More Bogus Mysteries

So, I've got the day off, and I'm home alone with the kids, trying to plug away at my doctoral coursework, but to no avail. It's impossible to concentrate with the kids around.

Besides, there's a brutal shortage of hiking and blogging in my near future, as I'm leaving for classes in Rochester this Sunday, then writing papers (as well as juggling a very tolerant parish and a relatively-tolerant-but-don't-push-it-buster wife...and two children) until February 22, when this term's papers are all due.

And so, in this "calm before the storm," I decided to do another post about Bogus Rocks...since I'll probably be living off the memory of that last hike until late February. (Most things are bearable if you know for how long you'll have to endure them.)

I thought it would be really clever to name the first photo "Dos Equis," but it doesn't quite evoke the Siberian feel that I associate with that ghostly quadrant of the forest. The derelict tracks off to the right lead to the Rocks. And the icy road leads off into the forest to a place called Watson Farm. The signs are for real when they say "no winter maintenance," too.

And did I say that those rocks were thirty feet high? Well, they're surely thirty feet at the overlook. But in most spots, the height is probably something between fifteen and twenty feet, as you see in this second shot. Still a nasty fall.

And check out the poor, denuded tree, exposed to the winter weather. What strange woodland varmint climbs so high to eat the bark of trees, and why does it eat so selectively, bypassing perfectly identical bark closer to the base of the same tree? Other trees had the bark chewed off a full twenty feet off the ground (no exaggerating this time). Are we dealing with young black bears here?

And finally, who made these tracks in the melting, two-day old snow? A young bear? A bobcat? Do you think he knows that he lost his glove?

Anyhow, rock on, most excellent rocks. (Dude, that was bogus.)

Bogus Rocks

A pretty entertaining movie that got totally overlooked by the world was Transsiberian, a 2008 "neo-noir" Sundance thriller starring Woody Harrelson. As I set out in quest of "Bogus Rocks," I was reminded of the film: long expanses of abandoned railroad tracks stretch through miles of the level pinewoods. This is a dark, eerie quarter of the forest, silent and blanketed in snow. The terrain could definitely pass for Siberia, or Yakhutsk...or Irkhutsk.

Bogus Rocks don't get their name from being made of styrofoam. They're real rocks, and big ones at that. Once, long ago, this part of the forest was blessed with an industrial site called "Bogus-Something-0r-Other," and the name stuck long after the factory disappeared. Bogus was surely the name of the guy who owned the factory, although when I was young, and could still get away with using pop slang (back in the days of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure) "bogus" meant something roughly equivalent to today's "lame"...which Bogus Rocks are not.

The stream that runs through this part of the forest is called Bogus Run, too.

Bogus Rocks are a long stand of boulders overlooking a broad basin-shaped valley, or depression, in the forest floor. Several streams flow through the valley, and local legend has it that there was once an "Indian fort" here. Others say that the Indians used the valley to corral livestock...which seems pretty unlikely to me. Not because it wouldn't make a great natural corral, but because...what kind of livestock would they have corralled? Elk?

In any case, earlier inhabitants of Kane asserted that there were wooden pens, earthworks, and defensive ramparts in the slopes above the valley. Some say that you can still see ancient carving in the rocks themselves, but I find nothing.


In the 1920s, an archaeologist from the U. of Rochester documented a site somewhere around this area, and he called it a "hilltop stronghold" claiming that it was bulit by "proto-Erian" people 600 to 800 years ago. He collected pottery and other artifacts. That's pretty cool because so little is known about the Erie Tribe that originally inhabited this region. The Senecas in nearby New York State exterminated them in the early 1600s, but left their land largely unoccupied.

Nevertheless, I have my doubts about whether Bogus Rocks are indeed the site of the archaelogist's "Indian fort." The site of Bogus Rocks is in Howe Township, Forest County. The history books situate the old Indian fort in Highland Township, Elk County. True: Bogus Rocks are very close to the line between these two backwoods political entities, but---unless I'm very much mistaken---it's still on the wrong side. That gives me reasonable doubt that the locals are right in saying that Bogus Rocks is the same site as the old Indian fort.

Bogus Rocks make a great hiking destination. There's an overlook, seen in the second photo. In the third photo, you see an icy cliff edge dropping off to the forest floor thirty feet below. The fourth pic shows some sort of lair among the rocks. I couldn't identify the tracks, but whatever creature lives behind those icicles has itself a nice little pad up there. Is it a porcupine? It climbs high into the trees to eat off the bark.

Strangely, hiking guides of the ANF don't tell you how to get to Bogus Rocks, so take note! Go to Chaffee, the intersection where PA948 leaves PA66 and heads toward Warren. Continue on PA66 toward Marienville, but only go about one mile. Reach a Y in the road where the pavement (PA66) veers to the left, and a dirt road (Chaffee Road) continues due west. Take Chaffee Road into Forest County, and cross the railroad tracks two times. Park at the second railroad crossing, and follow the tracks to the right. After less than half a mile, there's a sign and a well-worn path off to the right.

The Weary Road

"And you, beneath life's crushing load,
Whose forms are bending low,
Who toil along the climbing way
With painful steps and slow,
Look now! for glad and golden hours
Come swiftly on the wing.
And rest beside the weary road
To hear the angels sing."

This sentimental old Christmas carol always seemed so sappy to me until I learned that it was written by a Massachusetts minister in protest of slavery. After learning that, it became my favorite Christmas song; you can see traces of outrage in all the lyrics, poetic cries against the injustice of human bondage.

(It's said that there are more slaves in the world today than there were when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, many of them foreign women hidden in dingy trailers at ordinary truckstops...where caring people buy their gas then zoom off to their destinations, all unawares. Alas, although The Allegheny Journal is mostly about "escape," human trafficking is beyond the scope of our homespun journalism. )

This Christmas Eve, I find myself thinking about the power of metaphors. One cool thing about Christmas is that it's a time when people expect metaphors and parables. I've hated Santa from the time I was five, and I noticed that his liar's beard was made of cottonballs. But other Christmas metaphors / parables have their power: You don't have to believe in "The Whos" for the Grinch's story to get its point across. You don't have to believe in ghosts for Scrooge's story to speak to you. And you don't have to believe in angels and miracles for the Nativity story to touch your soul. In fact, stories are really the most powerful medium for speaking to the soul, whether they're literal fact or simple parable. Even the best literal stories work themselves into parables at some point, becoming a strange mixture of fact and fantasy, taking on a more than literal meaning.

Christmas is a time to tell ourselves stories. Pick good ones. We'll get back to some serious backwoods discoveries next week. For a few days, at least, The Journal is going to "rest beside the weary road." Hope you'll do the same.

Winter's Silence

There's a silence in the winter woods unlike any other season. No insects. No people. No birds.
Winter hiking can be less exciting because the plant life is all hidden away, as are the old industrial artifacts. Parking near trailheads can be difficult, too, since the pull-offs usually aren't cleared. You can only cover about half your normal distances in the snow. And yet, winter hikes are worth the pain.

It's the profound silence that I love, "the silence of eternity." Once you get out there beyond the noise of the road, there's a deep hush over all the frozen landscape. That intense quiet takes me by surprise every time, even if it's the very thing that called me to the woods in the first place. It's an unexpected visit from an all-too-rare friend. The only sounds are the gurgling brooks, not yet frozen, the creaking branches, the snow underfoot.

Today's trek covered the southern terminus of the much neglected Mill Creek Trail. You gotta love making the only set of tracks in the snow, even if it does bode ill for the trail's future. (In the Darwinian cycle of funds apportionment, the upkeep goes to the most utilized facilities...like the ATV trails.)

When I was a kid, I used to think it was weird that, in the woods, Christmas Day looks just like any other. The squirrels are still holed up; the wind still rattles bare, snowy branches; the same supreme silence reigns. There's nothing special about the day, no music, no lights, no feasts or gifts. The childhood magic of Christmas ends where the woods begins, stark and cold. I used to think it was a little sad, how December 25 was just another day in the wintry forest.

Now it makes me want to spend Christmas in...the woods. The silence is a gift.

The Holy Experiment

This famous painting, by Bucks County folk artist Edward Hicks, is known as "The Peaceable Kingdom." It depicts an encounter in the 1680s where William Penn is talking cordially with the Lenni Lenape, the indigenous people from whom he purchased much of the colony of Pennsylvania. Penn is a Quaker. He believes that there's a fragment of the Divine in every human being, and so he is duty-bound to treat everyone with respect, and to honor his agreements with the original inhabitants of the land. The river in the background is the Delaware.

In the foreground, you see the fulfilliment of the words of the Hebrew Prophet Isaiah:

"The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf, and the lion, and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox... They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain." Isaiah 11:6-9

Penn and his followers called Pennsylvania a "Holy Experiment." His was the only colony that guaranteed absolute religious freedom for anyone who claimed to believe in some version of the Christian God. That's narrow by modern standards, but it was pretty liberal back in the day. In fact, the Quakers were so tolerant that they were soon outnumbered by people far less tolerant than themselves. And in time, those "less tolerant" folks rose to power, where they sit entrenched these 300 years later. But as long as Penn lived, the land was never "taken" from the indigenous peoples, only "purchased." That's pretty fair, since Penn could have behaved like other European settlers, laying claim to the land and purchasing it only with musket and sword.

This second picture, of course, lampoons "The Peaceable Kingdom." It depicts a ruinous place where respect has been supplanted by the shameless and shortsighted drive for material gain.

I know--as you do--that there's no returning to innocence once it's been lost. And all the Utopian experiments in the history of the world have failed. Wisdom cannot be legislated, but only acquired through pain and openness. Respect will never be as glitzy and glamorous as raw material gain. But how did we get so far from where we started? I don't mean "How did we get so far from our religious roots?" God knows religion has been a huge part of the problem! I mean, how did we go from a society based on respect to a society based on individual gain? And what can be the future for people who make such a shift?

Images

My philosophy of life in the Pennsylvania Outlands is this: Don't let the weather stop you. If you're a ninny about the weather, then you will never enjoy life here. Heck, if you're a ninny about the weather, then you've probably got deeper issues that this blog can't address.

And yet, I'm more than a little saddened that I got freezing rain during my week's most sacred hours, Sunday afternoon. Freezing rain is the one thing that can usually make you wish you'd stayed in. And so, instead of reporting on the weekly adventure, I am left to pour over images from finer seasons, the Ghost of Hiking Past.

They say there are two phases to life. There's an earlier phase when you're primarily oriented toward the future: marriage, children, career goals, adventures, etc. And then, after all your goals have been met (or left glaringly unmet), and the flower of youth begins to fade, there comes a second phase, where you are primarily oriented toward the past. This second phase comes earlier for some than for others, and it isn't necessarily a bad time in life. How bad it is depends on how you invested the energies of your earlier days.

I wonder why no one ever gets caught up in the present, the here-and-now? Why don't we ever fix on the phase we've got in our hands at the time? I don't know. But I've got to admit: I'm definitely oriented toward the future this week. I've got a lot of hopes riding on the afternoon of Sunday, 12/20, the next chance I'll get to hit the trails.

I was hoping to explore the ghost of Pig's Ear, but the ATV trail reopens down there next Sunday, so it might have to wait for another day. I'd love to find out how that place got its name. Was someone really trying to make a silk purse or something?

Byways

A lane rose steeply off to the right.
It flanked the mountainside a little crookedly,
tunneling beneath hemlocks
before disappearing from sight
and rolling on forever
into other byways
across mountains
and through valleys
that I would never see.
It called to me, that road.
In promising tones,
it chanted the old, old song of my soul:
Come away. Turn away.
This is the path of
adventure,
freedom,
solitude,
peace.
After all these years,
the anthem is unchanged:
Discover. Escape.
And when I’m old,
that road will still beckon.
Come away. Turn away.
This is the song of every way
I’ve ever had to shun;
once it rang with promise,
tantalizing and sweet,
but today the sacred song accuses me,
for we’ve both learned
that I do not come away.
I never turn aside.

Pines, part two

As noted below, our hardy ancestors planted evergreens around their rural homes in order to keep the cold winds off the house and to retain warmth. In bigger towns, the houses sat side by side, insulating each other. But in isolated areas, it was necessary to plant pines to act as windbreakers. Today, you can identify many abandoned town sites on the ANF because of the pines planted in neat rows. The three sites that come to mind are Guffey, Corduroy, and Windy City. In two of these ghosts, all that remains is the pines. And in the case of Windy City, the name itself should prepare you for what you'll find remaining there: rows of tall evergreens.

But as I shoveled a narrow path through the snow between my office and my house, for the third time today, it occurred to me that our ancestors had another reason for planting pines. They did it in order to keep the snowdrifts from piling up against their houses. Mounds of snow against the doors would make it impossible to get out, literally snowbound inside your home.

My grandparents used to talk about the fierce winters of the 1930s when they had to climb out of their house from the second story windows, wearing snowshoes. A nice stand of pines would have borne the brunt of such a wintry onslaught, leaving a canyon of protected space between the house and the trees.

Anyhow, here's another shot of Corduroy. Too bad you can't see the creek from the grounds of the old house. You surely could at one time, but now there's too much brush.

Lonesome Pines

The abandoned village of Corduroy is little more than an empty post-residential lot surrounded by large, sweeping pine trees. Like the camp site at Guffey, it's a spacious grassy lawn with a stone fire ring on the spot where a big house used to stand. Or it might have been a church or an inn. Both ghost towns sit in pretty stream valleys. Corduroy is unlike Guffey in that there is no evidence of any old industrial complex here, and the town site is entirely level and low-lying. Corduroy is also smaller and a whole lot further afield.

Of course, our hardy ancestors planted pines around their rural homes in order to insulate them from the bitter cold winds. Today, the pines at Corduroy are so tall that they provide more beauty than warmth. But that's okay because nobody ever camps here except fishers, in the spring and summer when the weather is good.

I mainly like these fine pines because they show me traces of what used to be. I'm fairly certain that this is the spot where the largest house in the hamlet stood, presiding over a broad green lawn on the banks of Hunter Creek. I know nothing about this old settlement. I don't know if it was a lumber town, a tanning town, or just a regular old farming town. But the thing I love about ghost towning is exactly this: to stand in a place where there are traces of long-forgotten lives and to imagine them. Who were they, with their real hopes and fears, their genuine sorrows and joys? What living, what childbirth, what labor, what abuse, what passion, and lovemaking, what dying and grieving took place on this very spot, which is now just a patch of grass in the forest? What heartache and horror took place right here; what lives were lived out in this place, and how different were they--really--from my own? Their stories will never be told. Aside from a few pine trees in a row, their tale is lost forever. As the Hebrew psalm says, "Their place remembers them no more."

They say you can find anything on Google. I sure can't find anything about Corduroy except the vain promise that it is "a populated place" in Elk County, PA.

December Skies

Oh, those moody December skies above the Allegheny: brooding, dramatic, uncertain. As winter advances, the sky becomes less steely and less low. It's no longer the gun metal gray of our usual November; instead, there's a luminous, watery light that makes me think of the old Dutch painter Vermeer de Delft. It's a timid light that refracts beautifully off the dusting of snow on the forest floor. Winter hiking isn't my favorite, but it is its own thing, with its own pleasures and rewards. The views are long. There are no bugs. You don't get overheated. It's also a great time to find artifacts of bygone settlements, since summer foliage tends to hide such things.

There's a rare, fully intact CCC camp, built in 1933, still standing along Forest Road 124 near Duhring. This place was used as a prisoner of war camp during WWII, and staffed by conscientious objectors. The old camp is privately owned and mostly used for horseback riding, but you can see it from the road, that distinctive old CCC architecture applied to a Hogan's Heroes-style campus. (The only other fully intact CCC camp I know is at Clear Creek State Park, where you can rent the tiny, old log cabins.) This shot was taken from one of their horse riding trails, which passes up over a partially cleared mountaintop and back down the other side. The trail becomes FR124B and rejoins FR124, which is how I discovered it: by snooping around FR124B, a track that clearly doesn't get much motor vehicle traffic. The backroads around this area are worth exploring.

Today I hit the abandoned town sites of Pig's Ear and Corduroy, too. (Do you think everybody up and left these places because of their really uncool names, embarrassed to have addresses like '56 Four Corners Road, Apt. B, Pig's Ear, PA'?) Nevertheless, Corduroy is a pretty site along the upper reaches of Hunter Creek (see below). I'll surely make it the topic of a future post.

Pigeon Run Area

In keeping with my original promise to provide a "backwoods discovery guide," I'm posting some photos of the area around Pigeon Run and Spring Creek, although I'm fairly certain that the body of water pictured here is a tributary called Hunter Creek. This area of the ANF crosses over into State Game Lands #28 without warning, and if you really cared about the border, you would have some difficulty keeping track of it.

Given the relatively tiny readership of this obscure blog, I sometimes give myself license to rant or wax philosophical. (Hence the angry posting below.) Alas, that's what happens when you're at home with the kids all day on a Tuesday. In any case, the hike described as "Pigeon Run Falls" by Jeff Mitchell is great if you're in a hurry. If you've got a little extra time, follow his directions to the waterfalls, then cross Pigeon Run at the falls, and follow it back downstream until you reach an old forest road going up the mountainside to your right. This road trails off into some of the most beautiful, loneliest country in the Southern reaches of the ANF. These photos were taken on a cell phone, and they don't do justice. But the valleys are deep and steep. The pathway runs right along the edge with great views to the various streams below.

I don't know why I can't just blog about theology like other ministers. I have close friends who never even read what I write here because the Allegheny National Forest isn't a pressing matter in their lives. They look at this page and say, "It's just trees. Why aren't there any people in your pix?" I think it's because I mostly go to the woods to be alone.

Anyhow, unless I miss my guess (which is really unlikely), the narrow track over the mountain above Pigeon Run Falls--described above--winds all the way north to Four Corners and eventually becomes a road that joins PA66 at the big Chaffee intersection.

Owl's Nest

Owl's Nest is one of those places I've been hearing about for years. It was a hamlet in the Allegheny National Forest that owed its living to the natural gas industry. The residents are all gone, though some gas company still operates some machinery there. Because of my morbid fascination with abandoned town sites, I took an interest in the place.

I've had ideas about visiting Owl's Nest for about three years, strictly on the back burner. Looks like I'll be putting those plans on an indefinite hold. Front page headlines of the aptly named Kane Republican trumpet "Marcellus Shale Gas Drilling Near Owl's Nest." The long awaited and much anticipated Marcellus Shale has finally struck a blow in Northwestern Pennsylvania. Never mind that the company doing the drilling is out of Oklahoma, and the drillers have been imported from Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, and Colorado. Never mind that this Marcellus Shale drilling can only pollute our aquifers and give the local economy nothing in return...unless, perchance, the drillers choose to spend their weekends living it up at the famous Hallton Hilton, which, like Owl's Nest, is another local legend I have yet to experience. And who owns this bed of ancient shale anyway? (Hint: Not you.)

The drilling is taking place two miles west of Owl's Nest, on State Game Lands #28, a beautiful spot that I know well. It's where Pigeon Run meets Spring Creek. In his book Hiking the Allegheny National Forest, Jeff Mitchell calls the path through this area "one of the most scenic trails in the ANF." It follows an abandoned railroad grade that runs alongside Spring Creek and passes through both the state game lands and the ANF. (See hike #34 on page 82.) Here's a cell phone snapshot I took in the fall of 2008. I wonder what the place looks like today. And what will it be in a few years? Do people really think that Marcellus Shale is going to bring prosperity to this region? How much drilling will have to occur, doing irrevocable damage, before local people admit that drilling for Marcellus Shale makes no returns to the local economy and runs the risk of destroying the quality of life that we currently have?

Calm Before the Storm

This week, all the hiking time I got was one measly hour on Sunday afternoon: ten minutes to my destination, forty minutes in the woods, and ten minutes return time. Almost not worth the effort? Even if it was just an hour, I had to take it. If I miss my weekly rendez-vous with the forest, I spend the next seven days operating on a depleted spirit.

Besides, yesterday was the calm before The Storm. Today, of course, is "The Storm." It's The First Day of Buck, when men take the day off work, kids get the day off from school, and the sometimes peaceful Allegheny National Forest becomes the Marne River Valley, circa 1914...except with no trenches for shelter. I don't mean to pick on hunters, but I marvel at their deeply held belief that the only reason to go to the woods is to kill its inhabitants. I recently met some hunters in the Tionesta Natural Area, and one of them told me---as if confessing a dark secret---"This place is real nice. We come here once juss to be here." Funny, that's the only reason I ever go to the woods: Just to be there.

I know a nurse in the ER in Seneca who says that they play "Hunters' Bingo" on The First Day of Buck. The first nurse to report the Big Four ("heart attack in the woods," "gun powder in the right eye," "fall from a tree stand," and "stray bullet") wins. It's cynical and mean-spirited. But it's no wonder some of these guys have heart attacks in the woods. Most of the hunters I know spend the whole year in a recliner, shouting at ball games on the TV and getting brainwashed by Fox News. They drag their flagging manhoods off their seats long enough for three things: 1) to grab a beer, or eight; 2) to go to the pot; 3) for their yearly foray into the forest, armed like Hessian mercenaries, firing at every hapless bird and every twig that rattles in the gust.

Anyhow, due to time restraints, yesterday I did a quick loop on the old forest roads that run through the McKinley Valley. In case you don't know McKinley, it's an abandoned town site that I documented for a popular ghost town website. (I can't seem to establish a link to that web page for you, but if you're really interested, you could find it by googling "mckinley ghost town.") Definitely worth a visit...when there's nobody shooting at you. The photos on the aforementioned site were taken with a cell phone, so they're not great. But here's a shot of the old main street. Notice the "staircase to nowhere" in the foreground. I recently talked to an 88 year old lady who moved out of McKinley in 1953. She said there were still six occupied houses there at that time.

Three Worlds

Long ago, while decorating my dorm room in college, I came under the influence of M.C. Escher's drawing "Three Worlds." The famous picture depicts the three 'worlds' you see while looking at a fish in a pond in the late fall. There's the underwater world of the fish, the surface world of the leaves floating atop the water, and the outer world of the barren trees reflected on the smooth surface of water.

I loved the picture because it reminded me of one of my earliest childhood memories, a place where my grandmother used to take me to watch the fish. There was a terraced garden behind the old Andrews Mansion in New Bethlehem, Clarion County. By the 1970s, the grounds of the estate were more than the family could maintain, so they loaned the back garden to the borough to use as a park. It was one of those formal, decorative lawns with symmetrical shrubbery and stone walkways running at geometric angles. Kind of like a mini-Versailles, but without the bizarre statuary. (Back in the golden age of small town aristocracy, good Presbyterians like the Andrews had reservations about "graven images.") There was a pergola, though we didn't know that word back then; to us, it was just a "summer house." Best of all, there was a little rectangular pond with lily pads and huge goldfish.

The three worlds you see in Escher's picture are the ones you'll find in every situation if you look closely enough. There's the inner world, the underwater world, where you are the lone fish. Others can see some of your world, but they can never really share that inner world with you; it's yours alone. There's the surface world of the floating leaves. This is where most of us are content to skate around for our allotted 75 or 85 years of life. Then, there's the outer world reflected on the surface, which is unattainble to the fish, but which looms like a constant presence. This "outer world" is whatever "reality" we perceive from the limited vantage point of our little ponds: the way we think people are reacting to us, the way we think the universe works, whatever we believe to be true, based on the evidence we observe. The problem with this 'world' is that our perspective of the larger world is always skewed by the water that we live in.

And the real problem with this photo, taken in the wild country of the Tionesta Natural Area, is that it represents only Two Worlds. The surface world of the floating leaves is gone; the leaves have sunk into the interior world, leaving the surface smooth as a window. I like it. I think that's why I go to the woods anyway, so that the surface world can be stripped away.

Brookston Overlook

As Slade from Ohio pointed out in October, the Twin Lakes Trail gets dicier and dicier the closer you get to its western terminus. Where the old path snakes its way across the mountain just east of Brookston, it's mostly overgrown with rose cane and blackberry. Even in November, you have to beat back the jaggers. Long, thick pants are a must. Of course, if you're trying to hike the ANF in your khaki shorts in the month of November, then pardon me for suggesting that you take up mall-walking.

Unlike the more easterly segments of the Twin Lakes Trail, which tend to run through nice streams valleys and pass under dense canopy, these neglected western stretches have some elevation and a few decent vistas.

The Brookston Overlook doesn't offer the most striking scenery in the Allegheny, but it is pretty. It's quiet here, hauntingly quiet. The hamlet of Brookston is completely invisible from the hilltop, and all the open space invites backcountry camping. Since overlooks are relatively rare in the southern half of the forest, I'm surprised this one isn't a little better known. There's easy access from FR443 if the gate's open.

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....

An Official Apology

I'm not usually a rain-hater. In fact, if I don't have anyplace to go, I love the rain...until this year. There was just so dang much of it getting misdelivered here from all those places out west that were experiencing drought.

Ah, but sweet November 2009 stepped up and offered us bright, beautiful, golden days of reprieve. November came like Nature's apology with 50 degree temps and that yellow tinted autumn sun. I know that "uncharacteristic" weather can be a little freaky and off-putting, but not this time. Since June, July and August were so damp and gray, we water-logged denizens of the Big Level will happily take a good, long Indian Summer even in November. No complaints. So, here's my official apology to the Eleventh Month for calling her "November the Gray" in a previous post.

And as long as I'm "clearing the air," and being all Polyanna, and retracting all of my negative statements: here's a shot I took at the Tionesta Scenic Area. There are some big honkin' trees out there, some of them 400 years old. In this photo, you see a standard-sized notebook atop a standard-sized walking stick, leaning up against a very non-standard-sized hemlock. The thing is enormous. How did this 2,000 acre patch of trees escape the axe? Definitely worth seeing! (And if you're looking at my walking stick and wondering why the tip is sharpened into a pike... Well, it's not because I'm paranoid. It has to do with an ill-fated camping trip this past August where we had to prop a tarp over our tent because of all the blasted rain.)

Lessee, what other libelous statements have I made in this blog? Oh, yeah, the Mutant Pear Tree! Hmm. Nope, I'm going to let that statement stand...

Curtain Call

It's not a wild sylvan scene, but it is the glorious autumn's curtain call, as the last straggling performer lingers late on stage. All the other actors have long since cast off their costumes, but the genetically altered pear tree is still decked in full regalia, attracting all the attention it can never receive when the larger, brighter native trees are in color.

You go, Mutant Pear Tree! Poor, emasculated, overly-refined, decorative treeling. You're an evolutionary dead end, and you'll never reproduce of your own power because your empoisoned fruit never gets any bigger than a pencil eraser. Sad, stunted little species whose whole lot in history is to grace boxy postage-stamp lawns like this one behind "The Manse." What overly domesticated, professional man fails to feel your pain? We love our troublesome children and spouses; we identify with our life's work, yes, but which of us on a bright fall day doesn't feel the primal urge to rip off the damned necktie...or collar? Which of us is deaf to the wild call of rocks, and streams, and wind, and dirt? But we have to ignore it, or relegate it to tiny blocks of preplanned "free time." We resign ourselves instead...to tameness, stability, responsibility, respectability. We give our life's energies instead to deadlines, and productivity, and institutional advancement.

Ah, the wildness we long for would kill us anyway. And right quickly! So, you go, Mutant Pear Tree! You'd never survive in the forest, but you sure are nice to look at in mid-November.

"...And Rolls through All Things"

...And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods,

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth; of all the mighty world

Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create,

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being.

~William Wordsworth, 1798

El Dorado of the Allegheny

The Tionesta National Scenic Area is the El Dorado of the Allegheny. You can set off in search of the place like a brave Spanish conquistador, but you'll probably never find it, and you might never be heard from again. Those happy few who do actually do find the place scratch their heads and think to themselves, "Huh, it took longer to plan this trip than the hike itself."

Not to disparage any part of the forest. I love the whole flippin' thing. But when you hear that there are 2,000 acres of 400 year old hemlock and beech forest, and that it's protected as a national natural landmark, well, you just assume that it's one of the highlights of the ANF. Maybe the Tionesta Scenic Area is nice in the summer. But on a gray November Sunday--a day that evokes the old Morrissey song--this place doesn't quite seem worthy of the considerable navigational skills that it takes you to get here.

It's tree carnage, due to the infamous tornado of 1985: twisted limbs, fallen trunks, rotting hulls of ancient trees. Some areas are scrubby from all the dense saplings that have sprung up on the once-dark forest floor. There are some very nice old hemlocks. Some of them are as grandiose as the trees you see in Cook's Forest. Twenty-four years after the tornado, many of these hemlocks still hold splintered and ragged tops high against the sky. It's almost as if Nature herself couldn't bear the thought of two ancient forests in such close proximity to each other, and so she decided to decimate one of them.

Now don't get me wrong. Jeff Mitchell--peace be upon him!--is the forest guru. My copy of his book, Hiking the Allegheny National Forest (autographed by the author himself), is as dog-eared as my copy of To the Lighthouse. Heck, my copy of Jeff's book is as well-worn as the little black book that I use at weddings, and funerals, and baptisms. When Jeff describes a hike, or gives directions, or estimates distances, his accuracy is astounding. What I sometimes find frustrating about Jeff's book is that he always withholds judgment. He never says things like, "Don't bother with this trail if you hate hiking in oil fields," or, "This trail is as dull as Food Network." But I only get Sunday afternoons to spend in the woods, and it sure is frustrating when I dedicate my precious hiking time to a place that isn't really all that great. I kind of wish he had left his readers a clue that the Tionesta National Scenic Area will be a whole lot nicer in 100 years.

"The Road"

On November 25, the film "The Road" is going to be in theaters. (Though the drive-in here in Kane only shows films like "Monsters vs. Aliens," and it closes in October anyway.) "The Road" is based on the post-apocalyptic novel by Cormac McCarthy, and set in a world where all living things are reduced to ash. Nothing grows. The few survivors have to scrounge for canned goods or else cannibalize each other. It's a world where meaning is lost in the featureless, fearful fight for daily survival. Against this bleak backdrop, a father and son make their silent way south along some unnamed and treacherous road in hopes of finding warmer weather. Incidentally, much of this movie was filmed along a derelict 13-mile stretch of the Pennsylvania Turnpike that was bypassed in 1968.

Here's a long quote from the novel "The Road." I'm using this quote in my doctoral dissertation to talk about the erosion of meaning in postmodern language:

"He tried to think of something to say but he could not. He'd had this feeling before, beyond the numbness and the dull despair. The world shrinking down to a raw core of parsible entities. The names of things slowly following those things into oblivion. Colors. The names of birds. Things to eat. Finally the names of things one believed to be true. More fragile than he would have thought. How much was gone already? The sacred idiom shorn of its referents and so of its reality. Drawing down like something trying to preserve heat. In time to wink out forever."

I think that too often we're made to live anonymous lives: on the computer, in our cars, on the phone, staring blankly at the fictitious lives of others on TV. In all these things, we're unknown. And human beings were never meant to be unknown. We're meant instead to live in close proximity with each other and in direct relationship with the earth that gives us life. I think the thing we most need today is a stronger sense of place, and communal identity, and the greater good. What we need is to find our own unique identities within the context of "our place," rather than moving to North Carolina because it stays so warm in the winter.

I even think that "The Road" uses the symbol of "the road" to refer to geographic rootlessness of modern life, and the way our lives lose meaning when we're always on the move, never able to commit them to a single place, always trying to carry our identities with us, as if 'who we are' could be unrelated to 'where we're from'. Anyhow, I'm looking forward to seeing the movie "The Road," even though the book is oppressively dark. Dark books and movies express a real truth, all the while reminding us not to take hope for granted...

Interior Design at Tapper Camp

Here you see the little gas stove inside the shack at Tapper Camp. (Too bad it's not a wood stove.) Here, too, is the only window, with its 90 year old glass pane still intact. If I had discovered this place as a kid, that glass would be history, which tells me that not many kids visit the camp....

Tapper Camp

This is a place I call "Tapper Camp." I'm pretty sure it's on public land, but the ANF border runs a little crooked through this area, so I'm not certain. Also, I like having Tapper Camp to myself. For those two reasons, I'm not going to say where it's located. Surely hunters and bushwackers know about it, and yet, in three years, I've never found trace of another human there.

We used to call the guys who worked the oil fields "tappers." Hence the name Tapper Camp; it's where tappers used to bunk down when they got stuck out on the mountainside at night. As you'll see in the following post, it's a shack just big enough for a bed and a small gas stove. The thing that amazes me about Tapper Camp is that it's completely intact. The glass in the window is unbroken. The pane still opens. Despite a few leaks, the roof still holds. With some work, you might be able to close the door. In a pinch, you could still hold up there for the night, but the gas stove is long since disconnected.

Tapper Camp sits at the edge of a great rock city. I wonder if the boulders have protected this little shack from the elements? There was surely a time when these little cabins were all over the forest, but since the 1920s, most of them have collapsed. I wonder what keeps Tapper Camp standing. Anyhow, interior shots are coming in the next post.

In Praise of Hemlocks

The things that make hemlocks so beautiful are the same things that make them hard to catch on camera: their deep shade, their delicate--even elegant--needles, their evenly spaced branches, their streamside setting. The hemlock is constant, if not flamboyant, the graceful matriarch of the forest.

Many moons ago, I used to listen to the "Largo" from G.F. Handel's opera "Xerxes." I'm not an opera fan. Too much screaming. But this is a well-known song, sad and haunting. The lyrics are in Italian, and I never knew what the tenor was singing about. I always just imagined that he was singing the profoundest words of self-disclosure, words of heartbreak, words of deepest sorrow mingled with wisdom and calm. Just a few weeks ago, the song came back to me in a fit of melancholy. Google had been invented since I last thought about the song, so I did an Internet search to see what the words really are about.

They're about a tree! A friggin' shade tree!

"Never has there been a shade
of a plant
more dear and lovely,
or more gentle. "

At first it was disappointing. I wanted to go back to a state of ignorance. When you don't know what the words mean, they sound like the Mystery of the Ages unveiled. When you find out that the guy's just singing about the shade of a plane tree, it's a let down...

But honestly, when you get under the shade of those streamside hemlocks and hear the brooks prattling against the rocks, and see the afternoon sun in the laced branches, you could see how someone might write a song about it. It's definitely worthy of a haunting melody. In any case, here it is: Ombra Mai Fu, also known as "Xerxes Largo," by G.F. Handel. (In this version, there is no human voice, just a cello. I prefer that for the same reason I prefer to post photos without people: it seems to express the solitude of the forest.) And this photo was taken in the area of the much-neglected Mill Creek Trail, parts of which are hemlock heaven.

A November Scene

The vivid yellows and oranges of October have faded into the browns and grays of November. It's the annual juxtaposition, as the year's brightest month is supplanted by its successor, November the Gray. No month is drabber. And yet, they're all beautiful in their own way, and not a one of them could be spared, not even the cold ones. Consider it. November teaches us how to part with beloved things. December and January force us to share close quarters with the ones we love. February, with its lengthening days, sends new light again into corners and crevices that had long been dark, calling us to see old things in new ways. And then there's March! March is named after Mars, the God of War, because ancient kings used to wage war in the early spring. (If you're into historic arcana, take a look at II Samuel 11:1. See, I really am a parson....) March teaches us perhaps the most valuable lesson of all: that no season lasts forever, not even the most dismal.

In November, blue skies and golden sunlight are rarer and more precious than at any other time. And the bright, hot days of mid-July are sweetest to those who know the short, dark days of late fall. Enjoy November in all its austere beauty. Here's a November scene, a beaver lodge on the Kinzua Creek between the ghost town of Tallyho and the ghost town of Guffey.

A Place in the Forest

Think about the places that make up your life. Count them. It's strange how few "places" you have, when you think about it. You've got your workplace, and your home, your few selected weekly haunts, and the places you visit on occasion. Each of those places has its own spirit about it, its own psychology, its own unique identity. And because of that, your life's places--which you chose--end up shaping you. You may live in a modern apartment and work in a windowless cubicle beneath flourescent lights. If so, then the mood of your life is very different from mine, since I live in a 120-year old Victorian with five bedrooms, and I work in a dark but lovely wanna-be-gothic church. The backdrop of my life is stained glass and ornate woodwork in a declining rustbelt town surrounded by a beautiful forest. But my neighbor just next door could have a very different life despite living only twenty-five feet away.

They say that every New Yorker has his or her own private New York, and it looks different from everyone else's: one's own neighborhood, shopping places, workplace, hangouts, favorite haunts, travel routes, etc. That's how it is that 8 million people share one city, but they all have very different versions of it, from Donald Trump to the impoverished youths playing basketball on 124th Street. The same is true in small towns. And it's true of everyone who shares a public forest, too.

What are your places in the Allegheny? What's your home base? What streams, and roads, and trails do you branch out to? I think of Twin Lakes as my default location in the forest. It's rustic old CCC administration building and lakeside pavillion are my own personal ANF headquarters. Twin Lakes with its outgoing black bears, its grassy hillsides sloping gently to a glassy, motionless lake. It's a pond, really. And good luck finding its "twin." But there's a nice beach there with shockingly cold water. Best of all, Twin Lakes is a trailhead to lots of lesser known wonders in the southeastern part of the forest. It's a gateway to fantastic streamside hikes, shady forest roads, wild places among boulders and beneath hemlock, places where it's twilight at high noon. For me, Twin Lakes is a home base, a starting point. And no matter where you end up, you need a starting point.

I meet lots of folks who love the forest as much as I do, and each of them has a relationship with it as intimate as my own. And yet it looks so radically different for each person. Some start from completely different geographic angles--like Willow Bay or Buckaloons--and some come to the woods for completely different reasons. What we share is the woods that draws us. When most of our neighbors choose Oprah, or video games, or online chatrooms, or team sports, we choose a place in the forest. And like all things, we choose it, then it chooses us. Our choices shape us, and define us, and re-create us. Everyone needs a starting point. And if you want any kind of perspective on life, you could do worse than to choose a place in the forest.

Guffey: The Mystery Unravels

Here you see the high street that passes through the ghost town of Guffey, a place that's about as photogenic as its name is poetic (which is not at all). Guffey is so weed-choked that it's hard to catch the scope of the place, and its vistas, on a little digital camera. But this picture is most interesting for the things that are barely seen. Notice the metal guardrail to the left of the old street. It protects a cliff that drops almost thirty feet to a lower street, which runs along the Kinzua Creek. The only evidence you see here of the low street is the old power line just above the guardrail. (If you look near the upper right hand corner of the photo, you can also make out the electric lines that run alongside the high road.) I tried to follow the low road along the creek, but it was too overgrown, which proves to me that the good folks of Guffey preferred to 'take the high road' whenever possible....

I asked a local history buff about Guffey, and he in turn referred me to the proprietor of the Westline Inn, a historic hotel about five miles downstream from the ghost town. Just a word in passing about the Westline: it is undeniably the Rivendell of the Allegheny. It's in a beautiful, remote valley. The rooms are rustic and charming. The bar is rustic and rowdy. There's nothing rustic about the restaurant, though; it's easily the best in McKean County. My wife and I aren't crazy about the ancient taxidermy that graces the dining rooms. (A dead squirrel only keeps for so many years.) But even that is consistent with the spirit of the place.

Anyhow, here's what the fine chef at the Westline knows about Guffey: "Guffey was a small oil boomtown. It was founded by a Cornel Guffey, who fought in the Civil War. The town was documented by the Forest Service before it was taken down. There was a large water injection plant there that used to discharge into the creek until the 80s. The Forest Service should have old pictures and info."

I wonder if by Cornel Guffey he means "Colonel Guffey," a Civil War officer? I mean, surely a person wouldn't have to go through life with a name as hideous as Cornel Guffey....

The Bridges of Guffey

Some fishers know the ghost town of Guffey (McKean County) as a pleasant crossroads in the forest where there stands not a "village," but a well-maintained monument to the village's war dead. There's a nice campsite on a piney hill just above the monument: a fire ring on a broad grassy lawn, surrounded by enormous evergreens, all in rows. It's a beautiful spot above the Kinzua Creek, which surely once belonged to the town's one and only mansion, or maybe the village church. If you poke around, you'll find an old driveway with a concrete bridge leading up to the secluded site.

Well, that's Guffey's swank neighborhood. To see the grittier parts of town, approach it from the neighboring ghost town of Tallyho---which, unlike Guffey, has left not a trace to posterity. That's to say, go to the valley where you would turn off to go to Westline (Rivendell of the Allegheny!) but instead of following the Kinzua Creek downstream toward Westline, follow it upstream and eastward, toward Guffey. You'll see old fashioned electric lines running alongside the creek. These lead over very wet tracks to a huge old industrial site. There are some nice overlooks, with rusting guardrails, where the main street ran along a cliff above the creek. And there's a long-overgrown side street where company row houses probably stood. The woodland that has overtaken the actual townsite is only about 30 years old, so it's a scrubby place that hides hundreds of industrial artifacts. If you google it or look it up on the ANF map, Guffey still appears as "a populated place" with permanent structures. Good luck finding them.

The back road to Guffy is pictured here; unless you want to ford Pine Run on foot, you have to cross this bridge. It's not for the faint of heart. There's also a strange metal bridge that traverses the Kinzua. The nearby hills, which are known around here as "Tallyho Mountain" and "Music Mountain," hide more antique oil works than any other part of the forest that I know. They look lovely and wild from Highway 219, but under the trees, it's all rusted pipelines, rotting wooden half-barrels, and the scarification of greed. What happened in this place? Does anyone recall?

Kudos to Pennsylvania State Parks

Just an appreciative nod in the direction of our state park system. On October 16, they were awarded the prestigious "National Gold Medal Award" (which is like the state parks version of one of those movie awards that all the directors strive for, and which I ignore so thorougly that I don't even know their names...Oscars? Tonies? Cannes? Sundances?)

The goal of the PA DCNR was to put a state park within 35 miles of every resident. Of course, that includes urban parks, like the uber-cool Point State Park in downtown Pittsburgh. But it also includes such woodland gems as Chapman, Elk, and Parker Dam. Where do you stop in listing all the fantastic state parks? Raccoon Creek, Oil Creek, Ohiopyle.... (Sorry if I don't say Kinzua Bridge, but I wish they would develop some trails there.) Clear Creek State Park is one of my favorites, with its miles of beautifully maintained trails passing through hilly forests, its CCC architecture, and its cold little beach, pictured here. (As always, click on the image for a better view.) Check out this link to read about the award.

Occasionally Pittsburgh will win the name "most livable city" for a given year, and each time it happens, the world stands amazed. "Pittsburgh? Really? Not Phoenix or Seattle?" I have a friend out west who maintains the illusion that Pennsylvania is all strip mines and rusting factories (more about that in a future article). Now, I don't mean to sound "jingoistic" or anything, but this is what I love about the unglamorous places on the backside of the Eastern seaboard, places like rural Pennsylvania and the Southern Tier of New York State: The quality of life is unparalleled; it's inexpensive, and the larger world isn't forever encroaching, crowding in, trying to claim its part. We live quietly and well. These awards and moments of recognition are nice every once in a while, but in the end, the nation at large will go back to overlooking us, and our way of life can continue undisturbed.

"Antlers in All of My Decorating..."

On the one hand, I know a lot of really great guys who are hunters. Many of those guys show up on my door and offer my wife and me choicest cuts of their forest kills, and we gratefully accept. (I think they secretly pity my wife for having a husband who doesn't bring her dead animals.) I don't begrudge them the sense of manly accomplishment that must come with providing meat and proving their status at the top of the foodchain. There's surely something satisfying and primal about stalking, killing, and eating a wild beast without any help from anyone but the good folks at Winchester. I get that. Too many people are too far removed from the earth. They're completely out of touch with their own food sources, and they'd be lost without the industrial food business. (That rant belongs to a different blog, but you gotta read The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan.)

On the other hand, why is it that so many guys believe that they aren't allowed to go into the woods unless they're armed with deadly weapons? And whenever you ask a guy 'why' he hunts, most of them will tell you, "I just love being out there in the woods."

Anyhow, I came across this really cool hamlet of hunting camps on a little patch of private land surrounded by the national forest. Just four simple cottages that sit there all year and wait for the hunters to come back in the late fall. This cabin was called "The No Tell Motel." (What are those hunters doing out there that they can't tell their wives?) I don't know what the name implies, but this place clearly hasn't seen a woman's touch in a few years. The racks above the door made me think of Gaston, the hunter in the Disney version of "Beauty and the Beast." There's a scene where Gaston is singing a tribute to his own superior manhood, and he sings, "I've got antlers in all of my decorating."

Ah, hunters. They make us flee the woods every fall, for fear of their stray bullets, and they're trying to take Sundays away from us, too. But I gotta say, most of them are nice enough guys.

Loleta, You Will Never Know...

Maybe you've heard of "Loleta," a recreation area in the ANF, several miles south of Marienville.

Now, for most folks in their late 30s, the word "Loleta" does two things. 1) It reminds us of an old Elton John song, where he croons, "Nikita, you will never know anything about my home." (Nikita. Loleta. They both sound vaguely Russian.) And 2) It reminds us of a controversial novel by Vladimir Nabokov... also undeniably Russian.

I mention Loleta here only because the Loleta Trail makes a way better hike in the fall than in the summer. It's a 3-mile loop that follows the scenic Sugarcamp Run, passes through hardwood gallery forests with very little understory, goes through big, grassy meadows, does a sidespur to a great rock city that could take several hours to explore, and climaxes at an "overlook" that only has views when most of the leaves are off the trees.

I'm not usually one for the trails. I far prefer to hike grassy old forest roads. But I can guarantee that you will have this trail all to yourself. The views on the second half of the loop are broad, looking out over the valley of Millstone Run. But when the green leaves come back, all the vistas will disappear.

"Yellow Leaves, or None, or Few..."

If I understand leaf coloration at all, I think the recent snowfall killed off our best October colors before they got a chance to appear. Apparently the leaves can take the cold, but they get tinged with brown when snow settles on them. The southern edges of the Allegheny are still decked out in vivid array, but around here, the colors have been muted and toned down.

In any case, I'd like to apologize on behalf of Mother Nature (or Pan or whoever) to all the poor, disappointed leaf peepers I see driving Route 6 with their Ohio plates, looking in vain for the mid-October splendor of The Big Level.

Ah, but it's still fall, and I'm still a melancholy ex-English teacher, so here's another poem just for the occasion. This one's a sonnet by William Shakespeare in honor of all those 400 year old trees in Cook's Forest that began their life in 1609, the same year these verses were published.

"That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see'st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed whereon it must expire,
Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.
This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long."

The song of the ephemeral autumn. Love it well.

The Clarion River Valley

Never under-estimate the importance of a river. Every great civilization had its river, drawing life from its waters, approaching the world on the highway of its currents. Think about it: the Euphrates, the Nile, the Yangtze, the Thames, and the Seine. Even today, the cultures of the world develop along the banks of great rivers, and those rivers still bring life.

The river that forms the north border of the ANF is the well known Allegheny, and the Forest is its namesake. Outside of Pennsylvania, the word "Allegheny" still evokes images of steel mills, smokestacks, and Pittsburgh under the mid-afternoon darkness of polluted skies. The Mississippi is the river of American commerce; the Potomac is the river of power; the Hudson is the river of culture. And the Allegheny--despite its spectacular scenery and ecological comeback--will forever be remembered (alas!) as the dirty river of 19th century robber barons.

And so, what about the Clarion River, the lazy, shallow body of water that saunters along the southern border of the Forest? Well, let me tell you a secret: the Clarion is an outdoorsman's paradise. It passes through some of the wildest, most scenic country in the sate, much of which is public land--whether state or federal. There's fantastic backpacking in the Clarion Valley. The river is shallow enough to make easy canoeing and kayaking. Bridges are rare in far-flung parts of the Valley, but you can even ford the river on foot in places. Cook's Forest is the Clarion's closest brush with fame. The river also passes alongside Clear Creek State Park. But consider the parts of the ANF that run alongside the Clarion.

Next time you visit Loleta Recreation Area (the subject of a future article), do yourself a favor and follow the Loleta beach road (Millstone Road) southwest, away from the beach, as it follows Millstone Run toward the Clarion. This road runs four miles through a beautiful, riverine landscape, lonely places known only to fishermen. After about four miles, the Millstone joins up with the Clarion, and there are great campsites set up all along the river. These are all ANF sites. They're free, undiscovered, absolutely beautiful, and tranquil like some new kind of Eden.

Hell, there's probably a river out there for everyone. But if you're reading this obscure blog, then you probably belong to the civilization that takes form along the banks of the Clarion River. Go check it out.

The Ancient Forest

Cook Forest State Park (known to locals as "Cook's Forest") is surely the most popular woodland destination in the western part of the state. Unless there's some corner of the Poconos that attracts hordes of New Yorkers, my guess is that Cook's Forest is the most popular patch of trees in Pennsylvania. What explains this popularity?

On the one hand, much of Cook's Forest is virgin woodland. That's to say, it has never in all its history fallen under the axe or saw. That's pretty cool. In the area known as "Forest Cathedral," pictured here, many of the trees are 300 to 400 years old. It's mostly white pine, hemlock, and beech, which were once the dominant species in this region. They make for a pretty dark forest, but there's just something almost mystical about standing next to a living thing that was around in 1609 when Henry Hudson first discovered the Delaware Bay, the year that Shakespeare's sonnets were first published, the year that "Three Bilnd Mice" made its debut....

And yet, I don't think the 400-year old trees alone explain the park's popularity. I mean, there are 20 acres of virgin forest at Heart's Content, in the ANF, and the campground there is still threatened with closure for lack of use.

Cook's Forest is as commercialized as any spot of so-called "wilderness" in the Northeast. PA36 is lined with "Indian" trading posts, replete with giant statues of Yogi the Bear and oversize cigar store Indians. The stores and cabins are all done in a mock-rustic style. The private cabin rentals are a booming business because, as our hostess told us on a recent stay, "The forest sells itself." At only 8,500 acres, Cook Forest is a fraction the size of the adjoining Allegheny Nat'l Forest. And yet, because it's a state park, it's much more carefully maintained and more geared to recreation (hiking, backpacking, camping, canoeing and kayaking) and natural preservation than the Allegheny...which some call a "black cherry plantation."

Strangely, you can hike for hours in Cook's Forest without encountering another person on the trails. It's as if all the many visitors want to be *near* the Big Woods but not *in* it. The park is so small that there are few places on the trails that are out of earshot of vehicles passing on tarmac. (To me, that's the definition of solitude: an absence of noise from trucks and cars.)

Does a forest sell itself to visitors? Really? If so, then why is nearby Clear Creek State Park so little known to the outside world, despite being pristine, quiet, located on the same Clarion River, just as beautiful and far less touristy? What "sells" a forest?

Rimrock in Fall

When was the last time I went to Rimrock? For me to go to Rimrock would be like a New Yorker going to the Statue of Liberty; it's something you only do to entertain out-of-town visitors (which is why I was there today). The Rimrock Overlook might just be the only place in the National Forest where you can always find a fairly cosmopolitan mix of people. Even on a Monday morning, like today, there were people there from Switzerland and Brooklyn.

The Road Less Traveled

So, there are 305 million people in the USA. 12 million of those folks live in PA. I think that means that 24 out of 25 Americans live outside the Keystone State. I wonder what they all do out there without an Allegheny to discover and rediscover in every changing season? Surely folks in Iowa and Nevada do more than surf the Internet and play car-crash games on their wiis? I mean, I know there are other wild places out there, and I know that some of those places are filled with beauty and adventure, but I feel sorry for folks who don't have the Allegheny in October.

In any case, in celebration of October's arrival in the byways of the Allegheny National Forest, painting the woodlands in hews of yellow, orange, and red, here's a poem that might seem overused...until you listen to its words. And let's raise our canteens to "the road less traveled by," as Robert Frost calls it, for it does indeed make all the difference in this life.

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
and sorry that I could not travel both
and be one traveler, long I stood
and looked down one as far as I could
to where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
and perhaps having the better claim,
because it was grassy and wanted wear;
though as for that the passing there
had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
in leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
and that has made all the difference.

~Robert Frost, 1920