SYCAMORE ISLAND
Nine miles from the Point, the island is one man’s home away from home in the Allegheny River
Several days after a recent storm had swelled the Allegheny River, Rick Duncan rowed his red canoe past floating tree branches toward Sycamore Island. During the 20-minute excursion from the Sylvan Canoe Club in Verona, the water was calm. No other boats were nearby.
As the island drew near, details popped — the feathery white blossoms waving from a row of knotweed, the muddy embankment, scraggly willows along the gravel beach.
“Ideally we would replace the knotweed with something native,” he said, paddling from the rear seat, “but for now, it is holding that end of the island in place.”
“We” is the Allegheny Land Trust, the island’s owner. But Mr. Duncan is the island’s main man. He has been for 10 years.
“I am the site steward,” he said.
Of the dozens of site stewards the land trust depends on to maintain close inspection of their lands, Mr. Duncan is the only one in service to a rare flood plain forest island that’s home to frogs in an old swimming pool and the skeleton of a wooden barge. The island sits between Blawnox and Verona, nine miles from Pittsburgh’s Point.
Mr. Duncan spends one or two days a week in canoe season keeping the trails he helped carve free of poison ivy, cutting fallen trees from blocking paths, picking up what campers leave behind, rarely much, he said. He has cleared knotweed throughout the interior and staked 150 willow saplings along the shoreline. Thirty have survived winter’s ice floes.
The island is accessible to canoeists and kayakers only. Hunting and trapping are prohibited. What you carry in you are responsible for carrying out. Campers must obtain a permit. (Contact stewardship@alleghenylandtrust.org for details.)
Mr. Duncan steered along the main channel with the shoreline on the right. The sky had become bleached, with blue streaks. At the official beach landing, marked by a green diagonal sign that reads “Sycamore Island,” he plowed the canoe into the gravel.
A vertical piling made of cut-up power poles stands against the embankment. It was one of his projects, for erosion control and to give visitors a series of steps to climb up to the land.
The power poles had supplied electricity to a boat club in the late 1960s and early ’70s, before Hurricane Agnes obliterated everything in 1972.
The land trust bought it from a private owner in 2008 for $250,000, with support from the Colcom Foundation.
With help from volunteers over 10 years, but working mostly alone, Mr. Duncan has cleared overgrowth to create a mile of trail — “a figure-eight with a tail” — and several clearings.
As he walked the trail with two visitors from the Post-Gazette, the first stop was a clearing with a campfire pit and picnic table. The table was the Sylvan Canoe Club’s contribution, deposited there by flood waters.
Sycamore Island is recovering from generations of degradation but with the seeds of a rich legacy. The 2009 report that the land trust commissioned, by Applied Ecological Services, cited an earlier Carnegie Mellon
University study describing the island as “among the rarest plant communities of its type” — anywhere.
Riparian flood plain hardwood forests are both rare and endangered, according to sources that include the state’s Natural Diversity Index. And yet this island of 13.4 acres has been growing on the protected side of a bend in the river, collecting silt and sand while Nine Mile Island across the way bears the brunt of the current.
Sycamore Island was just 6 acres in 1809. Nine Mile Island has eroded from 30 acres to 4 in that time. It is privately owned.
“Nine Mile will eventually disappear,” Mr. Duncan said. “The current is taking bites from underneath.”
In the mid 1800s, the river was dredged for safer navigation. Sand and gravel that was not used in glass manufacture and construction was dumped onto Sycamore Island.
In 1936, the Pennsylvania Railroad owned Sycamore and Nine Mile islands and leased them to the Audubon Society of Western Pennsylvania. The islands became two of the first bird sanctuaries in the region.
AES reported on Sycamore Island’s significant level of biodiversity. Fish and pearly mussels were returning. One-hundred-sixteen bird species were observed in the year of the 2009 report, 35 breeding there, 15 likely breeding there, the rest migratory.
Its growing diversity of tree species includes the dominant silver maple, Eastern cottonwoods, black willows, catalpas, oaks and sycamores.Where knotweed has been eradicated, many varieties of native plants have reclaimed the understory.
Passion for preservation
Mr. Duncan, 64, grew up in a military family, in numerous states. He and his wife, Barbara Munford, who workedtogether as archaeologists in New Mexico, moved to Pittsburgh in 1988 so he could go to graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. They live in Penn Hills.
Now semi-retired from GAI Consultants’ cultural resources group, where his wife continues to work full time, he paddles a canoe that she bought him in 1999, the year their daughter Jamie was born.
“I had canoed when I was in my teens,” he said. “It was something I always wanted.”
When the land trust bought the island, he and other Sylvan Canoe Club members volunteered to help make the island accessible to the public.
“I made the trail that first season and had people from the canoe club walk it and tell me what they thought,” he said. “There was poison ivy everywhere, so the next season I started killing that back to keep it off the trail.”
Mr. Duncan has been planting redbud seeds harvested from his yard to diversify the tree species on the island. Several have taken hold. TreeVitalize and Tree Pittsburgh have also provided trees, he said.
Sycamore Island is fishshaped. The steel skeleton of what used to be a wooden barge is embedded across its southern tip, a rusted hulk that exists now in the clutches of tree roots that grabbed on and grew around it.
The barge was used as a fueling station when movie theater mogul Ernest Stein was developing the Harbor Isle Boat Club there in the late ’60s.
Several massive specimens of silver maple and sycamore survived the 1972 hurricane. The branches of one sycamore rooted into the forest floor after the tree fell, making it a nursery tree for a row of eight sycamores that aregrowing from the trunk.
Among the man-made points of interest is an old swimming pool, left behind from the boat club. Landscapers unearthed its filter tank, which Mr. Duncan turned into a tool shed.
The landscapers also reconfigured the pool into two parts. One end is an overlook, the other, lower end is an open-sided water feature that animals can get into and out of.
Mr. Duncan stood at the overlook and looked into the pond. The reward was what sounded like a double reed instrument making a knocking sound
“A frog!” he said. “In two days! Wow. Two days ago we hauled 20 wheelbarrows of black muck out of this pond. It had gone stagnant. We planted water lilies, iris and cattail. And frogs are already back.”
This visit was a little late to catch much wildlife in action. He said he often visits early in the morning, when animals, especially birds, are out. In the spring, when geese lay their eggs, he has spotted hungry foxes.
Before the trail loops back to the beginning, a steep embankment leads to a small bench at the summit.
“This is Mount Sycamore, a mountain of dredge, 28 feet above the river,” Mr. Duncan said. “I come up here sometimes just to look at the river.”
Of his stewardship, he said, “I don’t see this as a responsibility. I enjoy making it useful and interesting and try not to over-manage.
“But I don’t always come here to work. I come here to read sometimes. I’ve hung my hammock here and fallen asleep.”