My son, the budding photo-historiographer

I had a really great day today. I wanted to go hiking along the tracks near Pen Mar Park with Henry and was determined to get us up there while he still had at least a few hours worth of steam left, so to speak.

I brought along one of my new image acquisitions, fully expecting to find that it was taken in the cuts north of Pen Mar Park along the railroad tracks. I had found those cuts earlier in the year when I was looking for what turned out to be the cut east of the Mechanicstown Bridge, or High Bridge, as I hear it called. The only issue was that I could not imagine what large mountain would be in the background of those cuts. And the tracks were bending the wrong way. But other than that...

When we arrived at Pen Mar, Henry wanted to play on the swings for a while. When we finally got down to the railroad tracks, we walked north towards the train station and the railroad cuts. Ten paces up, Henry announces he wants to see what is down the other way. He does this a lot. He loves to explore, and I love that he loves to explore. I was also excited about walking south because I recently acquired a number of Blue Mountain House stereoviews, and want to see if there is anything left of the old train depot for that huge old hotel. So south we went.

Lo and behold, we rounded the very first bend and there it was, the cut I had been looking for, and henry had led us straight to it. The distinctive mountain in the distance loomed over us. The only sad thing was that it was obvious that the cut had been greatly widened over time, no longer closely skirting the trains. Finding the exact rocks in the image was not going to happen. So, I grabbed a quick then-and-now shot and Henry and I proceeded on for a few more miles. On the way back, we stopped to sit on the tracks and as I got familiar with where we were sitting I realized that we were on the exact spot where passengers disembarked for the Blue Mountain House. But that is for another day...soon.