The Strange, Sacred, and Slightly Unhinged History of Blue Knob
If you have read my blog or seen any of my posts about trail racing here in Pennsylvania, you probably already know that I hold a rather ridiculous amount of respect and gratitude for the volunteers who make these events possible. None of our races happen without an army of people who decide, year after year, that spending a weekend standing in the woods, handing food and water to sweaty strangers, and answering questions they could have easily answered by reading the race handbook is somehow worth their time.
Most of our volunteers return year after year, which is something I never take for granted. But life has a way of getting in the way. People move, schedules change, family obligations appear, and sometimes a longtime volunteer simply cannot make it back.
That is what happened this year with Rock ’N The Knob. Our longtime captain for the Lost Children aid station is unable to return, and when a friend of my co-race director offered to take over the reins, I was delighted. Then I asked her why she wanted to volunteer. Her answer caught me completely off guard.
She said it was an honor and a privilege to volunteer on such “hallowed and sacred ground.” She talked about the folklore, the connection between the hardy trail runners who spend the day crawling up and down Blue Knob and the early pioneers who settled these mountains. She talked about the “magic and mystery” that still seems to linger in these woods.
I will admit that my first reaction was probably something along the lines of, Well, that is considerably more profound than my usual description of the place.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized she had a point.
Blue Knob is a strange place. It is a mountain with layers of history piled on top of one another, some documented, some exaggerated, some bordering on the completely unbelievable. There are stories of children lost in the woods, mysterious ape-like creatures terrorizing communities, military installations defending the nation from The Reds, a ski resort built from the remnants of an Air Force station, and, naturally, a Cadillac that ended up in the middle of the wilderness after a police chase.
So, in honor of Rock ’N The Knob and the peculiar mountain we have chosen to torture people on, here are a few stories from the strange, sacred, and occasionally ridiculous history of Blue Knob, the northernmost peak in The First Frontier.
Lost Children of the Alleghenies
If you run the 50K at Rock ’N The Knob, you will encounter the Lost Turkey Trail somewhere around mile 8.5. Tucked along the trail is a stone monument inside a roofed structure and surrounded by a chain-link fence. It marks one of the most enduring stories in the folklore of northern Appalachia: the story of the Lost Children of the Alleghenies.
On the morning of April 24, 1856, Samuel Cox heard his dog barking in the forest. Assuming it had trapped a squirrel in a tree, Samuel grabbed his rifle and headed into the woods. At some point while he was gone, his two young sons apparently wandered away from home, presumably following their father. Susannah Cox assumed the boys were with Samuel. Samuel assumed they were at home.
It was only when he returned without them that the family realized the children were missing.
The Cox family and their neighbors immediately began searching. By that evening, more than one hundred men were combing the woods. Fires were lit in the hope that the boys might see them and find their way home. By the following day, nearly a thousand people had joined the search.
The spring snowmelt had turned nearby Bobs Creek into a raging stream, and many believed the boys could not possibly have crossed it without drowning. The creek was searched, but the boys were nowhere to be found.
As often happens when people do not have answers, speculation quickly filled the vacuum.
Rumors circulated that the children had been kidnapped by a band of gypsies that had recently been seen in the area. Others claimed that monks from the nearby Roman Catholic monastery had taken them away to indoctrinate them into their “peculiar religion.” One particularly ugly accusation suggested that Samuel and Susannah Cox had murdered their own children so they could collect donations from sympathetic neighbors.
The family cabin and garden were searched, but no bodies were found.
Eventually, the searchers resorted to increasingly unconventional methods. A dowser was brought in. A witch from Somerset County was also consulted. The dowser found nothing. The witch claimed to know where the children were and led a search party through the woods for hours. She also found nothing.
Then, about twelve miles away near Claysburg, a man named Jacob Dibert heard about the missing boys. Dibert told his wife that he wished he could dream about where the children were.
Apparently, he got his wish.
On May 2, Dibert dreamed that he was walking through the woods. In the dream, he passed a dead deer, a child’s shoe, and a fallen birch tree before arriving at a small ravine filled with birch trees. There, he found the bodies of the two boys.
The dream repeated itself for the next two nights.
Dibert told no one except his wife. Eventually, however, he decided the dream was prophetic and told his brother-in-law, Harrison Whysong. Whysong recognized details from the dream, and the two men decided to search for the boys.
They found them exactly where the dream had described. The younger boy, Joseph, appeared to have died first from starvation and hypothermia. His head was resting on his brother’s hat, beneath which someone had placed a large, smooth stream rock as a pillow.
A signal was raised around 11:00 that morning, and the community began gathering at the secluded site. Jacob Dibert remained with the boys, standing protectively over them until their father could arrive. Samuel Cox reportedly came to the site weeping and overcome with grief.
The community had raised a $50 reward, a considerable sum at the time. Rather than keep it, Dibert and Whysong gave the money to Samuel and Susannah Cox so they could purchase a proper monument for their sons.
The boys were small enough to share a casket, and a white marble monument still marks their joint gravesite at Mount Union Cemetery in Pavia.
It is one of those stories where history, tragedy, folklore, and mystery have become so intertwined that separating them is almost impossible. And when you are running through the same woods more than 160 years later, it is hard not to think about how different this landscape must have looked to the people who lived here then.
Listen: Lost Children of the Alleghenies on Morbid: A True Crime Podcast is an American true crime anthology podcast hosted by author and former autopsy technician Alaina Urquhart and her niece Ash Kelley.
Listen: "Jacob's Dream" is haunting bluegrass song written by John Pennell and Julie Lee, and famously recorded by Alison Krauss & Union Station on her album A Hundred Miles or More, telling the true 1856 story of the "Lost Children of the Alleghenies".
The Man Gorilla of the Alleghenies
If the Lost Children story is tragic, the next one is considerably more difficult to explain.
In 1920 and 1921, reports began circulating about a gigantic, terrifying man-ape supposedly roaming across the Alleghenies.
The story was that an enormous gorilla had escaped from a carnival train near Williamsport and fled south across the mountains. Along the way, it allegedly attacked a small boy and broke his arm, held up automobiles, raided smokehouses, and generally caused the sort of mayhem that newspapers apparently considered irresistible.
Eventually, the creature supposedly made its way to Blue Knob.
Even contemporary journalists had their doubts. There were no reports of an escaped carnival animal, and the creature somehow managed to remain on the loose for an extraordinarily long time, including surviving the winter of 1920–1921.
Today, some cryptozoologists consider the story one of the earliest mass sightings of what we now call Bigfoot.
One of the more entertaining accounts involves a woodsman named Heinie Beery, who lived alone in a small shack on Poplar Run. According to Henry W. Shoemaker's Allegheny Episodes: Folk Lore and Legends Collected in Northern and Western PA, Beery was a solitary and rather gloomy man who preferred living by himself rather than in the larger logging camp where his workers stayed.
While the woodsmen were searching for the supposed man-ape, the creature was reportedly seen several times near Beery's camp, creating a considerable amount of panic.
One Sunday afternoon, Beery left the crew's camp and headed alone up the ravine toward Blue Knob. As the story goes, he eventually reached the summit near dusk and sat on a flat rock overlooking the surrounding country. From there, he could see the lights of Altoona and Johnstown and the trains winding their way around Horseshoe Curve. Then he heard the brush crack behind him. When he turned around, he saw the monster.
According to Shoemaker's account, Beery's hair stood straight up and his face turned pale. The creature grabbed him from behind and sent him careening over a precipice, supposedly taking a “short cut to Altoona.”
The creature then turned around and disappeared back into the mountains.
After Beery's death, thousands of men reportedly took to the woods looking for the beast. Additional sightings followed near Hollidaysburg, Frankstown, Yellow Springs, Williamsburg, and elsewhere across the region.
Eventually, the creature supposedly made its way northeast toward the Lewistown Narrows. There, according to one account, it sat on a high rock and began to sob and moan as if overcome with remorse for its previous behavior.
Apparently even monsters have regrets.
Trackwalkers reportedly heard the creature and called to it through megaphones. It eventually headed north through the Central Mountain toward Jersey Shore and was last seen near Woolrich. There, local sportsman offered a reward of “five hundred dollars dead, one thousand dollars alive.”
At this point, you are probably wondering how much of this actually happened.
That is a fair question.
Henry Shoemaker and the Problem With History
Much of the Man Gorilla story comes from Henry Wharton Shoemaker, a fascinating character in his own right. Shoemaker was Pennsylvania's first state-appointed folklorist, and Pennsylvania was the first state in the country to establish such a position.
He spent much of his life collecting stories, legends, folklore, and oral traditions from across the Commonwealth. His work helped preserve a tremendous amount of regional history that otherwise might have disappeared.
There is, however, one small problem.
Nobody is entirely sure where Shoemaker's history ends and his imagination begins.
There has been considerable debate over how much of his writing was based on fact and how much was embellished, invented, or simply repeated from stories he had heard.
I still find myself wondering about it.
But maybe that is part of the appeal.
Regardless of whether every detail was true, Shoemaker's stories caught the attention of thousands of people. In a way, he was one of Pennsylvania's first travel bloggers. His books encouraged outsiders to visit the remote places he wrote about, and he even published a tour book for north-central Pennsylvania called Eldorado Found. One of its chapters was devoted entirely to an expedition to Blue Knob.
So whether you believe Shoemaker was an important preservationist, an enthusiastic storyteller, or occasionally a guy who let the story get away from him, there is no denying that he left his mark.
He wrote about these places, people read the stories, and then people came to see the places for themselves.
That sounds an awful lot like what travel writers and bloggers still do today.
The difference is that Shoemaker did not have Instagram.
From Park to Air Force Base to Ski Resort
The Blue Knob story gets considerably less supernatural from here, although it remains pretty interesting.
The old-growth forests around Blue Knob were clear-cut during the 1930s. In 1935, the National Park Service opened the area as a National Recreation Demonstration Area. The Civilian Conservation Corps subsequently reforested the mountain, and in 1945 the property was transferred to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and opened to the public as Blue Knob State Park.
The mountain's elevation and geography also made it attractive for another purpose.
Blue Knob rises roughly 500 feet above the surrounding plateaus to the west and became a useful location for the nation's air-defense system. Construction of the military installation began before 1941 under the U.S. Navy Department as a weather station, and the facility later came under the U.S. Air Force.
From 1952 through 1961, the Claysburg Air Force Station was home to the 772d Radar Squadron Aircraft Warning and Control Squadron. Its job was essentially to watch the skies and serve as one of the last lines of defense for Washington, D.C., against Soviet bombers.
Think about that the next time you are running past the remains of the old military facilities during Rock ’N The Knob. You are not merely struggling up a mountain. You are following trails through what was once part of the Cold War's defensive infrastructure. There are also remnants of NIKE surface-to-air missile pads scattered around the mountain.
And then, in 1961, the Air Force station closed.
Naturally, someone looked at all that terrain and thought, You know what this needs? Ski lifts.
In 1962, the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources created the Blue Knob Ski Area using a combination of state park land and adjoining private property. Trails were cut to take advantage of the mountain's terrain, lifts were installed, and several of the former Air Force buildings were repurposed to support the ski operation.
Skiing began.
The military left, the skiers arrived, and Blue Knob once again found a new identity.
Today, the ski area is known as Blue Knob All Seasons Resort.
Blue Knob: The Underdog
I should probably say something about Blue Knob All Seasons Resort.
I have not always been particularly kind to Blue Knob. In fact, if you know me for any length of time, you may have noticed that I have occasionally treated the resort as though it were the world's longest-running comedy of errors. I will admit that I have posted #blueknobdumpsterfire on more than one occasion.
The snowmaking operation has often been underwhelming, hampered by equipment that seems to have been installed sometime shortly after the invention of snow. There was, for a while, the wonderfully misplaced French restaurant, which made me wonder whether anyone involved had ever heard the phrase “know your market.” The lower mountain terrain (which, in my opinion, is the best terrain on the mountain) has sometimes opened sporadically, and there have been occasions when it remained mysteriously closed even after the surrounding area received a healthy dumping of natural snow.
And then there was the website.
At one point, I was convinced Blue Knob was attempting to establish the world record for the most exclamation points ever used on a single webpage. Every announcement seemed to arrive with enough punctuation to suggest that something had either gone spectacularly well or someone had just discovered fire.
So, yes, I have been critical.
Then last year, Blue Knob displaced Rock ’N The Knob so it could host a fairie festival.
I wish I were making that up.
The decision nearly put Allegheny Trailrunners out of business. Losing the mountain at that point was not a minor inconvenience. It was an existential threat to a small, grassroots organization that does not have a corporate parent, a private-equity fund, or a warehouse full of money somewhere with our name on it.
So you might think that would have been the final straw.
And yet, I have a hard time staying mad at Blue Knob.
Because when you look at the ski industry today, Blue Knob is the kind of underdog I cannot help but root for.
American skiing is increasingly dominated by corporate giants such as Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Company. Blue Knob sits in the middle of that landscape as something almost quaint by comparison: a family-owned mountain with a local identity, a local community, and a distinctly homegrown personality.
When I talk to friends who have made Blue Knob their home, they keep coming back to essentially the same idea: nowhere else in the Northeast is there quite the same combination of a family-owned mountain and a community built around it.
That matters.
And it matters even more when you consider where American skiing actually comes from.
Colorado is unquestionably the epicenter of American skiing. It is home to some of the country's most iconic resorts and accounts for roughly one in four skier visits each winter. But where do you suppose all those skiers come from?
Not all of them come from Colorado.
Colorado ranks 21st among the states in population, with about 5.9 million residents. Pennsylvania, meanwhile, ranks fifth, with nearly 13 million people. We have Philadelphia. We have Pittsburgh. Next door is D.C. and its suburbs. We have dozens of mid-sized cities and communities scattered between them. We have cold winters, mountains, ski areas within driving distance of major population centers. Pennsylvania is, in many ways, a skier-printing press.
We produce millions of skier visits of our own, but we also produce skiers who eventually load up the U-Haul and head west, where they can become “Summit County locals” after signing their apartment lease yet hours from the nearest mountain.
That is part of what makes the current consolidation of the Pennsylvania ski industry so interesting.
One company now controls more than a third of the state's ski areas. Those resorts collectively account for, by my estimation, well over half of Pennsylvania's skier visits.
Maybe I am old-fashioned, but that strikes me as an uncomfortable amount of consolidation for an industry in a country that supposedly maintains robust antitrust laws.
And this is where Blue Knob gets interesting. Because Blue Knob does not need to beat the corporate ski industry at its own game. It simply needs to continue being Blue Knob.
There is a very strong argument that it is already a better pure ski mountain than any of the six Vail-owned mountains surrounding it. Look at the trail map and the terrain speaks for itself. Blue Knob has some of the best skiing in Pennsylvania and, arguably, some of the best terrain anywhere in the Mid-Atlantic.
That is not nostalgia. That is geography. Blue Knob has legitimate mountain.
The problem is that having great terrain and being able to consistently make that terrain available are two very different things.
In recent years, the mountain has too often struggled to operate top-to-bottom. When the lower mountain is closed, skiers are left with the upper-mountain triple chairs while the terrain that makes Blue Knob special sits tantalizingly out of reach.
That has to change.
And, to their credit, they know it.
But fixing Blue Knob is not as simple as throwing a bunch of new equipment at the mountain and reopening on Friday.
This is a feisty mountain sitting in a devilish microclimate. Locals say, "if you can ski Blue Knob", makes note not only only of its superiority but also of its fickle conditions. It has aging infrastructure, challenging terrain, and an access road that seems to have been designed specifically to test the mechanical integrity of your vehicle before you are allowed to ski.
Nothing about renovating Blue Knob is going to be fast. Nothing about it is going to be easy. But it can be done. And it should be done.
Because there is something worth preserving here that goes beyond ski lifts, snowmaking, trail maps and season passes. Blue Knob represents a different model of what a mountain can be. It is a place where the mountain and the surrounding community are still connected in a way that is increasingly difficult to find in an industry dominated by enormous corporations and interchangeable resort experiences.
That is why, despite all my complaints, I root for Blue Knob.
I root for it because I understand the underdog.
I root for it because I believe in grassroots organizations and locally owned businesses.
And, perhaps most importantly, I root for it because the mountain itself is too fucking good to lose.
Blue Knob has survived being a forest, a National Recreation Demonstration Area, a state park, a military installation, a ski area and everything else that history has thrown at it. It has survived Soviet bombers that never came, a French restaurant that probably should not have been there, questionable websites, fairy festivals, and at least one Cadillac-driving methamphetamine enthusiast (more on that soon). Surely it can survive the ski industry.
It just needs a little help.
And maybe a few more exclamation points!!!
Cadillac Alley
And then there is the Cadillac.
In 2021, a new and decidedly less ancient piece of history became part of the Rock ’N The Knob course. The story, as told by Wayne Glass, begins on August 15, 2021. Wayne's wife and two other women were hiking in the area while Wayne had taken a different route and climbed Throat Punch Hill.
After reaching the top, Wayne continued along the 10K course and began noticing something unusual. First there was a side skirt. Then some plastic from an inner fender well. He figured somebody in a Jeep had gotten a little too ambitious. Then came the headlight. A really big headlight. He was still thinking SUV when the women came around the bend. One of them asked if he had seen the car parts.
He said somebody must have wrecked a vehicle.
She told him to wait.
It gets better.
A little farther down the trail they found it.
A Cadillac.
And apparently, it had once been a rather nice Cadillac.
After finishing their training run, the women reported the discovery to the local police. A police officer eventually met them at the clubhouse, and they explained what they had found.
According to the story, the Cadillac had gotten there after a police pursuit.
The police had attempted to stop the driver, who decided that stopping was apparently optional. The chase went through Claysburg and up Blue Knob Mountain. Eventually, the driver lost the police but apparently failed to realize the pursuit was over.
He continued into the wilderness. For roughly another two miles. Along the way, he tossed drug paraphernalia out of the vehicle before eventually getting the Cadillac stuck.
At that point, he abandoned the vehicle and took off on foot. Instead of simply turning around and walking back the way he had come, he decided to head down the steep mountainside. The tracks left behind suggested he slid down the hill, eventually flattening saplings as he went. He crossed a creek, became soaking wet and cold, stripped down to his underwear, and continued walking.
A passerby eventually stopped to see if he needed help. That turned out to be a questionable decision. The man was apparently in no condition to communicate coherently, so the passerby left.
The driver then went to a nearby house and attempted to get inside. The door was locked. So he picked up a chair and broke a window. The elderly woman who lived there managed to get out of the house, and she and the passerby called the police.
When officers arrived, they had to break down the basement door because the man had barricaded himself inside.
They eventually found him lying in a corner, soaking wet, wearing nothing but his underwear and covered in his own blood, with several garments draped over his head.
It was apparently a very literal interpretation of hide-and-seek: If I can't see you, you can't see me.
The police convinced him to come out. He reportedly claimed that he could not because he was “a bomb.”
Eventually, the police got him out and dealt with the situation.
The Cadillac, however, remained.
And that is how a wrecked Cadillac, sitting in the middle of the Blue Knob wilderness after a spectacularly bad series of decisions, became part of the Rock ’N The Knob course.
Naturally, we call it Cadillac Alley.
Hallowed Ground
I started this with a story about a volunteer calling Blue Knob “hallowed and sacred ground.”
After writing all of this, I think I understand what she meant.
There is something different about running through a place that carries this much history. The mountain has been a forest, a settlement, a place of tragedy, a source of folklore, a military installation, a recreation area, a ski resort, and, occasionally, apparently, an excellent place to hide a Cadillac.
It has been a place where people lived, worked, searched, fought, skied, hunted, told stories, and occasionally scared the hell out of one another.
And now, for one weekend every September, we bring a few hundred trail runners here to see how many times they can climb the same mountain before questioning every decision that brought them there.
Maybe that is not so different after all.
The pioneers had to endure the mountains because they were building lives here. The soldiers watched the skies because they believed something dangerous might come over those mountains. The storytellers came looking for mysteries. The skiers came looking for snow.
And the trail runners?
Well, we apparently come looking for suffering.
But perhaps that is why the place feels different. We are not simply running on a trail. We are passing through layers of stories, many of which are still sitting right beneath our feet.
So when you are out there at Rock ’N The Knob and you find yourself wondering why the trail has to go up again, remember that you are part of a much longer story here in The First Frontier.
And if you hear something moving through the woods, don't panic.
It is probably just another runner.
Probably.
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