Walkabout: Emerald View Park, a jewel of a trail, helps outdoor lovers be high over the city
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The latest portion of trail in Emerald View Park begins with a view of the Point.
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As Emerald View Park evolves in its loop around Mount Washington, Duquesne Heights and Allentown, it strikes me that the other parks of my lifetime seemed always to have been there.
The heavily wooded trails and plank foot bridges in the parks of my West Virginia youth seemed as natural as the rock walls that arched above them. My favorite, Audra State Park, was both wild and tame, part you and part other, a blending of worlds that happens almost nowhere else except in dreams.
The hand of man was obvious in the swing set near the toilet lodge and the picnic tables near the parking lot. But with the rapids of the Middle Fork River roaring in the background, the trails seemed hewn by the monstrous moss-covered boulders that shadowed them, the shade that darkened them and the occasional glitter of sun.
It was just wild enough to feel like an adventure without being one.
Emerald View Park, Pittsburgh's fifth regional park, has been an adventure in the making. Where now we can walk, Ilyssa Manspeizer and others once grabbed onto trees to keep from falling. At first, the crews of young trail builders couldn't believe what was expected of them, she said, "but look what they've done."
A looping swath of woods with views of the city through the trees, Emerald View Park is Pittsburgh's most dramatic park, even with just over four of 19 trail miles completed. It is also an inspiration of ambition at a time when funds for the natural world, and the natural world itself, are increasingly threatened.
Five years ago, the Mount Washington Community Development Corp. hired Ms. Manspeizer to direct and oversee the park's evolution from overgrown hillsides, dump sites and crumbled, abandoned homesteads.
The process has unfolded in chapters of fundraising, land restoration, fundraising, land acquisition, fundraising and trail building. The total investment when all 257 acres are completed in about 20 years will equal $8 million in today's dollars.
This evening, on the grassy slope just west of the "Point of View" statue on Grandview Avenue, the Mount Washington group will celebrate the latest mile of completed trail with live music, refreshments and trail tours that go up and down, from narrow wooded switchbacks to clearings with open views.
First Published September 27, 2011 12:00 am
