Women document nature on Ohio trail

Akron Beacon Journal

AKRON

Two Stark County women are going through withdrawal. Gigi Muir and Kay Wuske are removing themselves, cold turkey, from the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail.

The women, both from Jackson Township, spent virtually all of 2010 along the hike-and-bike trail from Cleveland through Akron to New Philadelphia.

Together they snapped 80,000 photographs of the trail and the nature along its 85 miles in Summit, Stark, Cuyahoga and Tuscarawas counties.

They were on the trail two to three times a week in the winter and almost daily from spring through fall.

“It was fun, [and] I miss it,” Wuske said. “I’m homesick for it ... and still going through withdrawal.”

Muir, 58, a clinical supervisor at Canton’s Trillium Family Solutions, hiked 534 miles along the Towpath Trail.

Wuske, 45, a student in web design at Stark State College of Technology and an admitted nonhiker, topped 300 miles on foot.

They also pedaled, paddled and rode a train and canal boat for another 71 miles.

Together the two women logged enough miles to have traveled the existing Towpath Trail 101/2 times.

But the two women were more interested in their photographs and a trail blog Muir wrote — Towpath Twenty Ten, with 262 outings recorded — than in logging miles.

The women were on “excursions filled with wonder and discovery,” Muir wrote on one post.

They have exhibited their photos at a recent arts event in downtown Canton and are hoping to garner a book or calendar contract or a gallery show in Northeast Ohio.

Their mission was to show people that beauty abounds along the Towpath Trail.

“We want people to know it’s there. You just have to look. Be patient and look around you,” Muir said.

The inspiration for the yearlong project came to Muir in late 2009. She was hooked on the trail’s beauty in southern Summit County and loved the idea of exploring and recording what the pair found along the trail.

It was a big and sometimes daunting project to commit to spending 12 months along the Towpath, the women said.

They might shoot up to 500 photographs per outing with a heavy dose of landscapes, birds, mammals, insects and flowers. They might spend hours waiting for the shot they wanted.

They encountered a coyote up close — a scream but no photo, Wuske said — and got reprimanded by park rangers for not seeing warning signs and getting too close to a bald eagle nest in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. They hiked the trail at night to get full-moon photos.

Early on, Muir and Wuske had the trail to themselves, especially in the dead of winter. That changed in the spring and summer.

“We caught ourselves asking, ‘Why are all these people on our trail?’” Muir said. “We knew we had to let go a little bit. We were being too possessive.”