Roam Through Nature/History At Redication of Eden Mill Nature Center and Historic Mill Museum

The land, the water and the wildlife have been there forever, at the confluence of Big Branch and Deer Creek in Pylesville, but the forward-thinking nature center designed to provide environmental education as well as preservation, interpretation and management of the ecological and cultural resources of the site is a relatively recent amenity.

Eden Mill Nature Center and Historic Mill Museum is celebrating 17 years in operation with an open house and rededication party Saturday, June 7 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Eden Mill was once an actual, functioning mill built in the early 1800s. It became a power plant with the rebuilding of its dam in 1917, but functioned as a mill up through the 1960s. Harford County then purchased the land for park property and in 1991 a group of local nature-lovers, led by Frank Marsden formed Eden Mill and began the laborious process of cutting trails through the forest, building a nature center and rehabilitating the historic mill for public display. Continue reading Roam Through Nature/History At Redication of Eden Mill Nature Center and Historic Mill Museum

Fear and Loathing at Campsite 100

The weekend started like this: me, stopping the car at an intersection in the middle of a 44,000-acre state forest, gray dust rolling past the windows. “Do you want to try it?” I backed up the car and eased the 1997 Nissan Maxima (manual, with spoiler) onto the brown dirt ski slope that is Kirk Road. A Coleman lantern, filled to the brim with kerosene, dangled from the rear view mirror. There was an hour of daylight left, and as battery acid leeched into my veins, I pushed the car harder and harder up and down the impossible rocky hills of the off-road trail.

About five minutes after I had yelled at the guys in the car to shut up, I pulled to a stop at the zenith of a rollercoaster-looking drop-off; I turned off the engine, jumped out and lit a cigarette. Brian and Scott – cooler heads than mine – set off running down the road while I tried to calm down. We were off to a bad start.

Over the next two days we would evade the Maryland Department of Natural Resources Police twice, rescue a pair of lost dirt bikers, catch and release a rare wood turtle and a hognose snake, survive an insane 40-mph ride through the woods in the bed of a drunken redneck’s pickup truck, and hone our skills at axe tossing. But first, Brian would have to run off the hippie squatters at Campsite 100, and my poor old sedan would have to traverse the final grueling 400 yards of Kirk Road. Later that night, significantly, after we had laid hotdogs and beans on top of frayed nerves, we hiked out into the black woods, and gazed up at the Milky Way. “How can we see it if we’re in it?” I asked. Not 24 hours later, I was drunkenly calling out foreign moons like Karaoke requests around the fire, imploring the brains among us to retell the icy details: “Do Io again, man…Now do Europa!”