The Bike Trail...

The beautiful Little Miami Bike trail is one of the most pleasant places to spend a day anywhere and draws bikers, walkers, fisherman, birdwatchers and more by the thousands every year. Following close alongside the beautiful Little Miami river it offers a chance to see nature at it's finest. Stretching 78 mi from Springfield to Newtown there are countless places to get away from it all while still being in reach of the charming ice cream shops and restaurants that grace the many small towns the trail passes thru. For the first 9 miles to Xenia, the Little Miami Scenic Trail is operated by the Clark County Park District and the National Trail Parks and Recreation District. Due to budget concerns parts of this northernmost section have sometimes been closed. From the trailhead in Springfield, the Little Miami trail runs south to Yellow Springs. Yellow Springs is home to Antioch College and the must see Glen Helen Nature preserve. The "Glen" is home to the large yellow colored spring that gives the town it's name and visitors can view lovely wildflowers, huge old trees, cliffs with waterfalls and rock overhangs as well as an historic covered bridge. Nearby is Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve and John Bryan State Park, two of the most scenic parks in the United States. Located along the Little Miami Scenic River, Clifton Gorge is famous for its waterfalls and rapids that flow through a narrow gorge. Clifton Gorge itself is such an amazing place and seems so unlikely that in many places you can walk right up to the cliffs of the gorge before realizing they are even there. It seems that at the end of the last ice age the headwaters of the Little Miami flowed gently thru glacial drift below the retreating glaciers until they encountered the solid rock of the gorge. The water then cut deeper and deeper into the resistant Silurian dolomite bedrock until at the upper reaches of the gorge the cliff walls are barely 25 to 40 feet apart and it must be 75 to a 100 feet down to the water. Due to the fact its reasonably flat right up until you step off into space it's almost impossible to convey in a photograph the scale of the gorge. All the photos I've seen do no better than my poor attempts, trust me this is one place that is a hundred times more impressive in person. In this stretch the normally knee to waist deep upper Little Miami rages along between the cliff walls at an average depth of 34 feet. The river here drops at a powerful rate of 35 feet per mile. A small sign marks the spot of Darnell's leap. In January 1778, Daniel Boone and his party of 28 were captured by the Shawnees. Cornelius Darnell was able to escape and with Shawnee in hot pursuit Darnell leapt across the twenty five foot gap between the cliffs to freedom. Of course he could not make the entire leap but branches hung out over the 80 foot drop and Darnell went crashing across into them before finally getting a firm grip on one as he fell and climbing up the cliff to safety! It makes me uneasy here to lean out over the safe rail of the overlook, I cannot begin to imagine the courage it took to even attempt the leap.

Just downstream, in John Bryan State Park, the rock is slightly softer and the gorge opens to a quarter mile or so but still retains impressive cliffs. John Bryan purchased, in 1896, 335 acres along the Clifton gorge area and called these acres "Riverside Farm." The Cincinnati-Pittsburgh stagecoach road served the area and settlers began establishing water-powered industries such as a textile mill, grist mills and sawmills in the gorge. After the turn of the century water power was no longer as economical as electricity and the industries in the rugged gorge closed. At the top of the gorge in Clifton the only surviving mill still is in operation and is famous for its Christmas light displays, one of the best in the state.
Close to John Bryan State Park, the North Country Trail and Buckeye Trail enter From the west and Dayton. For the next 15 miles to Spring Valley, the Little Miami trail is managed by Greene County. At Xenia Station, it meets the Creekside Trail, as well as the Prairie Grass Trail, on which the Ohio to Erie Trail continues north to Columbus.

Little Miami State Park (nothing changes but the name) begins at Hedges Road in Spring Valley and follows U.S. 42 into Warren County. It passes through Corwin (near Waynesville), Caesar Creek State Park, and Oregonia, where the Buckeye Trail rejoins. Corwin and Waynesville are home to many fine places to take a break from the trail and enjoy the dozens of antique and specialty shops that dot the towns as well as enjoy a good meal in one of the fine restaurants. South of Waynesville the trail enters another wooded gorge and passes close by the lovely Corwin M. Nixon covered bridge, possibly the prettiest covered bridge you will ever see. At Fort Ancient, the trail runs under the awesome twin Jeremiah Morrow Bridges and Interstate 71. The bridges are 239 feet above the river, and are the tallest bridges in Ohio. The bridges are an amazing 2300 feet long spanning the Little Miami in a huge wooded gorge. The trail then passes through the towns of Morrow and South Lebanon to the Middletown Junction, where the Lebanon Countryside Trail begins and runs 7 miles to Lebanon.
The Little Miami trail continues south, past Kings Mills on the opposite bank. At this location the historic Peters Cartridge Company factory overlooks the bike trail. The site of several tragic accidents, the facility is reputed to be among Ohio's most haunted places! The trail passes under U.S. 22/State Route 3 at Fosters, across the river and under one of the prettiest bridges in the country. It continues entering Clermont County and beautiful Loveland, where it is known as the Loveland Bike Trail.
The trail crosses to the western, Hamilton County side of the Little Miami River, as it meets State Route 126 (Glendale–Milford Road). The trail passes by Camp Dennison and its former southern stopping point in Milford. A 2006 extension carries the Little Miami State Park along Wooster Pike to Terrace Park. From here, the Loveland section of the Buckeye Trail splits off, going to Eden Park in Cincinnati. A short Hamilton County Park District extension brings the Little Miami trail back across the river to the Little Miami Golf Center in Newtown. Hamilton County Park District intends to extend the Little Miami Scenic Trail to Clear Creek. From there, it will follow the Little Miami River to its mouth past Lunken Field in California. At the Ohio River, the trail will meet the Ohio River Trail and continue west to Cincinnati.
The Little Miami bike trail follows the right-of-way of the old Little Miami Railroad, maintained by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources as Little Miami State Park. The long, thin state park passes though four counties, with a right-of-way somewhere 50 miles long and roughly 65 feet wide for a total of about 700 plus acres. Along the rest of it's length the corridor averages around 10 feet in width.

After the fall...

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The Little Miami River valley is home to some of the finest woodlands still left in Ohio. From the lovely woods lining the river banks for much of it's length to the big forests around Fort Ancient to the stunning cliffs and grand woods of John Bryan State Park, great woodlands are just part of the Little Miami River experience. I guess it is a perfect example of the dichotomy that is your average human being or at least me in particular that while fall is my favorite time of the year, it is for me a time of melancholy and deep sadness. I find a walk thru the fallen leaves brings out regrets, memories of things long past, even fears of things to come. For in the autumn I see signs of our mortality everywhere. Portents that those we love and cherish will age and die. I start dwelling on old sayings like "you can never step in the same river twice" and ponder the possibility of how so much of the best of myself has already been wasted.In part to combat this angst and also out of genuine wonder and enterest I have thrown myself into the study of the nuts and bolts of what actually happens in the fall. The miracle that returns both ourselves and the fallen leaves back into the great circle of life. Of how reduced to our most basic componets, bits of nitrogen, carbon, water and mineral, we are never really gone. We are made up of everything that has gone before and everything that comes later will contain us. I can see how some would find religion in that. The Druids worshiping the Earth under their sacred oaks seem to me sometimes to have been ahead of their time. Or possibly we have just lost something in ours. A man I worked with had a wonderful brass loupe, a magnifying glass for looking at the individual pixels that make up each letter of a printed word. After expressing my admiration of it, I was shocked at his generosity in giving it to me. The first thing I looked at with my new toy was a freshly fallen leaf. How amazing is this tiny feat of natural engineering built to do one of natures true miracles, the work of photosynthesis. And yet there on this leaf that had just fallen today were the signs of its future destruction, or possibly rebirth. For in tiny patches along it's main rib were growing two blotches of fungi. Fungi may be the most important thing on earth that your average person knows practically nothing about. I thought I knew somethings, after all I could tell the difference between a puffball and a morel, a chicken of the woods and a boletus mushroom. Well it turns out these are no more fungi than a single dogwood flower is a tree. For the bulk of the fungi, the part that does the real heavy lifting, is the network or matrix of thin strands called hayphae. These hyphae form a network in the topmost layer of soil and leaf litter called a mycelial network. Mycelial networks work their way into dead branches, rotten logs, feces, fallen leaves, animal carcasses, etc. Some networks even seem to link up with the root systems of living trees, sponging off the tree but giving back by passing along some of the nutrients gathered by the network of hyphae. Most of the hyphae strands are too small to see with the naked eye but the larger strands are visable as a white mesh permeating piles of old leaves or seen as you break apart rotting wood on the forest floor. The total amount of fungi in the forest is staggering. There are an estimated one and a half million different kinds and estimates usually come out at somewhere around a thousand pounds of hyphae per acre on the entire land surface of the earth, with higher amounts in areas of heavy vegatation like our woodlands. Or to put it another way over 4000 lbs of fungi per person on the planet!
Although plant eaters from as large as deer to as small as insects eat huge amounts of plant material over 90% goes directly to the decomposers in the form of fallen leaves, branches, logs etc. Add to this things like walnut and acorn shells, flowers in springtime that last just a while, plants such as nettles or trillium that die back completely every fall and the carcass of everything that dies( think of the millions of cicadas in a breakout year), animal poop...well, the list of garbage on the forest floor is endless. All waiting their turn to be broken down into their most basic parts and recycled back into more oak, more maple, more deer, more chipmunk. A single maple leaf may weigh at most four hundreths of an ounce but by november over a ton and a half covers the ground on every acre of woodland. How many fallen leaves lie on the big hillside behind my cabin in the woods? Like counting the number of stars in the universe it is a number too large to comprehend. A number too big for my calculater to handle even if I tried to do the math. Yet all returned, recycled, reborn by the the mycelial networks covering the forest floor. Helping the fungi in this work is an even stranger army of creatures that break down the leaves into smaller and ever smaller bits. Sift thru an old pile of rotting leaves and you will find a myriad of tiny creatures. From tiny arthropods such as pillbugs, to comparatively large earthworms to diminutive monsters like pseudo-scorpions and springtails. A look thru a microscope would reveal untold numbers of protazoans and bacteria hard at work also. Some of the wildest creatures are also among the hardest to see. For this purpose I once built a Berlese funnel out of an old paint can. I cut the bottom out of the can and covered this with a cloth secured by rubber bands. Under the cloth I placed a funnel leading down into a jar of water. Into the paint can I dumped a shovel full of rich humus from nearby Halls Creek Wood. On top of the can I then placed a light borrowed from Gary the pet lizards cage. The light dried out the soil from the top down driving the tiny animals deeper and deeper till they finally worked their way thru the cloth and into the jar. My goodness what monsters were revealed when viewed thru a magnifying glass. Springtails, mites, false scorpions and a plethora of tiny creatures I couldn't name. Remember Creepy Crawlers? The soft plastic creatures you made by pouring that goo from bottles into the square metal molds. Remember how you squeezed in the goo and then baked them and out comes a scarey bug like thing with giant pincers and lots of legs with little claws on the ends? Well, thats exactly what alot of these tiny creatures look like. Existing all around us by the billions and trillions. Even comparatively large creatures like millipedes, centipedes, or earthworms are present in numbers that stagger the imagination. Earthworms alone can reach totals of around 900 pounds per acre in rich leaf compost. Just try to picture in your head 900 pounds of earthworms. Slugs and snails can total as much as 400 pounds per acre. If you suddenly had Godlike powers and could miraculously seperate every pillbug, worm, slime mold, fungi, springtail, bacteria etc., (again the list is nearly endless) in an acre of woodland scientists say you would end up with over five tons. All working somehow seamlessly as part of a perfect system. If God exists he's here, in the details.


"Split a piece of wood... and I am there,
lift a stone... and you will find me."



All working to recycle last year into the new. Breaking everything down into basic pieces of nitrogen, phosporus, calcium, etc. and returning these back into the circle of life. Every bit of you has passed thru this cycle countless times already and will do so again. The atoms that made up our ancestors surround us in the trees, in the rivers, inside ourselves. The huge great circle of life is way too complicated for anyone to ever fully understand, anyone who would claim to do so shows how little they really do know. But to understand a tiny bit, to glimpse how everything fits together perfectly, to me that somehow brings solace to the bittersweet experience of fall.
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