Life in the Shadows

There's a duality that exists for those who love the forest. On one hand, we love it so much that we want to tell its secrets to all the living world. On the other hand, it's those sylvan secrets that we treasure. We love the forest precisely because we're quiet people who would rather stare at a rock than a TV, rather listen to a chattering stream than a yammering radio.

The forest lover lives in both worlds: the world of alarm clocks and deadlines as well as the world of mushrooms and ferns. One world drains us, and the other gives us life. It's not a bad way to plod through your years, moving between desk and trail, between committee meetings and bird concerts. The price you pay is that living in two places makes you a stranger in both.

But alas, The Journal is finally starting to amass a bit of a following out there on the Net, and so I feel some pressure to tell some worthwhile secrets in the one month of publication that remains. And so, here goes:

The ANF is great and worth years of exploration. It really is. But in its southern reaches, especially, there are huge swaths of devastation that can really leave a wilderness seeker feeling frustrated and angry. Drillers and loggers have plowed so many roads through the forest that you really have to plan your excursion carefully if you want to avoid the horrors of tree carnage and large scale death. And so, if you're thinking about a trek in the ANF, that's cool. Plan carefully to avoid all the industrial incursions into the woods. But allow me to suggest an alternative: the Elk State Forest.

The Elk State Forest is vast and little-visited by anyone but hunters and fishers. Like the national forests, it's perfectly legal to set up camp wherever you like, as long as you're a good distance from the roadways. And like our national forest, there is some logging and drilling, but on a much smaller scale. You can wander for hours through the Elk and never encounter a noisy derrick, or a depressing clearcut, or a monstrous truck barreling down narrow dirt roads at dangerous break-neck speeds. And yet, because the few pleasure seekers who turn to our woods are conditioned to look to the ANF, the Elk State Forest passes its serene life in the shadows of its bigger, more industrialized neighbor.

So, get yourself a map of the Elk State Forest. They're free from the PADCNR, and you can even print one off the Internet. This is a PDF, so give it a few minutes to download, then save it to your computer in a file entitled "heaven-on-earth." On the map, you'll see that the bulk of the forest is well to the east and south of the ANF. These areas are out of my league. But look to the isolated patch of green in the northwest corner of the map, the area just around East Branch Dam. This is where you want to go.

From the village of Glen Hazel, there's a road that follows the East Branch of the Clarion River to a gate. From that point, it follows the Middle Fork deep into the heart of the beautiful State Game Lands #25. (SGL25 is perfect for a trek, and even wilder than the Elk SF, but camping is not allowed on any PA gamelands.) You'll reach a point where the road veers leftward, and a much lesser traveled track continues dead ahead. Take the leftward track toward the Elk State Forest. This is uphill all the way. You'll pass the black and yellow gate pictured in the last post, and from that point, you can camp wherever you like.

Once you start the downhill trek into Briggs Hollow, you'll be glad you brought a bike. The scenery is great, and the ride is easy, with the wind on your face. Make sure your brakes are working! Now you've got a huge swath of wildlands all to yourself. Follow Briggs Hollow Road to Naval Hollow Road. From there, make a loop up onto Straight Creek Road and back down to where the loop started. Also, you might want to trek west the whole way to the banks of East Branch Lake and pass a night close to the water. Be careful not to set up camp west of the "state park" signs, since a very narrow stretch of designated "parkland" encircles the lake, and backcountry camping is not allowed in the park.

There's a lot of life flourishing in the shadows. Elk SF is superb in its own right, but often gets overlooked...the same way Philadelphia gets overlooked by tourists who hit New York and DC. The top pic is my ancient mountain bike parked along the lonely stretches of Briggs Hollow Road at the bottom of the valley. The second photo is Briggs Hollow Run, which meanders lazily through some very wild back-country into East Branch Lake.

A View from the Ferns

The ferns were here first. Sometimes I wonder if they won't be here last.

Long before there were ash trees, with their emerald ash borers; well before the elm trees evolved, much less Dutch elm disease; before anyone had ever yet laid eyes on a white oak or a gypsy moth, the world was green with ferns. Of all the living things that greet the woodland wanderer, the fern is oldest. Millions of years ago, before Lucie the protohuman shuffled through the Great Rift Valley, the dinosaurs dined on ferns. That's an impressive pedigree.

Funny thing about ferns: they thrive on all the things that destroy trees. Global warming? The ferns are glad someone turned up the heat! Air pollution? It's mother's milk to a fern! Excessive logging and drilling on public lands? The ferns will be the first to reclaim the wasted acreage.


If you let the ferns have their way, they'll shade the forest floor so darkly that no new trees will ever sprout. If not for human intervention, the Wilds of Northern Pennsylvania would be mostly treeless. Ferny hills, ferny valleys, ferny meadows, ferny river banks. You've got to hand it to those ferns. They survive.

When my life is in flux, sometimes I like to take it to the ferns, as I did today in a remote stretch of the Elk State Forest. So beautiful, so far flung, so alive with birdsong and brooks. Today is the first time I've thought to ride a mountain bike into the forest in order to get as far into the wilderness as possible before choosing a remote spot for a hike. The mountain bike is a great way to save on precious weekly hiking time...especially since the old Allegheny National Forest and I are soon to part ways.

Yes, friends, that's right. The parson is leaving the snowbelt. "The Allegheny Journal" is not an ancient, adaptable, long-surviving fern. No, the Journal is more like one of the short-lived boomtowns that I've documented on this site. They say that you become the things you think about. Maybe, by spending so much of our woodland energy digging through the wreckage of Guffey, and Granere, and McKinley, we've brought the fate of those extinct towns down on this site itself. Soon, the Journal will be little more than a bit of abandoned real estate on the Internet, the Windy City of the worldwide web. I'll continue to publish my treks through the Month of July, then it's off to balmy Southern Pennsylvania for the parson.

I don't know. Maybe I'll start blogging about some other patch of trees down there. Or maybe I'll take up exploring abandoned buildings, like Mayview State Hospital, less than two miles from my new home. In the meantime, I've still got a few things left to say on this blog. And I'll continue to maintain the site as a resource for hikers well into the future.

Here you've got a photo of those resilient, old ferns. The wisest plants in the forest. The bottom pic is an unguarded border crossing 2 miles from the Land Before Time.

Ghostly Foxglove

During most of the year, you can only tell where Windy City was located by the tall pines that still line its two streets. If you look closely, you'll see that the clearings on either side of the roadway are about the size and shape of residential lawns. There are derelict electric lines, too.

A nice time to come to this abandoned town site is in the early summer. If you come in June, you'll see the foxglove blooming among the gravel heaps and rusting derricks, as in this photo.

I actually think Windy City is the creepiest of our ghost towns. It's at the end of a series of twisting dirt roads. The derricks pump oil out of the old front yards, and beer cans litter the back yards. The place feels exposed, somehow. And as you travel the roads in this part of the forest, you almost always encounter slow-moving, unsavory-looking characters in ragged vehicles.

If you Google "Windy City, PA" you'll get a map to the eerie old town site. It's still listed as a populated place in Elk County, and our outdated forest maps still show six or eight structures standing in town. In reality, those buildings have been gone since the 70s. I know I said I wouldn't be describing any treks for a while, but I got to come back to Kane just for the day, and ended up doing some unexpected bushwacking in some beautiful country west of Windy City. Can you believe I got lost in the forest again? Seriously lost. Maybe I need to take up a more sedentary hobby, like--I dunno--drinking, or toy trains, or origami.

Biannual Exile

It's time again for my biannual exile to Rochester, New York, so we'll have several weeks with no woodland treks to report. Tune in again sometime near the end of June. Until then, faithful reader, I leave you with a thought from the Bard.

"And this, our life,
exempt from public haunt,
finds tongues in trees,
books in running brooks,
sermons in stones,
and good in everything."

~William Shakespeare