EBENSBURG, Pa. — Cliff Kitner cruises on a bicycle across a wooden bridge that crosses a roaring Blacklick Creek in Vintondale, Pennsylvania. This scenic view is part of the 54-mile Ghost Town Trail that connects Ebensburg to Blacklick.
In spring, Kitner, executive director of the Cambria County Conservation and Recreation Authority, and his peers celebrated the completion of the Ghost Town Trail’s 32-mile loop — a project the Cambria County Conservation and Recreation Authority has been working on for the last 32 years.
“This is the project that made me realize that we can do the impossible,” Kitner said.
This large undertaking involved cleaning up countless coal waste piles across coal mining towns in Cambria and Indiana counties and transforming nearby railroad beds into a bike path for recreational purposes.
“All these communities have been affected by the coal mining of the past,” Kitner said. “(We) want to make the communities better moving forward into the future.”
How it started
Construction began on the Ghost Town Trail in 1991 when the Kovalchick Salvage Company donated 12 miles of the former Ebensburg and Black Lick Railroad to Indiana County. Over the years, the trail would continue to grow:
In 1993, the Cambria and Indiana Railroad donated 4 miles, and in 2005, an additional 20 miles were added, including 12 miles in Indiana County and 8 miles in Cambria County.
The Cambria County Conservation and Recreation Authority was created in 1994 to continue the trail into Cambria County, according to Kitner.
By the time Kitner joined the organization in 2015, he had two goals: complete the 32-mile Ghost Town Trail loop and the Path of the Flood trail, a 14-mile bike trail that follows the path of the infamous Great Johnstown Flood of 1889.
The flood occurred when the South Fork dam broke — due to structural failure and heavy rain — unleashing roughly 20 million tons of water onto downwind communities. This tragedy killed 2,209 people — one of the most deadly floods in United States history — and was one of the first disaster relief efforts conducted by the American Red Cross.
Within his first two years of working at the organization, Kitner and his crew were able to finish the first 8 miles of the 32-mile Ghost Town Trail loop.
The Path of the Flood trail was completed roughly two years ago and the Ghost Town trail loop was finally completed this past spring, celebrated with a ribbon-cutting ceremony in April. In total, the Ghost Town Trail is 54 miles, which includes the 32-mile loop.
Building a trail takes time, for various reasons, including writing — and sometimes being denied — grants to work on specific sections of the trail, building bridges over creeks and main roads and, in this case, cleaning up coal mining waste.
A multi-county-wide effort
The Cambria County Conservation and Recreation Authority worked with the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection and Robindale Energy Services to clean up coal waste piles — also referred to as boney piles — along railroad tracks and the Blacklick Creek.
In recent years, Robindale Energy Services has removed hundreds of thousands of tons of coal waste from the banks of the Little Conemaugh River near the Path of the Flood Trail and from the Blacklick Creek near the Ghost Town Trail, opening up construction for the trail and improving water quality.
“Of all the projects we’ve done, (the Vintondale pile) has probably been the most beneficial, and it sits right on the Ghost Town Trail,” said Jim Panaro, executive vice president of Robindale Energy Services.
Kitner used various funding sources to conduct trail work, including through the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, the Community Foundation for the Alleghenies and, most recently, through the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement’s Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization program (AMLER).
The AMLER funding was used to clean up two bony piles along the trail.
“(The DEP) started to (incorporate) recreational components into AMLER (because) they wanted an economic development component involved with these grants,” Kitner said.
“Not only do they want to make the environment better, but they also want to give recreational opportunities to these (coal mining) communities.”
The DEP also recently built an active treatment facility to remove acid mine drainage in Blacklick Creek, opening up the area to fishing — the creek has been polluted with acid mine drainage (AMD) for over a century.
“One of the best things about restoring this section of creek is the vast majority of that stream is very accessible, right by the Ghost Town Trail,” said Ryan Farabaugh, mining engineer consultant with the DEP Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation. “It’s not like we restored all this stream and it’s all this private ground that people don’t have access to.”
In addition to fishing and biking, the Ghost Town Trail, which won Pennsylvania’s Trail of the Year in 2020, allows visitors to experience local history, including the Eliza Furnace — one of the state’s best preserved iron furnaces located in Vintondale — a miners’ memorial, old railroad cars and signage about old coal mining towns that no longer exist.
Visitors also get to experience existing coal mining towns for themselves, visiting local shops and restaurants in towns the trail passes through, including Nanty Glo, Vintondale, Ebensburg and Blacklick.
Throughout the year, the Cambria County Conservation and Recreation Authority hosts events, including a trail series that consists of races on the Ghost Town and Path of the Flood Trails and, on Oct. 10, will host a Halloween bike benefit ride.
But Kitner doesn’t plan on stopping there: he wants to add more signage about local history and, one day, hopes to build a welcome center with a museum, ice cream and coffee shops.
“In my opinion, you don’t get anywhere in life without big dreams,” Kitner said. “If you shoot for Jupiter, you may end up just getting to the moon, but you may end up getting to Jupiter.”
For more information, visit https://www.cambriaconservationrecreation.com/.
(Liz Partsch can be reached at epartsch@farmanddairy.com or 330-337-3419.)
