Cellpic Sunday – The Canal Trail Bridge

Canal Trail Bridge – Cuyahoga National Park.

Valley View, Ohio.

In our continuing quest to discover what our national parks have to offer, we headed south of Cleveland toward Cuyahoga National Park and found a visitor center near the highway we traveled. There were cars in the parking lot, but as it turned out, the Canal Exploration Center was closed. The park facilities have seasonal hours and we discovered that between Labor Day and the end of October, the center is only open on Saturdays and Sundays. Of course, the day of our visit was Thursday. Strike one!

We heard the unmistakeable sound of a train on a nearby track and a couple of other gentlemen in the parking lot gave us some information about the park and the nearby scenic railroad. We were excited to know more about the railroad and between the signage in front of the visitor center, comments from our two acquaintances, and an online search, we found that the train stops at several places along the route. We also learned that it was their last run of the day and that we missed its nearby stop. No matter as it wouldn’t have returned here for us to pick up our car, anyway. Strike two!

We discovered that the parking lot is used by hikers and bikers who want to hike the Towpath Trail, a popular scenic trail in the park that provides views of the Erie Canal and up-close views of the national park. We weren’t up to a long hike, but I did notice a pedestrian bridge still standing right next to a more modern roadway bridge where they both crossed the Cuyahoga River. The Towpath Trail parallels Canal Road along with parts of the original Erie Canal. In the opposite direction, the pedestrian bridge leads to the train station for the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad. Even though we missed the train, we decided to take a short walk across the bridge to check it out.

I like to include details of the bridges I feature when I come upon them. Occasionally I come up empty with Internet searches. My most recent example is the old bridge at Betanos Spain. I couldn’t find any details at all. As it turns out, this bridge has the same lack of information. The Ohio Dept of Transportation features a collection of historic bridges, but this one, identified in Google Maps as the Canal Trail Bridge is not included. Wikipedia also has a fairly complete listing of bridges that cross the Cuyahoga River here. The bridge immediately to the right of the Canal Trail Bridge, the Hillside Bridge, is listed there with some detail, but though the Canal Trail Bridge is identified by name, there is no information about it beyond the name and GPS coordinates. Strike three!

About the photo: The weather on that day was cloudy with occasional rain showers. I decided to focus on the moody weather by tweaking the image to reflect the weather. Starting with Lightroom as usual for cropping and basic edits, I then sent it off to Luminar Neo for noise reduction, then I lowered the exposure of the image. I added a gradient fill in front of the bridge to darken the foreground even more. Then I added a radiant filter over the bridge itself and raised the exposure to draw the viewer’s eyes to the center of the subject. Finally, I used the HSL sliders to bring all of the colors individually to grayscale with each color’s saturation control. Then starting at the top, one at a time, I brought up the saturation of each color to see what colors are present in the image. I purposely left the ones that had the greatest effect, the red, orange, and green sliders, at a lower-than-normal saturation to accentuate the moodiness.

If you know any more about the specifics of this bridge, please feel free to let me know in the comments. To view the image in 2K HD, click on it to see it on my Flickr site.

I encourage fellow bloggers to create their own Cellpic Sunday posts. I never have a specific topic for this feature, and the only rules are that the photo must be captured with a cell phone, iPad, or another mobile device… If you have an image from a drone or even a dashcam, that’s acceptable as well. The second rule is to link your challenge response to this post or leave a comment here with a link to your post in the comment. Oh, and, you don’t have to post it on a Sunday.

John Steiner