CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The deep gorge that slices through downtown Cuyahoga Falls is hardly a secret. In the late 19th century, it was the site of a popular park said to have included one of the nation's earliest roller coasters.
Today, anyone can peer 100 feet down from the new walkway ramps or pedestrian bridge at the city's High Bridge Glens Park into the deep chasm cut by the Cuyahoga River through ancient layers of glistening sandstone and shale.
But from up high, you can't feel the full impact of the natural wonders below. The roar of traffic on nearby Ohio 8 drowns out the sound of rushing water. The sheer rock wall on the east side of the gorge is largely shrouded by greenery when viewed from above.
To sense the true majesty of the rapids and the cliff, you need to see them from the river's edge, where the landscape resembles wild scenery in the spectacular 19th-century landscapes of American artists Albert Bierstadt or Frederic Edwin Church.
"It's amazing, totally amazing, and you've got to see it to believe it," said local activist Gary Whidden, who has been leading kayak-and-hiking tours of this hard-to-reach piece of terrain, with special permission from Summit Metro Parks, for nearly a decade.
A 'citizen of the valley'
A self-described "citizen of the valley," Whidden, a 76-year-old retired businessman, is pushing for the removal of the Ohio Edison Dam in the Gorge Metro Park, two miles downstream from High Bridge Glens.
He feels that the best argument he can make in favor of his cause is to take people deep into the gorge so they can see the potential themselves.
"People say, 'Let the experts take care of it,' but they haven't, so I keep making waves," Whidden said while standing at the foot of the cliff on one such outing in the last week of August.
Built in 1912 to power a streetcar line, the Ohio Edison Dam created a V-shaped reservoir that later provided cooling water for a coal-fired power plant that was shut down in 1991 and later dismantled.
Today, the dam, which stands approximately 60 feet high and 400 feet across, is the last big structure of its kind on the Cuyahoga River below Lake Rockwell north of Kent, where a dam holds back a reservoir that provides water for Akron.
When it was built, the Ohio Edison Dam submerged much of the gorge and the cataract from which Cuyahoga Falls took its name.
Today the dam serves no commercial purpose. Instead, like many outmoded dams across the United States, it harms the river by creating a zone where decaying organic matter starves the water of oxygen.
Whidden and a large number of advocates and experts want to see the dam and the mud that gathered behind it removed to reveal the gorge as it was when the river ran free to Lake Erie.
An area off-limits
Gorge Metro Park, the unit of Summit Metro Parks that surrounds the reservoir created by the Ohio Edison Dam, features several miles of trails on the west and north sides of the water.
But the east side of the reservoir – where the cliffs opposite and below High Bridge Glens Park are located – is a conservation area off-limits to the public without special permits of the kind Whidden has obtained for his tours.
Whidden sees a restored gorge as a way to open public access to the base of the cliffs and to create a dramatic new "water trail" entry to the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, located several miles to the west.
A national movement
The restored rapids running through the now-submerged portion of the gorge would boost the economy of Cuyahoga Falls through tourism and recreation, he said.
"We have an opportunity to open this up," Whidden said. "This is not rocket science. You'd have a water trail that goes through the middle [of a region] of 4 million people and would be a joy to all and an international attraction. But we're still stuck."
A dam-removal movement is well under way across the United States, fueled by the obsolescence of structures no longer needed for irrigation or hydropower, and by new scientific knowledge about how dams harm the hydrology and ecology of rivers.
Nearly 900 dams have been taken down over the past 25 years, according to a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor. Another 50 or 60 come down every year.
Dams on the Cuyahoga River were removed in Kent in 2004 and in Munroe Falls in 2005-06. Two more dams in downtown Cuyahoga Falls, upstream of High Bridge Glens Park, were taken out during the summer of 2013. Plans to remove another dam at Ohio 82 in Brecksville are gathering momentum.
For now, the effort to remove the Ohio Edison Dam is in limbo while state and federal officials debate over how to pay for a study to determine ways to dismantle the structure and remove more than 830,000 cubic yards of sediment that accumulated behind it over the past century.
Officials from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said Wednesday that despite recent reports of a roadblock in their discussions, they still hope to launch the feasibility study this year.
At issue is an Army Corps requirement that 35 percent of the cost of the study should come from non-federal sources in cash or in-kind services deemed "integral," in its words, to the scientific and engineering work that needs to be done.
The Ohio EPA says that $500,000 in federal funding is available, but the Army Corps ruled in August that the required non-federal match proposed by the state agency wasn't "creditable."
Both parties continue to talk. Meanwhile, estimates of the total cost of the project have ranged from $700,000 to $900,000.
"We look forward to working with all the groups to hopefully get a project started this year," David Romano, chief of planning for the Army Corps Buffalo District office, said Wednesday.
Whidden is frustrated by the lack of progress, a view shared by many other observers.
"If we continue on having this bickering, nothing's going to happen," he said. "My personal opinion is that they're [the Army Corps and the Ohio EPA] just playing games."
A man with a soft, deep voice and a self-deprecating sense of humor, Whidden pokes fun at his dyslexia and tendency to run on about restoring the Cuyahoga gorge.
"I'm obsessed," he admits, "or at least heavily committed."
Whidden said his passion stems from his love of hiking in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and his long involvement in local affairs.
While running a business graphics and video production firm with his wife, Carol, Whidden volunteered on the civic commission that helped organize the merger of Cuyahoga Falls and Northampton Township in the mid-1980s.
After he retired in the early 2000s, he took up the restoration of the Cuyahoga gorge as his cause.
He's won admirers including John Debo, the former superintendent of the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, who now works as the chief development officer for the park's nonprofit conservancy.
"He's been tenacious about exposing people to what an incredible resource that stretch of the river is," Debo said of Whidden. "It's high time the Ohio Edison Dam removal project moves forward."
Viewing the gorge up close
A paddle and a hike in the gorge with Whidden shows what's at stake.
During the last week of August, after he obtained a special-use permit from Summit Metro Parks, Plain Dealer photographer Gus Chan and I joined Whidden and several of his friends for a visit to the otherwise off-limits conservation area in Gorge Metro Park.
We set off in a small flotilla of colorful, one-person kayaks from the gravelly shoreline shaded below the Front Street Bridge, which cuts cross the reservoir about half a mile above the Ohio Edison Dam.
As we paddled northeast, we passed the concrete foundation structure on the southeast shore, where the now-dismantled Ohio Edison power plant once stood.
On our left, to the north, impressive 19th-century stone abutments that once held up a streetcar line jutted out from the shoreline.
Thick trees lined the shores east and west of the bridge, creating pleasant reflections. But the silty, brown water bubbled strangely with methane gas released from decomposing algae on the bottom of the lake. In bright sun, the water almost appeared to be carbonated, like soda.
After paddling a mile north of the bridge, Whidden hauled out his kayak on the east shore of the gorge on a flat area of slick mud beneath a towering rock wall that had been barely visible through the trees.
On shore, it was suddenly possible to see the full extent of the cliffs rising overhead. They rose just east of the moss-covered stonework of the old Chuckery raceway, a mid-19th-century channel intended to harness the river's power for commercial use.
Long disused, the raceway is an impressive piece of industrial archaeology. But the cliff cut by the river is more impressive still.
Whidden led his party north along the base of the rock wall, which rose 70 to 100 feet straight up from the mud and debris that gathered between the cliff and the old raceway.
The rock wall, slimy at the base with algae nourished by groundwater that drips constantly through tiny crevices, rose overhead in tiers that cantilevered outward in complex overhangs eroded over millennia.
Whidden said the rock wall consisted of shale and a formation known as Sharon sandstone, facts later verified by University of Akron geologist John Peck.
In an interview Wednesday, Peck said that the deepest layer of shale visible on the cliff formed in the Mississippian Period, roughly 330 million years ago, followed by the sandstone, which formed in the Pennsylvanian Period, roughly 300 million years ago – long before dinosaurs walked the earth.
Even without immediate access to Peck's expertise on the tour, it was easy to sense the immensity of time it took to form the rock and later to expose it through the cutting action of the river.
Finally, Whidden led his entourage to the top of a small rise at the base of the cliff from which it was possible to look upstream toward the rapids that run through central Cuyahoga Falls.
It was also possible to look up through a break in the trees and see the tiny pedestrian bridge of High Bridge Glens Park, the vantage point from which most people can look down into the gorge.
Seeing the spectacular scenery along the river up close made it clear why Whidden has devoted years to his campaign to restore the gorge's natural splendor.
"No," he said, "I'm not going to give up."