Cabin 10, Babcock State Park

This is Cabin 10 at West Virginia's Babcock State Park. It's pretty much like Cabin 3, where we stayed, like these folks, in 2001--except it has fewer steps (38, by my count). Both cabins are above Glade Creek, though on opposite sides of the valley; 10 is past the mill, then down the hill on the Old Sewell Road. As you can see, the cabin's stairway's been rebuilt this season; we've also got new pots and pans and are feeling a little spoilt....

Photo taken Monday evening.

Old Sewell Road used to run five miles or so to the site of Sewell on the C&O line along the New River. The road was originally the "main line" for the narrow gauge Mann's Creek Railway, then was converted to a narrow and precarious automobile road when the rails were pulled in the fifties. It's recently become impassible by car; Joan and I hiked a mile or two on Tuesday morning and discovered two washouts that the park isn't planning to fix. (The second wash is pretty spectacular, and if my good camera got any decent shots you'll see them.) A foot and bicycle trail, now, and pretty inconvenient on a bike.

Babcock State Park was a gift to West Virginia from Babcock Coal and Coke, an operation which ran coal mines at Clifftop and a lumbering operation headquartered at Landisburg. The first purpose of the rail line was to get coal down the hill, but the same road was a traditional lumbering railroad with all the fixings--Shay-type locomotives, lightweight track, even a sharply curved trestle. When they closed down the line around the end of 1954, Mann's Creek got a flurry of publicity in the railfan press; the last train run on the line, on May 30, 1955, was the road's first fan trip.

Today's been quite wet--really serious rain for six or eight hours. Glade Creek's running wild in the channel tonight, which looks spectacular and sounds quite impressive.

(Originally a blog post written in July of 2004.)