A Walk Down Harmony Road

I’ve always been a huge fan of abandoned places. When I was a kid and we would go to the beach, I would make every excuse I could come up with so that we had to drive past this old abandoned amusement park near the shore. And when I first got my drivers license, I used to cruise around this stretch of Ambridge that was home to a drained pool and abandoned park. Even thinking about it now gives me the chills!

Lucky for us, there’s a stretch of road near my parents’ house that is now abandoned and closed to car traffic. A stretch of Harmony Road closed due to some cave-ins and rock slides somewhere around or before 2006, before Michael and I started dating (he’d never seen the road until our journey on foot). Before it was blocked off, this was a road we took nearly every single day. But none of us had seen what had become of it in the near decade it’s been shut down. One warm evening this summer, we decided to make the trek down on foot to explore how much nature had taken over since 2006.

Michael, my mum, our little red dog, and I headed down the road, not sure what to expect. The parts of the road that weren’t caving in are still open to cars, but as it’s now a dead end, the traffic is pretty light.

This is the part of the road that’s still open. While it’s a little wider than the closed stretch of Harmony Road, you can get an idea that it was a pretty average-sized two-lane road.

We brought Lucy along, who was totally ready for a grand adventure and not scared one bit! (Unlike her mother… who was a little scared, but in a good way, I promise!)

Here’s the final bit of drivable road. The curve at the end is where the off-limits part begins.

You can see the red blockades prohibiting car traffic. However, there aren’t any ‘No Trespassing’ signs anywhere, and it’s quite accessible by foot, so we were able to go all the way to the bottom of the closed section.

As soon as we crossed the blockades, we could see how nature had begun to take over. Remember that picture from above, showing the width of the road? Here’s how wide it is now with the overgrowth coming in from the hillside.

What was one a two-lane road is now the equivalent of a hiking trail in the woods!

Here you can see the effects of the cave-in on the edge of the road. It was pretty clear why they had to shut the road down after seeing how sharply the road drops off to the cliff below.

We also saw a handful of downed trees along the road. With the rock slides weakening the hillside, the trees go down much more easily in storms (which also results in a decent amount of power outages to the neighborhood).

Miss Lucy didn’t understand what the fuss was all about. This road has clearly become a perfect dog trail! Who needs cars when you’ve got four legs!

My favorite part of the abandoned road was the bit near the end where the concrete had cracked and the earth was literally growing up out of it. There was an eerie silence, even though we were above a busy road and a restaurant with outdoor seating. With the plants on all sides, it blanketed the road in a weird, creepy calm.

This part was almost entirely overgrown. You can also see some of the debris from a rock slide on the left hand side. So cool. And creepy.

All told, the walk was under a full mile, but it was an awesome journey into a formerly-familiar place that is now being slowly taken over by nature. I will definitely try to do this walk again in a few years to see how much more the plants have grown in and reclaimed this road, and in the meantime, I will keep scouring the background of these pictures for ghosts wandering the abandoned sections of Harmony Road.