FOGGY MORNING--
The Ohio River, Pomeroy, Meigs County

We headed for that (not-close-to-anywhere) Appalachian slice of Ohio on an early morning recently.  It was the start of a sweep of geocaching that ultimately would net us 7 new caches but, most importantly, two new counties in our quest for a cache in each of Ohio's 88 of them.

You just do not go to Meigs county in ordinary travel around the state...which makes it, of course, my kind of place!

Pomeroy is a riverfront village and the county seat of Meigs County with a population of 1852 souls.  Most of us have lived in neighborhoods with that many people.

The photo above was done in a town park looking straight south.  That's West Virginia in the background across this narrow neck of navigable river downstream from Parkersburg.

After scoring a cache in this little park and wringing the dew out of our shoes we headed back north and spent nearly an hour and a half on backroads where we went most of that time without seeing another car.

As you can see from this pic of our car GPS some of the gravel roads had quaint names.  After pondering this name I readied the camera for instant action in the event a bear did, indeed, decide to do some roadway wallowing.

The closest we came was a huge doe whitetail deer which sluiced down a steep hill and crossed closely in front of us on the way to join a regiment of her pals munching in a forest clearing just below us.

I wondered if that deer even remembered the last car that passed by.

We wound up meandering through Amesville in Athens County; a town best known as the site of the historic, Coonskin Library.  Settlers there in the early 1800s trapped fur-bearing animals as a means of both livelihood and sustenance.  They then sent a courier back east with a batch of fur hides where he sold the hides and used the proceeds to buy some 70 books.

They were the stock of the region's first public library--hence the name "Coonskin".

Somewhere along our route down there--and I haven't the foggiest idea where--we came across this horribly defiled, yet colorful, covered bridge:

It amazes me these hooligans were able to acquire the wide array of spray-paint colors used in this artsy vandalism.  Maybe by mailorder.

Our final treat of this adventuresome day occurred in McConnelsville where an actual working lock remains as a remnant of the Ohio-Erie Canal which, in its heyday stretched from Cleveland to the Ohio River.

Lock Technician, George Parker (left), while walking small circles around the black bar's gear axis, muscles the lock gates open or closed as necessary.  A vessel coming up the river would pull into the empty lock and the doors would be closed.

Then water from the higher, upstream river would be allowed to flow into the lock cavity, filling it and raising any craft in the lock to the higher level of the river.  When water reached that level, the upper doors would be opened and the vessel could continue its journey.

 A small, maintenance dredge (lower) has just been dropped from the higher, upstream side and is making its way out the lower end of the lock.  Only one door had to be opened to accomodate the beam of the dredge.

You can see by the water mark on the lock wall how much this vessel was lowered.  That vertical distance equals the amount of vertical height the river falls in this area with its impounding waterfall.

In its heyday this river system was a principal means of transportation.  That was through much of the 1800s but the railroads were churning their way west and taking the hauling business away from the much slower waterway system.  By the early 1900s the waterways were mostly out of business.

That part of our transportation history was eliminated entirely when a flood in 1913 destroyed much of the waterway infrastructure and the smaller river systems were relegated to handling mostly small boat traffic, just like this one today.

We left George sharing mutual smiles.  As we were telling him about our geocaching outing his smile led to the revelation we were standing quite close to a cache--right there.  He gave Sue a couple of hints as to its location while I was demonstrating how we found these things with a smartphone app.

Soon, we knew from Sue's happy squeal she had been successful.