Nay Aug Park: The Gorge the City Kept
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
A few miles east of downtown, Scranton kept something that most industrial cities of its era paved over or filled in: a genuine wilderness gorge inside the city limits.
Nay Aug Park takes its name from a Native American phrase meaning noisy brook. The brook in question is Roaring Brook, which carved this ravine at the end of the last ice age and has been noisy ever since. The centerpiece of the park is Nay Aug Falls, a waterfall tumbling over conglomerate rock and through soft siltstone formations into a gorge flanked by hundred-foot cliffs. The falls and the gorge are designated a National Natural Landmark.
The park was developed during Scranton's industrial peak. It was a deliberate choice: the city set aside this dramatic natural feature as a place where workers from the mines and mills could bring their families on a Sunday afternoon and breathe air that did not taste of coal dust. Over the decades, the park grew to include an amusement area, two swimming pools, a zoo, and the Everhart Museum, founded in nineteen oh eight and one of the oldest museums in northeastern Pennsylvania.
Today a fully accessible treehouse extends over the gorge, high above Roaring Brook, offering views that remind you this rugged landscape was here long before the furnaces, the rails, and the coal cars. It will be here long after.
In a city that spent a century consuming everything beneath its surface, Nay Aug Park is the thing Scranton decided not to consume. That decision still rewards a visit.
