The Wearin' o' the Orange

Oh, the joys of bushwacking, just shoving Jeff Mitchell's well-thumbed book into the glove compartment, taking out the old forest map, and dreaming big! Actually, I get so little time in the woods these days that I've been carefully planning today's outing since last week. I even had a dream about it last night: a bushwacking trip into the trackless Tionesta Natural Area...(not to be confused with the Tionesta Scenic Area). Sometimes you just gotta get away from the trails.

On the map of the ANF, just west of Kane there are two darkened areas. The more northerly of the two is the Tionesta "Scenic" Area, which I complained about this past Sunday, with its unbelievable blowdowns. Just adjacent to it is a more southerly patch of forest of about equal size. This is the Tionesta "Natural" Area. It's also old growth. It's off limits to all motorized vehicles; the mineral rights actually belong to the Forest Service, so there aren't many oil roads or derricks, and there are no trails through it. Two-thousand acres of bushwackers paradise!

Well, sort of. The approach from the hamlet of Brookston (Forest County) is a lonely one, so I was drawn to it. Forest Road 443 east from Brookston leads eventually to a closed gate at a pipeline swath. This pipeline, like all pipelines running through our forest, is a heinous, awful, reprehensible thing. But it serves as a perfect highway for hikers. It's grassy and passes through some beautiful segments of the ANF. You could actually hike the whole detestable pipeline from its starting place at Roystone (the natural gas facility between Sheffield and Ludlow) all the way down to the Little Drummer Trail, on the southermost marches of the ANF. In any case, it's really the only thoroughfare through the Tionesta Natural Area, giving hikers access to great bushwacking. From FR443, I followed the pipeline swath north.

In less than a quarter mile, the swath crosses into the Natural Area, one of the most isolated spots in the ANF. The trees here are big, mostly hemlock and beech. There are steep valleys, affording long vistas. The swath crosses two beautiful brooks, the East Fork Run and the West Fork Run. The first of them is deeper, with immense fallen trunks serving as the only bridge. This is what I love about bushwacking: in the absence of trails, you just pick a stream that you like and follow it. You can't get lost following a stream, and you can end up in some pretty remote country.

On this trip, I did meet up with some hunters from New Castle. They looked like characters on "The Sopranos." I could swear one of them shoved a handgun in his pocket when he saw me. They said they weren't hunting, "just looking." I thought to myself, "Yeah, I know New Castle. You guys are looking for someplace to hide a body."

Can't wait to discover more of this truly wild part of the forest. Hey, this is the first time in weeks that I've hiked on any day of the week other than Sunday! Had to wear that flourescent orange cap my mother-in-law got me. And I usually only wear orange on St. Patrick's Day....