I'm plowed under with work, and tomorrow morning is the deadline. In addition to about a million other things, being a minister means preparing a 10-page essay (a 20-minute sermon) every single week and being ready to deliver it. It has to be engaging, entertaining, relevant, natural-sounding, poignant, and delivered with confidence and poise. And in my congregation, it can't be too preachy, either.But today was partially sunny...after a long stretch of gray days. The wife and kids were away. The house was quiet (which is perfect for writing sermons). And the old Mill Creek Trail was just a-calling my name. So I spent this whole blasted day in the woods.
October is the perfect time to discover new territory in the Allegheny National Forest. It's cool. The hunters aren't out shooting the place up, yet. There are no bugs or snakes. And the leaves are beautiful.
Now, the northern reaches of the old Mill Creek Trail don't get much publicity. It's a brushy old path that runs through a relatively level section of forest that has suffered a lot of blow-downs. But like all lesser discovered trails in the ANF, it's got more than its share of hidden gems. You can hike the Mill Creek Trail from the point where it diverges from the Twin Lakes Trail (which will be the topic of another post in the near future), and you very quickly find yourself as far from human noise and bustle as is possible in the nation's 5th most populous state.
Striding south at a normal pace, you'll find yourself coming into wet territory about 45 minutes from the trailhead. When the path cuts up the left side of a broad, shallow valley, a basin-like place with a boggy floor, that's when you need to start looking off to your right to find the beaver pond. Bushwack due west from the trail down across the marshy floor of the valley, and within ten minutes, you're at a strange little beaver pond made entirely by wadded twigs.
How do those little critters stay so hard at work, flooding valleys, building dams, cutting down trees, when all it takes is a partially sunny sky to call me away from my duties?
Hi Snowbelt,
ReplyDeleteMy uncle and I hiked the Twin Lakes trail last weekend. We were originally going to hike the whole thing from Twin Lakes to Tionesta Scenic area, but at the last minute, we decided to start at the trailhead along 66 to cut off about 4 miles. Good choice, because it was a pretty grueling hike, we started at about 9:30 and it was getting dark by the time we finished. To say that the trail is not maintained is an understatement; there is no identifiable tread for the majority of the route and we lost the trail on several occasions. At various times we were bushwacking thru thorny brush, slogging thru a half mile of beaver-created swamp, fording the Tionesta in hip deep water (the guide book we had has a picture of a quaint bridge crossing the Tionesta at that spot but it is gone), and scouting for the next blaze thru thick stands of 8 foot high saplings. I failed to notice that the NCT section at the end has apparently been rerouted since the guidebook's publication and no longer intersects with the Tionesta Scenic Area loop trail (we should have turned down the the powerlines, if you are familiar), and so we ended up a mile up the road from where we parked my uncle's truck at the end of the loop and Tionesta Scenic Area.
Deceptively tough trail, considering the relatively gentle terrain! We had hiked the NCT from Henry's Mill to the Minister Valley Loop a few weeks ago which was about the same length, but that was a piece of cake compared to the Twin Lakes trail. This one took us 2-3 hours longer than that one.
Happy trails!
Slade from Columbus, OH
Thanks for your comments, Slade. Sorry to hear about your experience on the Twin Lakes Trail. The condition of that trail is one of my great sorrows! It's also one of the reasons I usually forego the trails and stick to the unused forest roads. But that trail will be the topic of a future post. I may use some of your comments!
ReplyDelete-Brian