Hey, what's up everybody?

Hope you're having a good day.

I've got my adventuring hat on, so you know what that means.

Today I am on my way down to see the abandoned West Newton Reservoir south of West Newton, Pennsylvania.

And if I still have time after that, I'm going to go a little further down the tracks and check out the remains of the American Reduction Company incineration plant just down the cliff from Reduction, PA.

So if you're interested in seeing either of those places.

Stay tuned for when I turn the camera back on when I get there.

I'm Noles.

I'm here to explore and explain.

So I'm not fully there yet, but this caught my attention up this little hollow on the inland side of the tracks.

Well, there goes my hat on a branch, is this little stone retaining wall.

Or maybe a foundation of a building.

I know I'm definitely not at the reservoir yet, but this is pretty cool.

Check that out with that frozen waterfall.

It's about 33 degrees right now, and so the water is just beginning to melt.

That is really cool.

I'm going to head up to the top, see what I can see.

Maybe there is a little bit of a dam here, maybe some kind of pumphouse, or maybe even a mill at some point.

I don't really know the history of this area.

I made it up to the top.

I still don't know what this thing is.

There is a little bit of bricks right there.

I don't know how well you can see that, but it looks like it's in a circular shape, so maybe some kind of well, or a storage tank.

I wonder if potentially this was a water cistern to store water for the railroad for the trains as they passed, and it looks like there's a little room in there between these two kind of front columns of stone, but it's really, really thick.

It seems like a super thick masonry wall for some kind of little structure.

So if you can see there, there's a circular area within the stone walls.

And here there's a, there was a circular area.

You can see a little bit of it left.

Leads me to believe there is tanks here of some kind.

So I would wager a guess that this was a water storage facility for the trains as they came through.

Maybe taking advantage of the waterfall as it came down the cliff here.

If you have any other guesses, let me know in the comments down below.

Otherwise I will see you back down on the tracks back down at the reservoir.

So I've been walking up this little hollow along whatever beautiful little stream this is off to my left.

Clearly, I'm not the only person to have come back here.

You can tell by the well-worn path here, but look at that.

That's the reservoir.

That's the dam up ahead.

That thing is imposing.

It just kind of sprung out of nowhere.

And I don't know now if I should take the high road or the low road, but I guess I'll go down here along the stream.

I think it'll be a little prettier.

I was really worried when I left home this morning, when there was two inches of snow on the ground there, that there might be two or more inches of snow on the ground up here.

Since were a little higher in elevation, but not so.

This is like the perfect amount of snow for exploring because it makes everything look beautiful, but you can still actually see everything.

But I totally understand the argument for wanting to explore in the summer instead, because I can imagine this place looks like a jungle in the summer, and I think that'd be beautiful as well.

So I crossed the stream twice, decided to follow the lower route along the stream up to the dam here.

But now, however, I am faced with a problem because I don't know if this really scales too well on the camera.

This thing is huge.

Way bigger than I thought it was going to be.

It's beautiful, it's amazing, but man is it big.

And now we're gonna have to figure out how to get to the other side if that's something I even want to do.

But right now, just look at that.

Standing here for like ten minutes, just taking in the sights and sounds of this place.

It is.

It's kind of breathtaking.

I really didn't expect it to wow me as much as it is.

But the adventurer in me is telling me I must go up to the top of the dam.

I must go to the other side to see what's over there.

So I'll see you over there.

Okay.

I had to go all the way back out, almost to the beginning of the hollow, and come back in to take that high road to get up here.

But I came up here.

Wow.

It's really crazy when you think that this was all underwater for probably decades.

I have no idea.

You know any of the history of this place.

When it opened?

When it closed, why?

I did some research.

And it appears that the reservoir was built by the B&O Railroad in 1907 to store water that would be used by locomotives, which probably means that little stone structure I passed earlier was not used for that purpose.

But as you can see by this 1938 aerial image, the dam served that purpose for less than 30 years.

And you can see the difference in the land.

You know, on this side, it's it's much closer to me than on that side.

I'm sure that's sediment buildup from years and years of a lake existing here.

But it's been long enough for some of these trees to grow in.

And some of these trees are pretty big.

Gotta watch that.

Okay, I'm not really going to go any further than this.

All the ground is a little slick and it's making me a little nervous to be honest, so I don't really know if I'm going to mess with all those bushes and twigs and stuff that's out there and potentially fall down, because that's closer to me.

But it's still not really close.

That's pretty far down there.

But you can see the two branches of the stream coming together there and then flowing through that big crack in the side, coming out there, continuing on down to the Yough River.

This is a really, really cool place.

And now I think I see a little bit of a structure over there.

So I'm going to try and get down to this side, and then I'm going to go over there and see what that's all about.

So I'll see you over there.

Okay.

This is super cool over here.

These are the remains of this piece of wall that fell off out of this tower looking thing.

I don't know if this what this served exactly, but there's a ladder.

As you can see, going down part of the way.

Had I come on the other side of the dam.

I might go up there to see what's down there.

But here's the hole in the dam where the water comes through from the other side.

Maybe not as spectacular, but still really cool to take a look at.

And the pieces of the wall laying here next to the stream.

Got to watch out.

Still a little icy up here.

Check it out.

Down there is that waterfall, that's where I was standing before.

I mean, you get a sense of how big this thing is when you're up here.

So that's the dam heading out that way.

That's looking towards the south.

And these are the bits of this wall that have fallen on this side.

And we're up here in the old lake bed.

What a neat place.

I managed to find a way across the stream, so I'm heading up now, along the other piece of the dam that's still intact.

Really nice moss content here.

This stuff is super soft and we'll see what we can see on this side of the dam.

Well, maybe it would have been easier to come up over here.

There's, like, a little roadway, Let's see what we can find.

Don't try this at home, as they say.

Now, here's where that ladder comes down.

Oh, that's deep.

All right.

This is where I let my phone do the work for me to see over the edge.

I think that's just water flowing through.

So maybe this had some kind of, you know, overflow effect.

If the lake got too high, it came down through here because there's no spillway on this dam.

So that's what I'm guessing for that.

And over here, of course, the beautiful little outflow pond.

I bet that's a great swimming hole in the summer.

It's not huge in terms of area, but it's really imposing in the whole landscape.

This place is really neat.

I like how pristine and quiet peaceful it is out here.

Very cool.

All right.

Well, I think I'm done here.

I've seen just about everything, so I'm going to head back down the tracks.

Hopefully I can get down to the other place I want to visit today.

I guess I'll let you know if I make it there.

Okay.

I finally made it to my next destination, which is the remains of the American Reduction Company.

This old factory?

Well, I shouldn't say factory.

It's an incineration plant that existed here from, I believe, 1898 to 1936.

And it took in trash from Pittsburgh, which of course was growing rapidly at that time.

And it burned it here.

You know, people paid them to burn trash, and that's how they made their money.

And I'd have no idea how much of this place is left.

If this is it, I apologize.

It's not very exciting.

It's a little anticlimactic, but there's a couple parallel walls sitting in the woods here.

And over on the other side of this little trail, I saw some brick and cement columns.

So I'm going to head over there.

Now, I have a feeling that there won't probably be a really intact building, seeing as this place has been abandoned for 90 years, but if you knew all the answers beforehand, they wouldn't call it adventuring.

So I don't know the answers.

That's why I'm here to figure them out.

Now.

These, I would imagine, used to support some kind of steel beams.

In fact, there's a little rivets or whatever you want to call them over here, if you can see that.

So I'm going to make my way on down through the woods that way, and I'll pick up again when I see something new, whether it's exciting or not, you're going to see it.

Okay.

I've walked a little bit further into the woods.

The vibes have shifted quite a little bit.

It got way darker, it started sleeting, and then all of a sudden I see this ghostly building up here.

I'm really happy there is an intact building, but it looks a little spooky.

So I'm going to bring you with me.

Now.

I'm assuming that those would be chimneys off to the side, and this would have been, Oh my God, that's an owl.

That's an owl.

Look at him.

Wow.

Okay, that completes the vibes.

Oh, wow.

Okay, now I'm not an owl expert.

I don't know what kind of owl that is.

This is why I love adventuring.

You never know what you're going to see.

Nature has reclaimed these places.

That's like a perfect owl perch, too, isn't it?

That actually makes me a little reticent to go in there, but I'm certainly going to go in at least this building off to the side.

Okay, I'm going to go take a few more pictures of that owl that I'm going to continue my journey here.

Okay, so as not to disturb the owl more than I probably already have, I'm going to make my way around the building counterclockwise here.

Whoa.

Now, I don't know if there was a fire.

I don't know.

You know what happened to this place.

I think that it just closed down because it wasn't really a profitable business anymore.

But I guess we'll figure it out as we go through.

That's a little creepy as well.

That's actually the first graffiti I've seen.

There was none at the reservoir, and I don't really see any other here so far.

But you never know.

I don't think any of these buildings are actually really fully intact anymore, but this is pretty cool.

I see some kind of machinery over there.

I'm going to walk around to that.

I don't know what this is, but I like the way it looks.

Some drum, perhaps, or some kind of like air.

Oh, yeah.

Like a turbine or something.

That's my guess.

Some kind of air turbine.

Let me know.

There's always somebody that knows in the YouTube comment section.

That is one thing I love about the comment section and making these videos is that somebody always has something new that I can learn.

So if anybody knows what exactly that is, please do let me know.

There are some old chimneys here.

Oh, this is so cool.

Maybe those birds saw the owl.

This is extremely photogenic.

And this is way out here.

You'd never know that it's along here.

Okay, now here.

This is interesting.

This is a little piece of fence it looks like.

Oh.

Yeah.

It's like.

Looks like old chain link.

Do they used to make chain link fence like that?

That's really neat looking.

I don't know how it got twisted like that.

I think some dirt bikers come through here, but I'm happy that they've made a little trail for me.

There's some other kind of piece of metal over there.

Okay, here's more of the factory.

I keep saying factory.

They didn't make anything.

They just burned trash.

But maybe this is where they put the trash when they were done.

These big pits.

Wow, look at that.

Two big pits.

Who knows how deep those things are.

And then either some rooms or maybe some more pits over here that are built a little differently.

And then there's this square structure over here I want to go take a look at as well.

Is that a drainage pipe?

Might be a drainage pipe off on the side, taking the excess down to the river.

You ever seen frozen algae?

I haven't until just now.

Oh, yeah.

This is way greener to.

And of course there's a tire.

There's always an abandoned tire.

I'm going to keep going through the woods this way, but that might just be it until we turn back around.

Well, no, maybe I was wrong.

Oh, these aren't actually cement columns.

These are.

Well, I don't know what they are.

But if you can see that on the camera, they have circular indentations in them, as if to hold some kind of long tank or like a barrel or something.

I don't know if you can really pick that up, but I might throw a picture up on screen that captures it better.

Those pieces of cement with the circular indentations in them were just about the end of the factory going that way, but I came back on the trail that circled around over here, and there's various, you know, little columns and things over there that's looking down into those tanks, that tank area again.

And there is a cement or stone, maybe brick wall over here that totally covered in moss, and it looks like I might be into where there was a big room or some big part of the facility.

And here's the giant pit again.

And their never quite as deep as you think they're going to be.

Who knows what that was used for.

But this trail takes us down this way or straight ahead.

And I wanted to see these structures straight ahead that look almost like coke ovens to me.

Now, I really don't think that they are because, well, they don't fully look like coke ovens.

And also, why would there be coke ovens in the middle of an incineration plant?

If you don't know what a Coke oven is, by the way, I have a whole video where I explore the old town of Shoaf and the coke ovens there, so you should go check that out when you get a chance.

But look at this row of these openings.

Maybe you know what?

These probably would have been the places where they they put the trash in to burn.

I feel like I'm like in an ancient Roman ruin or something, you know, all these arches and cement.

And, I mean, it looks so old for only being abandoned a hundred years ago.

And who knows how long the factory stood for after it was abandoned.

And look at that offset.

Holy cow!

I bet that's all water and wind.

Oh, that's nice and wet.

Let's see.

There's some of these up here.

And then there's this flat area, and it looks like there's more of them down there, and they might be a little bit bigger.

Yeah, these are definitely bigger openings.

So did they serve the same purpose?

Or were they doing different things?

The world may never know.

I'm going to continue on down this way and see what we can see.

Wow.

Look at what time and water have done to this cement wall.

You could sleep under there if you wanted to.

That is such a big gap.

Not that I'd recommend, of course, sleeping underneath a giant slab of concrete, but I think you could.

Now what happened?

And here's a box that kind of looks like a tomb or sarcophagus over there.

So naturally we should go closer and check it out.

Now.

I got caught in some thorns immediately after saying that, so I had to clear myself off.

But we're coming over here to this sarcophagus looking thing.

Oh, my God, that is so deep.

I guess people use that for their trash, which, you know, seems appropriate as that's what this place was for.

Here, move that out of the way so you can see.

Wow.

Okay.

I'm not going down there.

Well, it's a good thing that's mostly covered up, I guess.

You could do some real damage to yourself there.

So mostly this place is pretty empty.

It's mostly just cement walls.

Some brick walls here and there.

I'm going to go back towards that bit of the the facility where the owl was, but I'm going to go around and take some pictures first.

Remember I have an Instagram account where I post pictures of all my places that I go exploring, whether I make a video on them or not.

It's Noles Dot exploring.

Link in the description down below.

Okay, we've just about seen everything there is to see, but then I came across this staircase.

Looks like some of the public steps in Pittsburgh, doesn't it?

Maybe in better condition than some of them.

So I guess that would have brought people down from that level up into this level.

Or maybe that was the outside and this is the inside.

Who knows.

But let's see.

Let's head over into there, see what lurks in this chimney looking part.

And then I think I will have seen it all.

There's another step down there.

Oh, wow.

This cements totally being eaten away right there.

Wow, this is so cool.

Oh, I've seen that tag before.

If you watch this channel and this is your tag, please let me know, because I've definitely been to a lot of the same places that you've been to.

I definitely recognize that tag, but I don't know who you are.

Oh, and that's a little photogenic shot with the icicles there.

Look at that.

Very cool.

We'll finish up inside this building here, and I think that'll do it for the American Reduction Company.

What the hell?

There's a lot of hay and stuff in there.

Maybe people are storing stuff for a fire.

Well, like I said, that's why they call it an adventure.

Oh, I'm going to go this way and say bye to Mr.

Owl and thank him for protecting us as we walk through this area.

I don't know if that's something that owls are supposed to do, but he felt like a good omen rather than a bad one.

Oh.

Oh man, I'm sorry I dude, I spooked him.

Well, there goes the owl.

Well, I'm heading back up towards town now.

I had a great couple hours exploring and taking you with me.

I hope you enjoyed following along as much as I enjoyed showing you what I was seeing.

If there's any place you'd like me to take you in the future, please let me know down in the comments below.

Otherwise, thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one.