Boone Merrick here, glad to ride along. Now, I've told tales in a lot of pretty country, but this valley's a special case, because it's beautiful AND it's haunted — not by ghosts, exactly, but by what almost happened here, and by what did.
Here's our arrangement. Quinn keeps you safe and tells you what you're looking at — the river, the falls, the rock. I'll fill the drive with the tales: the giant dam the government started building right here, and the thousands of families it drove off their own land to make way for a lake that never came; the hippies who moved into the empty farmhouses; the old Lenape people whose homeland this was, and the barefaced swindle that took it; and a road older than the United States.
So settle in and enjoy the river, and I'll talk in the quiet stretches. There's a lot of ghost in this pretty valley, friend — the good kind, the kind worth remembering. Eyes up. Here we go.
Photo: NPS · Public domain
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