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SOUTH FORK -- An Ebensburg property owner has been charging $115 a night for visitors to take over her house as a bed and breakfast, using the nearby Ghost Town Trail as marketing lure -- and could rent it out every day, if not for needing to stay there herself, according to Cambria County President Commissioner Tom Chernisky.
A 1.6-mile trail fragment recently constructed in connection with the cleanup of a big bony pile near here could help South Fork residents and businesses enjoy similar economic benefits, Chernisky said at a ribbon-cutting Monday for the $2.1-million reclamation-and-recreation project.
"Beachfront properties," Chernisky said to about 50 people who were under a tent on the former site of the bony pile, which was produced by a coal-washing plant for a dozen drift mines that were dug generations ago into the ridge that overlooks the spot. "Guess what: we have trailside properties."
From shortly after the Civil War until the mid-1960s, local people worked the Stineman mines to produce coal that fired blast furnaces in Johnstown and Pittsburgh and powered locomotives on the Pennsylvania Railroad -- a heritage that makes local residents proud, said South Fork Mayor Mark Kohart.
"I have to believe" those workers are looking down with approval on their children and grandchildren, who with the recent project showed themselves to be "good stewards of (the) land," Kohart said.
Before the project began, the 27-acre site consisted of a near-vertical 60-foot wall with its "toe" in the adjacent Conemaugh River and peaks in the center rising higher than the steeple of a church in the borough across the river, said employees of Robindale Energy Services of Armagh the contractor for the project.
Thus, in addition to creating a recreational opportunity, the project eliminated dangerous high walls and pollution from the pile that had been seeping into the river, officials indicated.
Robindale received Abandoned Mine Land Pilot funding from the Department of the Interior to haul away 216,000 cubic yards of refuse coal to burn at its co-gen plants in Ebensburg and Seward and to regrade the remaining slag and burnt-out coal -- while also creating the trail on-site and into the woods to the south.
The trail is slated eventually to connect at one end with the former Conemaugh dam whose dissolution in a rainstorm in 1889 caused the first and biggest Johnstown Flood, and on the other end with the existing Path of the Flood Trail across the river in Ehrenfeld, which is adjacent to South Fork, said Jim Panaro, executive vice president of Robindale.
When that happens, the Path of the Flood trail will be complete -- from the source of the disaster at the ill-fated dam to the locus of the disaster, Johnstown, according to Panaro.
The Path of the Flood trail, along with the Jim Mayer Riverswalk and the Ghost Town Trail -- the 2020 Pa. Trail of the Year -- have all been recognized as National Recreation Trails, according to Caytlin Lusk, program coordinator for the Cambria County Conservation & Recreation Authority, which owns and manages all three.
"The long-term goal is to connect all three of these trails so that communities can benefit from these recreational assets, but also to connect to other rail trails in the region to offer a longer distance option for bike-packers and thru-hikers," Lusk wrote in an email following the meeting. "It's a work in progress, but every little project we achieve helps us get one step closer to making the bigger picture a reality."
"We're connecting the dots," Chernisky said, after noting that trail users have come from as far away as France. "We love trails."