Coming Soon: Nature Vacations and Art Education!

Art workshops, small event rentals, and “Glamping” in a peaceful natural setting next to two beautiful waterfalls surrounded by thousands of acres of forested land to explore with streams, lakes, and abundant wildlife.

The Backstory

The Dream: 

While I was living in Brooklyn, earning my MFA at the New York Academy of Art and later making a “go of it” as a working artist in NYC, I loved every minute of it. I knew, however, that I would not stay forever. My soul has always called out for nature, and I knew I would be called back to Central PA to be immersed in the landscape I grew up in and was always pulled back to, no matter how many times I left. My time in New York was for cultivating my career as an artist, and soaking up all of the art and culture. As I did so, I began to dream about what my future might look like. I began to dream about a place of my own, a bit of land somewhere in the forest, and if I was lucky, also near water. This place would have a little house and a big studio, and I would also build some adorable little cabins that I could rent out for extra income and to host people if I wanted to teach small workshops from my studio. 

The Search:

I had thought I would stay in NYC a while longer, but a few months into the first big pandemic lock-down in 2020, I decided this was the moment for me to leave. So, I rented approximately the last Uhaul truck in all of NYC and packed myself up and left for beautiful central PA. Since I was back, it seemed like I might as well start looking for land. At first, I was very discouraged. Everything was much more expensive than I had realized, and many things that were advertised as “forested” actually had been logged within the last decade or two. They were scrubby areas of saplings and invasive species. Sometimes I find real forest, but they were so remote that it would be impossible to live there year-round, with no cell reception and no winter maintenance on the roads to get there. As the months progressed, I began to realize that I was going to need to be very patient. If I just kept watching, I might get lucky and something would come on the market that would suit my dream, but it was going to be a rare thing. 

The Find:

Then, in early March of 2021, my dad and I went to check out a place that was out of my price range but claimed to have waterfalls. Could that be? I had not heard of many waterfalls in central PA. We hiked in to see the place on 18 inches of hard packed snow and ice on the driveway that had not been plowed all winter. To our great surprise, not only were there really two waterfalls, but they were huge gorgeous waterfalls crashing down across from each other over 20 foot cliffs, converging into a single stream going down a beautiful gorge. This was one of those super special properties that pretty much never comes onto the market. We had gone to see it as a lark, thinking we would never go for something so expensive. But when we experienced it, we thought… maybe we should try to make this happen? 

The Particulars:

The location is Loganton, PA. It is about 35 minutes northeast from Millheim, my current studio, and about 45 minutes east of State College, PA. It is also not far from Lockhaven, Williamsport, and Lewisburg. It is just 3 miles from an exit off of route 80, so it is very easy to get to and has cell phone signal, but it feels very very wild. The land is 5.7 acres, but it is embedded into thousands of acres of protected land, owned by the Lock Haven Water Authority to protect their reservoirs and the watershed that feeds their water supply. That land also connects to part of Bald Eagle State Forest. One of the reservoirs is just a few minutes walk away. A few miles away, a stream emerges from a natural cranberry bog, which feeds the reservoir, runs through my property, and eventually becomes one of the waterfalls. Another, spring-fed creek, runs along another edge of my property and becomes the other waterfall. The two falls merge into McElhatten Creek. The two falls are often called Rosecrans Falls, and if you don't believe my pictures, just google that and you will see many amazing photos of the waterfalls. It is a popular hiking destination for locals and waterfall seekers who find instructions from blogs and such, as the trail to it is very unofficial and unmarked.

The Progress:

Never, in my wildest dreams, did I expect to find something this amazing, and I got very very lucky getting it. That is another story unto itself… complete with harrowing moments like everyone at our bank getting covid on the day we needed to close on our loan, and other classic moments of nail-biting. In any case, with the amazingness also came a greater expense and with the additional expense also grew the scale of the dream and the potential for and need for income. It became a full blown family endeavor, with an enormous amount of help from my parents, who believed in this enough to put a lien against their home to make it happen. This covered the property purchase and also a construction loan, which we have long since burned through. 

The property had just a single-wide trailer from the 1960's, mildewed and mouse-chewed. In the three years since we closed, we have radically transformed the property. We first built a summer kitchen with an outdoor shower, a composting toilet outhouse, and a few glamping platforms. Then we took apart the trailer and carefully recycled and reused what we could and sent the rest into a dumpster. We designed a house, acquired a building permit, broke ground, and built furiously through all of 2023. By the end of that year, with the help of a three-person crew of talented friends we hired plus uncountable hours of unpaid labor by my dad, me, and other family, we built a house with a finished exterior. It is framed-in with completed roof, siding, windows and doors. It is just an exoskeleton, the interior is just the skeletal structure without insulation or completed wiring, plumbing, floors, walls, ceilings, heating systems, or anything else. So there is a long way to go and at this point, with the construction loan gone, we are moving slowly doing the finish work mostly ourselves. 

Where we started: The upper pictures show the original trailer and the process of dismantling it, lower left is me standing in my future bedroom as we layout the location of the foundation, and the bottom right is a paper model of the house design that I made to help me visualize our plan as we were designing it. More pictures of progress and other projects soon!