Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette Amber Hawkins, of Windham, Ohio, leaps across a gap in the rocks at Nelson-Kennedy Ledges State Park. Click photo for larger image.

By Lillian Thomas
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Nelson-Kennedy Ledges State Park is a freeze frame of the last vestiges of a 318 million-year-old river valley.

The ledges that give the park its name rear up in the middle of the prototypical placid Ohio landscape. The drive up is through countryside that rolls just a bit more as you get close to the ledges area; the parking lot is on a field that's flat as a pancake. Directly across the road, however, huge fists of stone surge out of the ground and slant at jagged angles 50 to 60 feet overhead, while fissures split the ground underfoot and reach down as much as 60 feet.

	Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette Richard and Catherine Ellison, of Nelson, Ohio, hang out with their dog Billy on the rocks at Nelson-Kennedy Ledges State Park. Click photo for larger image. More pictures More pictures from this hike in the special gallery "Hitting the Trails."

The whole time fellow reporter Gabrielle Banks and I were hiking on Monday, we kept asking ourselves and each other -- what caused this, and why just in this isolated area?

Though it looks like the product of a spasm that pushed the rocks up from the earth, it's actually a former river valley in which the softest rock (mostly shale) has eroded away and left the rest a heap of sandstone stacks that occasionally collapse or slough off huge chunks, called slump rock.

The result for hikers is a dramatic, shady place for a day hike that can range from very easy to a little bit of scrambling. There are narrow passages between the giant sedentary sandstone pillars (one such passage is called Fat Man's Peril), two waterfalls, caves, a low scramble beneath an underhang (Dwarf's Pass), trees sprouting out of impossible root-holds high up on rock ledges, and vertigo views down deep fissures, some narrow with a glimpse of water below, some broad with slump rock lying where it crashed down.

"It's kind of like a puzzle. You can almost step back and see where the [rocks] were" before they wrenched off and fell, said Norm Swann, assistant park manager for a three-park system that includes Nelson-Kennedy, Punderson and Tinker's Creek.

In the area around Cascade Falls, a pretty, narrow 20-foot spritz that bounces off an adjacent wall before dropping to pool beneath an underhang, Swann noted that it's possible to see an imminent slump candidate (though imminent is relative -- "probably not in my lifetime," he said).

	Pam Panchak, Post-Gazette Justine Bee leads the way up a trail above Cascade Falls at Nelson-Kennedy Ledges State Park, followed by Glenn Binion, Bill Leppert and Kristen Hall. Bee, Binion and Leppert are from Waren, Ohio; Hall is from Levittsburg, Ohio. Click photo for larger image.

"There's a lot of shale there, and that was eroded out to make Gold Hunter's Cave. Eventually that chunk above the cave will break off. It's going to fall down to the ground. It's got about 4 feet to fall, then it will start leaning downhill. It's going to be quite an event when it happens."

The stone in the park is called Sharon sandstone, said Mac Swinford, a geologist with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Geological Survey division. It's a conglomerate rock studded with smaller stones, including smooth white pebbles.

"What makes it unusual, spectacular, are those stones," said Swinford. "Those stones tell you a story. The story is that they are white because they are milky quartz, and they are rounded because they have been tumbled around in the bottom of a stream for a long, long time. It actually came several hundred miles from the north, from Canada and New York."

That was about 318 million years ago. "This is before the dinosaurs," said Swinford.

The stones became part of the sandstone, making it more durable than the surrounding rock, which gradually eroded away into Ohio's smooth contours. The ledges -- once part of the bottom of a waterway, then a valley -- now tower above the landscape that has eroded.

"It's like the last thing standing," said Swinford. Geologists can map the route of the ancient river by tracing a line of Sharon sandstone outcroppings that run north to south.

If you want to follow the park trails, you need to understand the blazing marks, explained on a sign at the entrance. If you don't mind wandering about, there's no need to worry about searching for blazes, since the park is quite small and hikers are rarely out of earshot of Route 282 below (a drawback to the sense of losing yourself in the wilderness).

We took the moderate blue path, which parallels Route 282 along the bottom edge of the park. As soon as you get onto the trails, the temperature drops and you can feel damp cool air drifting out of moss-lines crevices and passageways in the rock.

We got sidetracked by bluegrass strains plucked on a banjo, which turned out to belong to a denizen of a trailer in the adjacent private Nelson Quarry Park. We got back onto some easy white trail, then took the red, listed as difficult but not involving any extremely strenuous climbing. We finished with the moderate yellow trail, which leads to Dwarf's Pass, Cascade Falls, Gold Hunter's Cave and Old Maid's Kitchen. It was by far our favorite.

Caleb Gawne, 7, from Lancaster was there with his grandparents, Ken and Cheryl Gawne of Mercertown. He pronounced the park great and declared during a picnic break that he wanted to do the trail circuit three more times.

We left their picnic and headed out to search for our own lunch on the way back. We ended up at the Halfway Restaurant on Route 422, a Polish-owned place with 1950s diner decor accented with Polish handicrafts and a couple of Hungarian specials on the menu.

If you go

Location and directions: The park is on State Route 282 in Nelson Township, Ohio. Take Pennsylvania Turnpike (I-76) to Ohio Turnpike. Take Ohio Turnpike to I-680, take that until it meets I-80. Take I-80 about 4 miles to Route 11. Take Route 11 north to Route 82. Continue as Route 82 joins Route 5. Take to intersection with Route 422 -- take that west to Route 282. Take 282 south about a mile to the park. Parking on left, trails on right.

Trails: There are 3 miles of trails, all marked with color-coded blazes on trees and rocks. White is easy, yellow and blue are moderate, red is difficult. In addition, there are many unmarked paths. Climbing and rappelling are prohibited at the 167-acre park. The stones are very slippery when wet. The park warns that there have been several serious accidents, including two fatalities, in recent years. Children must be accompanied by parents and young children must be watched carefully.

Parking: Lot right off Route 282. No parking along the highway.

Facilities: Toilets next to the parking lot. There is a large open field there and picnic tables and grills.

Maps: There is a large sign with a map and explanation of the blazes at the entrance to all the trails. There is a slot for maps on the sign, but no maps were there the day we went. View an online map in pdf-format, or the check out the official Ohio parks map (also in pdf-format).