Choosing a Path

When you find yourself poring over a forest map, trying to choose a place worthy of your time in the woods, it's important to know what you're hoping to get out of that time.

If you want solitude, you pick the greenest regions of the map, with the fewest inroads and trails. And be prepared to bushwack. If you want to feel uplifted, you aim for rocky heights that offer vistas. If you're in a melancholic funk, and you want to nurse it a little, you scan the forest map for "place names" without any or many structures; that's probably a ghost town. If you want sylvan music to soothe your soul, as most of us do in the spring, you find a stream or rivulet to follow. This is why I'm always searching the map for gated forest roads that follow a stream.


The problem is that not all streams are equal. Their depth, and rockiness, and flow will all affect the music they make for you. Some are too shallow and shrill. Some are too deep and silent. But some rare streams are absolutely perfect, offering bright, wide expanses where the water babbles over stones; deep, still eddies where young frogs croak and sing; tiny waterfalls, swampy tributaries, passing through sunny meadows--where birds love to nest and sing--as well as dark hemlock groves.

There are more streams in the Allegheny National Forest region than I'll discover in a lifetime. And yet, the most perfect I've discovered so far is Middle Fork Run, a tributary of the East Branch of the Clarion River. Middle Fork runs through State Game Lands #25 at Glen Hazel.

Hiking the Game Lands is new territory for me, which is precisely the point of doing it. They've got some fussy rules and regs (like no camping), but as long as you don't go in high hunting season---when hiking is ill-advised anyway---the Game Lands offer an oft-overlooked alternative to the hiker. And SGL25 is just about superb: vast, wild, neglected, and little frequented by anyone but the occasional fisher.

Near the bridge in the hamlet of Glen Hazel, very close to East Branch Lake, there's a stone monument commemorating the first state game lands or something...(in which case, I don't know why it's SGL #25 and not SGL #1). Passing just behind the monument is an unmarked gravel road which is popular with fishers and follows the East Branch Clarion upstream. If you follow it far enough, it leaves off and begins to follow a smaller stream (the Middle Fork) into SGL25. The gravel ends at a gate, and there's lots of room to park. This is a fantastic road to hike, as it follows the perfect stream: in places raucous, in places bubbling, or silent, or swarming with frogs. It's also very scenic. I recommend hiking in about a mile; notice the "gallery forests" on the steep hillsides. There's almost no understory, which gives the woods a regal, park-like feel. In fact, the lofty peaks on both sides, the perfect stream alongside the road, and the gallery forests in this area remind me very much of a certain trail near Winter Park, Colorado.

About one mile past the gate, there's a fenced-in regrowth area on the left with a small gate marked "MF2." If you go just a a few dozen paces past this small gate, there's a tiny brook on your right that flows down into the Middle Fork. Follow this brook into the beautiful streambed of the Middle Fork and ford the big stream on a fallen hemlock. On the opposite bank, there's an ancient road---long disused---that you see pictured in this last photo. This is none other than the Highway to Heaven, the Narrow-Way-and-Few-There-Be-That-Find-It. I recommend crossing the Middle Fork and following that pilgrim path until you achieve enlightenment. (But who am I to say?) This is truly a spectacular region to explore, and so remote.

If you were to stay on the main road instead of taking the road less traveled, it would eventually take you into the western patch of the Elk State Forest, where back-country camping is allowed.

Thoreau believed that the walker doesn't choose his or her path; instead, the path chooses the person. "What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will walk? I believe that there is a subtle magnetism in Nature, which, if we unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright." I have to agree. Life experiences condition us for certain things. We begin to expect those things, look for them, prepare for them. Our memories and circumstances shape us so that we will recognize the path that's best for us. I'm not talking about kismet, or fate, or even the doctrine of predestination, long-time darling of the country parson. I'm speaking about how a person's lot in life turns out to be just an expression or fulfillment of his or her character. Your path somehow picks you. It calls out to you and claims you. And all you can do is follow. Or not.