Comment by gaoshan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gaoshan | Hacker News Reader

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The old canal towpath is part of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park and just a few miles from my house. We hike and bike there frequently. The canal itself is mostly filled in with sediment and is little more than a damp trench punctuated with sections that are full of stagnant water (and some sections where the water flows). The various locks work like mile markers and are all still quite visible as they were renovated in concrete back in 1913 or so.

One near me, Ohio lock 31[1], has a frightening history of murder and danger. It was a very remote lock and bodies were dumped there as highwaymen operated with lethal intent. Now it is my turnaround point for hiking that stretch of the old towpath.

1 - https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/ohio/cleveland/lonesome-lock...

That's part of the Ohio & Erie Canal[1], not the same canal as the Erie Canal[2] in the OP, that runs through upstate New York.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_and_Erie_Canal [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erie_Canal

Upstate is considered what area, everything above new york city?

I'm not really going to try to resolve the definition except to say that no part of New York is in Ohio.

These days, people north of the Finger Lakes, Mohawk Valley and the southern part of the Adirondacks often call those northern counties "Northern New York" or "North Country."

The summer of 2005 I was working at Canal and Warner where they put in the bridge to bring the towpath trail over Warner. When they went to pour the concrete for the east side of the bridge, they backed the concrete truck down the towpath next to the foundation hole.

Either the side of the hole collapsed or the driver dropped a wheel into it because the truck ended up on its side atop all the rebar. Nobody was hurt, and we got several hours of peerless entertainment watching them fish the truck out of the hole. That took three big wreckers and the construction company's excavator.

This was not the first afternoon of work we lost to watching that crew get themselves out of a jam.

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