After our stops at Seven Springs, Trenthouse Inn and Laurel Hill State Park, we went on a drive through the open road of Somerset County to Mount Davis, Pennsylvania's tallest mountain at 3,213 feet.
This area is Pennsylvania's Wind Belt, with booming energy production from wind mills in this mountainous region. This wind corridor stretches straight through the Allegheny Mountains into New York State. The continued growth in this sector will be great for these regions. The windmills are a spectacular sight to see.
Gotta love the open road!
Now to Mount Davis!
Baughman Rocks is one of the more interesting things I have seen. For starters, it is a series of giant boulders that have crevices between them that are at least twenty to thirty feet deep. This in itself is pretty cool, but the story of these rocks gets strange in regards to a story from 1849. A twelve-year-old boy named August Baughman. His body was suspected to have been put there by his father, who was believed to have killed him. They found no traces of him there, but did find a body somewhere else many years later that is suspected to have been the boy's. We will never know for certain if he was found.
This was one of those awesome days where there was a snow pack, but the temperatures were in the 30s, which felt like a heat wave compared to the temperatures around zero when we went to the Farm Show the week before.
As with most of this region, you can see an abundance of Mountain Laurel, the evergreen shrub from which the state flower grows. The namesake for the region, the Laurel Highlands, comes from the abundance of this beautiful shrub. The leaves were not tucked in too much today, which is a good way to tell how warm or cold it is. The colder it gets, the more the leaves tuck in to the shrub.
A plaque talking about the mystery of the boy.
These boulders are magnificent.
In some places, the crevices seemed to be anywhere from 20-40 feet.
These are a mix of pictures from my camera and Brit's. Brit snapped a shot of me here.
Our next step was to head over to the fire tower/observation tower lookout.
Brit was a little hesitant at first.
The views were stunning though. The mountain it self is 36 miles long, so it is more difficult to get a 360 degree view than it is on a typical mountain peak.
This single pine tree amazes me in how it is nearly double the size of the trees around it.
It was pretty windy, as you can see with Brit's hair.
Here is a video with a 360 degree view from the top of the tower.
Windmills out in the distance.
Brit making a heart in the snow.
This vantage point is from roughly 3200 feet. High Point Lake is at roughly 2400 feet and about four miles away.
The lake was completely frozen over.
I could stay in this spot for hours. There is something so soothing about the quiet. Nothing but the sounds of a breeze rustling the tree branches.
It was a perfect day.
What are all of those dots?
Zoom test! Oh look, fishermen!
A zoom test video!
Mount Davis is a really neat place. There is a network of roads that shows even more cool views of the area. We opted to not continue just because of the steep hills and untreated conditions. These views from the top of the mountain are really something else. Be sure to take the opportunity to visit this spectacular vista, the tallest in the state.
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