Park your car. Don’t get in it again. All you need is right here. Hear it. Feel it. Taste it. Touch it. You’ve earned it.
– Message left by “JO + SN” in the guest book of the Sumac Cabin, The Inn & Spa at Cedar Falls, November 5, 2005.
You have to lean back. That’s the weirdest part. I was not expecting the leaning, possibly because my idea of rappelling is largely influenced by that scene at the end of The Blues Brothers where the cops are rappelling off the side of the building yelling “Hut! Hut! Hut! Hut!” for no reason.
There are many other movies where rappelling is depicted, but that’s the first one that came to mind.
In real life, this is how rappelling works, or how it starts. It starts with leaning back over a cliff, like a trust fall you did at summer camp only in this case, if something goes wrong, you don’t just fall on your back and realize you can’t trust anyone. If something goes wrong, you die. Luckily, a lot of things have to go wrong.
We’re at High Rock Adventures, an ecotourism service just off Route 33. Steve Roley taught courses on ecotourism at Hocking College before he went into the ecotourism business himself, starting High Rock Adventures a few years ago. High Rock is about climbing as much as it is rappelling – they go up and down, as it were – and today we’re here for the down part. But, of course, to go down you have to go up first.
So we follow Steve up the trail, up into the hills, up into the rocks. Every few minutes Steve pauses and points out a particular tree or plant or some edible leaves. Because that’s the thing about High Rock Adventures, and ecotourism in general – at some point, it can’t just be about jumping off of rocks.
It’s about what it means to be in the wild.
Part 2: Where the Wild Things Are
The Old Man and the Old Lady
It’s called Old Man’s Cave because, according to legend, an old man lived in there. His name was Richard Rowe from Tennessee, and the story goes that around 1796 he absconded away to the shelter of a picturesque recess cavern in the Hocking Hills. I remember my first time visiting the cave, overhearing a naturalist point out the waterfall that spills into the gorge, telling visitors that’s where the old man used to take his morning showers.
Who can know such a thing for certain? Who can know why the old hermit Richard Rowe decided to live a chunk of his life in a remote gorge in the hills? The imagination conjures up ideas of a man fleeing the pressures of civilization. Maybe it’s a familiar, modern feeling that lends itself to such imaginings, and pushes people to visit the Old Man’s Cave still today, by the thousands.
If the old man wanted to get away from society back in 1796, ironically he’s brought society with him in 2017. Because Old Man’s Cave is crowded. V crowded, as the youths say. And that’s fine, because the fact is, Old Man’s Cave should be crowded. It is a natural wonder.
It sits at the convergence of trails, not the least of which is the Buckeye Trail. It’s a strange feeling. I’ve been on the Buckeye Trail before, earlier in the year, at Cuyahoga National Park. A different part of the state – a totally different context – but still the same trail. It’s not, like, mysterious. The Buckeye Trail curls all around the state at the edges. Chances are you’ve walked on it a time or two. But chances are you don’t have a stretch of it named after you.
Chances are you’re not Grandma Gatewood.
In 1954, Emma Rowena Gatewood was 67 years old. She had eleven children and 23 grandchildren. She was divorced (which was rare at the time) from a husband who’d spent much of the 30-year marriage beating her (which was not rare at all). One day, she came upon an article in National Geographic about the Appalachian Trail. She decided to go for a walk.
The next year, she walked a little farther, all the way to the end, making her the first woman to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail continuously, by herself. She hiked the Trail twice more in her lifetime, covering more than 14,000 miles in Keds sneakers. She carried her tools in a Band-Aid box. She slept on a shower curtain.
Almost makes old Richard Rowe seem lazy.
Back home in Ohio, Grandma Gatewood became one of the original founders of the Buckeye Trail. Her trek, having garnered national media attention, is now credited with sparking restorations that probably saved the famous AT. And now, of course, it isn’t hard to find all sorts of articles, activists and outdoors enthusiasts fretting about how crowded the Appalachian Trail has become. It’s the same story in the National Parks. Americans are visiting their public lands and many do not follow in Grandma Gatewood’s Keds-steps by carrying very little and leaving nothing. Is that the sacrifice to inspire admiration, and hopefully respect, for nature? When are there too many people in the wilderness for the wilderness to stay wild?
Is that even the right question?
At Old Man’s Cave, someone points out a fence along the edge of the gorge. It’s new, allegedly, erected because the crowds started coming too close. It’s crowded this morning, but not terrible. We’re all there for the views, and they deliver. We wander the old home of the old man, we take our photos and flood our Instagram feeds with hemlock sprigs and mossy boulders. But if you want a little more adventure, you can walk the Grandma Gatewood trail, all six miles of it.
Just 13,994 more miles and maybe you’ll be on Grandma’s level.
The Final Frontier
It’s not exactly the clearest night. Clouds are rolling in. But they’re still a ways off, so for the moment, the sky is an endless mass of darkness and light, sliced through by a wide band of stars and worlds and things we can only imagine. Into the cosmos pierces a green laser beam – the sort that seems too powerful to be legal. At one end of the beam; the vast nothingness and everythingness of space. At our end; Brad Hoehne.
Brad is an amateur astronomer and a member of the Columbus Astronomical Society. Full disclosure: the author was once a member of the CAS before forgetting to pay his yearly dues. I was not a heavily involved member, mind you, but I did enjoy the newsletter (which Brad edits). I still have the card, too.
Brad’s newest title is Director of the John Glenn Astronomy Park in Hocking Hills, which is still under construction. Tonight he’s taken us to a flat, grassy hill at Cedar Grove Lodging. It is cold. Brad is not cold because Brad is wearing an ice-fishing suit. You can’t explore the universe without the proper gear.
You also can’t explore the universe with the lights on. Even in the cabin, Brad advises us not to turn on too many lights because our eyes have to become acclimated to darkness in order to get the full stargazing experience. We’re going for maximum wonder, here, so we need minimum visibility.
“I’ve met people in my life who I’ve gotten to know very well,” says Brad. “And I’ve never seen their faces.”
It’s only when you don’t want any light that you realize how much of it bleeds into the night. Even on a small plateau in the Hocking Hills, there’s some orange glow from nearby streetlamps. But it’s not enough to ruin the view, untainted by the city lights of Central Ohio. Light pollution is a peculiar sort of smog. It can disrupt ecosystems on Earth, ruining migration patterns, but it also obstructs our view of the only wilderness virtually untouched by human beings.
Gently, Brad wheels around his telescope, finding different things for us to see. The Andromeda Galaxy and a globular cluster – a ball hanging in space made up of hundreds of thousands of stars. Through the telescope it looks like someone held up a Fourth of July sparkler and somehow hit a pause button. But the best moment didn’t need a telescope.
The best moment came when Brad was shooting his green, almost-too-powerful laser into the sky (one wonders if, 500 years from now, some astronomer on Kepler-186f may be blinded when Brad’s laser finds its way into the poor sap’s telescope). As he was showing us a constellation, right at the end of his laser beam, a meteor popped into view. It burned slow and bright as it zipped through the sky.
“Yes, I shot it down,” declared Brad.
I saw it myself.
Lean Into It
So we’ve hiked up the hill with Steve. We have all tightened our harnesses (I have tightened a little more every time we’ve stopped). We have learned about edible plants and eaten some leaves, because it’s nice to have a snack. Now it’s time to go off a cliff. A few of us are going up to rappel back down; the others are staying on the ground to take pictures.
“Good luck,” says one of the ground people. “We’ll see you at the bottom!”
I should think so. It’s just a matter of velocity.
Now, the cliff we are rappelling from is not the highest that High Rock has to offer. The highest is 96 feet and what we’re doing is only 65, which, you know, okay, only 65 feet. I don’t, off the top of my head, know the maximum distance you can fall and survive but I imagine it’s less than 65 feet, and if it is, well then, who’s to quibble? But I am not going to fall because Steve’s got this, I’ve got my harness, I’ve tightened it a dozen times, and I’ve got my helmet.
The helmet, it turns out, is very necessary. Not so much because it will save my head from cracking open if I fall (which I will not) but because it will save my head from cracking open against the other cliff. Because after we get to the top and cross a rope bridge that, in retrospect, was really cool and Indiana Jones-y but at the time was sort of terrifying, it becomes clear that we will not simply be rappelling off but into. This is more of a canyon situation. The limestone face of the other side of the canyon is not close enough that I will definitely crack my head against it. But if I start pushing away far enough on the way down like I’m Batman or something, I may be in head-cracking territory. But it’s okay, because I’ve got my helmet.
Now it’s time to lean.
When you’re rappelling off a cliff (or into a canyon) the first step is to lean back. Which seems like it’s not that big a deal. It didn’t seem like that big a deal on the ground. It doesn’t seem that big a deal when I’m visiting home and I’m leaning back in one of my mother’s antique kitchen chairs and she starts yelling at me and I’m all like, “It’s not that big a deal! It’s not like I’m 65 feet in the air surrounded by hard, jagged limestone!”
Well. Guess what.
It’s hard to come up with a more unnatural feeling than backing up to the edge of an abyss and leaning back like you’re trying to trick the free-floating air into thinking it can support you. But here, on the edge of a cliff, there’s only you to support you. I remember thinking I wasn’t leaning fast enough because it felt like the rope was getting stuck on something. It was getting stuck on something; my clenched fist holding it tight.
I started to release, but then it seemed like I was leaning too fast. You have to make sure your legs keep pace with your lean, always staying straight out in front of you at a 90-degree angle with your feet flat against the rock. Otherwise you may bend too far and your legs will be straight up to the sky and your backside will be against the cliff and that will be a situation. I’m not totally alone on the cliff, of course. There’s Steve offering helpful pointers for the descent, fellow reporters asking me to take a quick break from not dying to look up for one last photo before I’m swallowed by the canyon.
At the bottom of the canyon is Duran (yes, like the band) belaying me on the way down. Duran got into rock climbing and rappelling through Steve, and has been working at High Rock Adventures for about a year now. Duran is studying construction management at Hocking College. He plans to one day move back home to the Bahamas and start his own business. He also made sure I didn’t die. I am biased, but in the moment I considered that one of his greatest accomplishments.
About halfway down I realized I was going too fast. Not, like, terminal velocity fast. Just too fast to properly enjoy the view. The sun was starting to set. It was still very much Fall in the hills, and there was orange and red and yellow to accompany the green of the hemlocks. And there were the rocks. The flatness of Ohio can be endearing at times. Being able to watch a summer sunset fall upon miles and miles of soy and cornfields remains one of my favorite things about this part of the country. But somewhere in all the flatness you might underestimate the simple majesty of a giant limestone rock, until you’re dangling halfway down the side of one.
I came to the ground, not too fast but much too soon. Duran unroped my harness. I thanked him for making sure I didn’t die. I tried to take notes but my hands were shaking. I would’ve done it again, instantly. It’s great once the leaning is over.
