My various adventures of a "Going Outside and Doing Things" nature, mostly in the great outdoors of Colorado. Hiking, playing with the dogs, rock hunting, abandoned houses, gardening... and probably more!

Saturday, August 4, 2012

July 3, 2012 - Mill Ruins

On the 3rd, we decided to go around to a few of the old cemeteries in the area. (There are a lot more of them out there than there are in Colorado!)  We’d gone to a few of them when we went out two years ago, so we wanted to visit some different ones this time.

First, let me marvel again at how beautiful and amazing and green and gorgeous everything is.

 The first cemetery we tried to go to was impossibly overgrown.

Seriously, this is a cemetery.


And of course it was overgrown with raspberry canes, so it’ll shred you if you try and poke your way around anyway. Staying at the edges we could see a couple headstones, but not a whole lot.




Green spider and bitchin' web!

 So that was sort of a bust.

The second one we wanted to go to had a big “no trespassing!” sign on the road leading to it. That may have been more for the cell towers and such down that road, and not for the cemetery, but we still felt like we were a little too out in the open to be ignoring signs like that. So that was ALSO a bust.

And then we gave up on cemeteries, heh. (Someday maybe I’ll post some of the pictures from the trip a couple years ago; we actually succeeded in visiting some that time!)

We were in the right area to go check out the (preserved) ruins of Black Rock Mill, which we had visited last time we were here, though only very briefly.

Kinda the front of the mill.

Where it borders the river.

Little bit of information, and a picture of it when it was functional.

Towards the back.

Mill innards.

The rafters.

Back of the mill.

Ferns!

Japanese beetles. I know these guys are crazy-destructive, but I've never seen them before! And they're very pretty.

 The mill is a neat old structure, and I like that it’s being preserved. As nice as it is to find old buildings and ruins and things “in the wild” such as it is, so much stuff ends up entirely disappearing that way.

Afterwards, we went on a very brief hike along Seneca Creek, the waterway next to the mill.

The creek.

Some rocks with trees growing in them.

Mutant tree!

Big daddy long-legs on my hand.

Green!

Ferns!

Last shot of the mill from across the creek.

HRC sticker on the road.

 It was pretty warm and humid, and we were pretty tired, so we didn’t go very far before heading back ‘home’ for the evening.

But the way back let us pass this:



This little shed can be seen towards the beginning of The Blair Witch Project. Yeah, that movie was actually filmed in the park here, despite not being set in Maryland. Much to Alex’s mingled amusement and annoyance, when he got to hear people freaking out over how scary and “totally real” that movie was.

And then bonus stuff about where we were staying!



This is the house we were staying in. It’s very, very old… the cabin bit in front there actually dates to the late 1700s, the middle portion to the 1800s, and then the far section to the early 1900s (I believe.) It’s a shame that it would be so expensive to do a true restoration of the place, because it’s a very cool house, in very sad disrepair.

And this is the view from the porch of the house:

Center view. *

To the left. *

To the right. *


Sunset from our window.

Later, we had to make a run to the grocery store, because we were mad-craving donuts. You know how it goes.

Not donuts, but I wondered if we could get a discount if we bought frowning "smile cookies."
And when we got home, there was a little green moth.



This was a much “fuller” day as far as what we went and did, though it was still pretty easy. It was a lot of fun though. But we definitely had to save up some energy for the 4th!

*These pictures are from Alex’s camera.

5 comments:

  1. I really like this set of photos. I especially love the shots of the mill and the creek. My favorite one might be the mill on the opposite side of the creek. I think that one would look gorgeous printed out and framed.

    I have to admit that I -did- enjoy The Blair Witch and thought it was scary as shit when I saw it in the theatre. I know that I'm a very rare duck for that, but that's okay. It was still a good story from a writing aspect. So for me, seeing that area would really be cool (the same as going up to Amityville).

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    1. That one is my favorite, too! I wish that my resize program hadn't screwed some of my pictures up... usually it's fine, but for some reason when I went back to a lot of these, the quality had suffered in a way it hasn't before. (Generally, the quality IMPROVES when you reduce the size, but this time it actually kind of pixellated some of them, and I have no idea why.) Otherwise, I'd totally print that one out. DX I still could, I guess, it'd just be small.

      The Blair Witch... I feel like it'd be really scary if it were what it claims to be, but as it was, there was too much time devoted to nothing. I realize it was building tension and such, but at times it went too long, to the point that I just stopped caring what was happening. I also just got SO annoyed by all the people who STILL believe the whole thing was real, and not a movie. (And according to Alex, there were people in his area [where the movie was filmed, just a state away from where it was set] who all suddenly "remembered" that they'd heard about all of this happening for real, and how they'd heard about "the Blair witch" when they were kids... just lots of people being stupid about it.) I think it could be a good film if you're in the right mindset for it, and if you're willing to suspend your disbelief, but I just couldn't. (I also analyzed the hell out of it for a film class, and so I recognize what it did well... I just don't think it did everything particularly well.) I also wish that they would have devoted the film to a real regional legend, rather than making one up.

      However, the "sequel" is unequivocally awful, and I won't give that even the "I know what it was going for, and why people liked it" level of understanding.

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  2. Oh I have no desire to see the sequel. Just none. I was scared shitless the first time I saw it, and I'll admit that until I stumbled on one of the actors listed in a movie AFTER Blair Witch on IMDB, it was hard to nail down whether it was real or not. There were a lot of pros and cons (for me, Jeff and our friend Sean) as to whether or not it was real. Even after we knew it wasn't real, we still liked the suspense that was built and in a way the psychological breakdown of the party in the fact of being lost in the woods, growing increasingly more paranoid, and then doing shit to sabotage them finding their way out. It would have been interesting to have more of the legends of the area. I'm always fascinated with that stuff, especially the creepy ones.

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    1. Well, they did very deliberately make the film ambiguous as to whether it was "real" or not. I'm mostly fed-up with the small but vocal fanbase that insists it WAS true, and the company was "forced" to claim it was a movie because it's a government coverup or something...

      I generally like slow burn type pacing, especially in horror, but something about it in Blair Witch just really didn't work for me. My ex was SUPER-scared of it, so I watched it with her a couple times, and I saw it for my horror films class... but while parts of it were genuinely interesting, a lot of it didn't hold my attention.

      And I love local legends and cryptozoology and things like that... so I wish they'd picked a location with an ACTUAL legend to base it on, rather than making one up.

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  3. Okay. Um. That's a bit on the crazy side. Not that there aren't plenty of blatant gov't conspiracies out there and cover-ups, but I just don't think Blair Witch was one of them. O_o

    I haven't watched Blair Witch in a year or so. I think one of the things that got me were the little things -- the weird branches that were shape the same way, the piles of rocks, Josh's teeth or whatever were wrapped up in his shirt with blood, and I'm gonna say that the final scene where they're in the house and she runs into the basement and the other guy is in the corner (after hearing the story about the way the dude killed kids) -- that fucked with me. I didn't really catch it the first time because the jiggly camera was hurting my eyes and I had to close them for a second, so I missed it. But Sean and Jeff discussed it afterward and so when we saw it again, I paid more attention. At that point, we knew it was a fake, but we went back to see it with the purpose of picking out little clues that we didn't completely catch the first time. I thought the weird old woman was definitely less authentic with her hairy woman story, but the men at the river seemed more "real."

    The movie really doesn't scare me so much anymore unless I just happen to watch it when I'm already in an anxious mood, and then it's one of the movies (like Event Horizon or Mood Swingers) that will really set me off balance and leave me more anxious. Not all horror movies will do that, but those and generally exorcism movies will affect me more than others, and I think because of the wonky camera shit and slow creepiness of Blair Witch just unsettles me if I'm already half there.

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