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.

The Big East

It's not that I'm getting tired of the Allegheny National Forest. The ANF is a place of wonders that would take decades to discover. It's just that I've been dreaming about those big, townless spaces to the east: vast stretches of state forestland with names like Susquehannock, and Moshannon, and Sproul. A decade ago, when I was just home from five years in Africa, I got a job in the suburbs of New York. I decided to cross Pennsylvania on old US Route 6 instead of Interstate 80. (All unknowing, I drove past the very house where my children would later learn to walk, and speak, and have their first memories of the world. I drove past the mock gothic church where I would later be ordained.) I took Route 6 because I hadn't seen autumn in my homeland for five long years. Africa was a wonderful place for an adventurous young man. I left a part of my soul there, and I still miss it every day that I borrow breath. I'll never wash its red soil off my heart. But Africa wasn't my home, and it was half a decade of endless summer.

I guess, by traveling Route 6, I was also attempting to succeed where Jack Kerouac had famously failed. When he decided to strike off and see the country, he hitch-hiked from New York up to Route 6 and waited in vain to catch a ride west at the Bear Mountain Bridge. Unlike the dharma bum, I was headed east. And I couldn't believe the glorious wildlands of northcentral Pennsylvania. And here lately, I've been looking at maps and dreaming.

There is a series of outstanding state parks, most of them surrounded by state forestland, beginning in Potter County and extending east about 100 miles. This region has the darkest night skies on the east coast. (I didn't even know the wonder of truly dark skies until one clear, moonless night in Mills Canyon, New Mexico, last September. It blows my mind to see all those stars and to think of the millions of galaxies out there and the mathematical chances that there's so much life beyond our knowing, or seeing, or imagining.) One National Geographic article calls this stretch "The Wild, Wild East." And so, I've been dreaming about Cherry Springs State Park, and Sinnemahoning, and Kettle Creek. They look like a whole new dimension of beauty and isolation.

And the closest of these mythological places is a state park called Sizerville, one hour east of Kane. So I bit the bullet and spent precious hiking time in the car. And it was worth it. The Elk State Forest and the Susquehannock State Forest run together out here. There are amazing trails and forest roads, abandoned farmhouses, and land for sale! Wonderful, far-flung woodland property for sale! Hunting camps and cottages for sale, too. Some of them with porches that I would settle for.

I hiked a trail in Sizerville State Park called Nady Hollow. It was very, very steep with fantastic, unphotographable views. At some places, as in the top photo, it looks as if you could step off a bluff to the end of the world. Unfortunately, the trail crests at a clear cut in the Elk State Forest, but that's just old Mother Pennsylvania reminding you not to be beauty-greedy. The bottom photo is Colonel Noah Parker's tomb in Gardeau, the southeasternmost settlement in McKean County. Parker figures in the outlandish local legend about Blackbeard's treasure. Believe what you want about that. (I think it's perposterous.) But his grave is desolate.

If I didn't have a wife, and family, and career to anchor me, I think I would wander off into that big eastern woods and disappear like that kid in "My Side of the Mountain."

More Ketner Photos

"Give me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness!"


"When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest, most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum."


"There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature. The wildwood covers the virgin mould, and the same soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck."

"A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. "

"A township where one primitive forest waves above while another primitive forest rots below--such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey."

~Henry David Thoreau

Ketner Dam

I'm aware that most people do not set off with a walking stick and a bottle of Poland Springs as soon as they read about the hikes that I describe on this blog. (But, hell, I'm a minister; I long ago made my peace with people not putting my words into practice.) My main intention when I created a hiking blog was to give myself a sort of photo-journal of the places I discovered while exploring the Allegheny National Forest and its environs. That said, this time I'm for real: you really need to go to Ketner Dam.

Some friends from Johnsonburg recently discovered this place and told me about it. They even found a website documenting its history. But strangely, very few locals seem to know anything about Ketner Dam, Ketner Lake, or the former village of Ketner.

I say "former village," although the place is not exactly a ghost town. There are some very nice year-round residences out here, as well as some camps that--once again--I would give a body part to own. (Lightly-used, 40-year-old ear lobes, anyone? Never pierced, need occasional shaving.) But it is a ghostly kind of place at the end of a dirt road. And yet, Ketner once had a railroad station, a post office, and a great big old reservoir with a dam and control tower. It's reminiscent of Austin Dam in Potter County. It differs from Austin Dam in that it's mostly undiscovered; since large scale disaster was averted when Ketner Dam broke, the place has returned to nettles and jaggers. Oh, but this is one of the most spectacular scenes of ruination I've come across, and no melancholy loner within two hours of Wilcox, PA, ought to miss it!

Instead of talking about the place's past, I'll let interested parties do their own research. Instead, let's talk about these photos and how to get to Ketner. The top photo is the breached dam with control tower, taken from the outside of the old reservoir. The second photo is the tower from atop the dam, and the former lake bed beyond. The third photo is an old unloading tipple that stands along the railroad tracks at the end of Ketner Road. The bottom photo is the last building that remains of the original village. The old "railroad town" architecture is recognizable to anyone who's spent any time around here. This place is now a hunting camp that goes by the name of "Hidden Valley Ranch." (Why do unimaginative people have all the best cabins?)

Driving from Bendigo State Park toward East Branch Dam, you'll take a bridge to exit the village of Glen Hazel on the north end of town. Immediately after the bridge, there's a gravel road to the left. It cuts sharply and follows the East Branch of the Clarion River along the opposite bank. This is Ketner Road; set your odometer as soon as you turn onto it. At exactly 0.8 miles, find a place to park and look for a hard-to-find trail off to the right. This is one of three ways to get to the old dam, but it will give you the most scenic approach, as it follows the steep ravine carved by Johnson Run. After less than a mile, you begin to ascend the earthworks of the outer dam. Off to your right you'll find a big sluice where people sometimes camp. And soon enough you'll come to the dam itself. Take your time through here. The brambles will be harsh in full summer, and this place has got to be teeming with snakes. You can walk out onto the dam walls, try to climb the tower, and explore the floor of the old lake. When you decide you're ready to hike back to your car, go looking for the other sluice gate on the opposite side of the dam. There's a very old road that leads up the wall of the valley onto the railroad tracks. You can follow the tracks leftward as far as the unloading tipple (pictured above) then get down onto Ketner Road and walk back to your car. Walking this entire loop will take an hour or less, but you'll want to give yourself lots of time to explore, too.

Kiasutha Trails

My goal was the Campbell Mill Loop at Dewdrop, which is supposed to have some really great rock formations to explore.

Unfortunately, the Longhouse Scenic Byway is still almost impassable to the average car, and I didn't want to push Murtha too hard on the curvy, downhill road between Kiasutha Beach and old Camp Cornplanter. (I've named the ancient Toyota "Murtha" in honor of one of the greats: like her namesake, she's steady and sensible, if unglamorous.) The road was still too slick, despite all the recent sun and warmth.

So, with a glowering gray sky overhead, I made my peace with hiking the trails around Kiasutha. The "Longhouse Interpretive Trail" at the Kiasutha Recreation Area (which is closed for the
season) is one of the worst. It's hard to find, overgrown, and poorly blazed. It's also a "one way" trail because its ghetto-blazes, which are spraypainted onto trees, are only visible if you're going one direction. Otherwise, you're on your own.

So I'm not a huge fan of the trail at Kiasutha. But there's some worthwhile countryside in this area. If you can manage to locate the dull blue blazes near the Kiasutha boat ramp, you can follow them up across the paved road (The Longhouse Byway), and up the hillside that flanks the road. At a certain point, the trail turns left and follows a very old forest road. The trail follows the forest road for only a short distance, but instead of following the trail as it exits this old road, cut cross country and bushwack straight up the hill to your right. In time, you'll come into another abandoned forest road, also bushy, but much larger and more recent. Follow this road to the right as it wraps around the mountainside, passes through some hemlocks, and takes you to a fantastic pair of broad, grassy clearings at the summit of the hill. This would be a perfect
place to set up a tent.

Is that a hawk's nest or a squirrel's drey? Look closely at the light gray area in the dead center of the top photo. That's Kinzua Lake, way down in the valley below. This is a great place to summit because, unlike many peaks in the ANF, you can actually see how high you are here. The clearings provide a vista, and the lake gives it the valley floor clear visibility.

Elk State Park

If you look
very closely
at the floor
of this drained
lake, you'll
see the
remains of
the town of
Instanter, PA.
(As always,
click on
the image
to enlarge.)

Either the snow is hiding most of it, or else I'm like one of those poor saps in college who could never make out the images in the then-popular 3-D posters, which initially just look like a bunch of colorful dots. (What ever happened to 3-D posters?)

I do see something
that looks
like old bridge
supports.
And a few l
ines of
cement or stone
formations
could be
foundations.

This was a living place
until 1948, when the
government began to
buy up all the propetries
in order to make
East Branch Lake.

But I don't really see much. At least when a town is drowned by the Army Corps of Engineers, its memory is kept alive. Most of the ghost towns in this area aren't as well documented as Instanter, which has a boat ramp and a road named after it. Click on the above link, and you'll even find "interactive photos" of the old town during its living years.

This is Elk State Park, the location of Instanter. It's really just a boat launch with some picnic tables and restrooms. A nice place. There's lots of woods within the bounds of the 3,200 acre park, and even more in the adjacent Elk State Forest, but there are no hiking trails in either. A bushwackers paradise, but not till spring thaw. My little girls and I sat on a picnic table and read Dr. Seuss books in 52 degree temps, but I'll be back when the snow's gone and the lakewater's back.

Three Bears' Cabin

As Goldilockses go, I make a pretty poor one. For one thing, it's been years since I've sported "locks" of any color, and for another thing, I have enough trouble falling asleep in my own bed, much less someone else's. But I do share Goldilocks' curiosity, and I would love to publish photos of the private property where I tresspassed today! But alas, photos could get me in trouble.

This is one thing I love about the Allegheny National Forest: it's splintered by small, odd-shaped slivers of private land. This means that you can be bushwacking far from the beaten track when, suddenly, through the trees, you see what looks to be a cottage or even a full-scale house. Some of these places are pretty nice, like the one I discovered today. It was an old, beautifully maintained brick house in the middle of the woods, with a deep wrap-around porch. This place was entirely snowbound. The long private road that connects it to the world is impassable under the snow, and so the only way to get out there is on foot or snowmobile. Its winter isolation is spectacular, but it's obvious that no one ever goes there in the winter.

There were no "no tresspassing" or "private property" signs, so I didn't even know I had strayed off public lands until I was in the front yard. Also, there were no curtains in the windows, so I didn't know I was peeking inside until I saw the quaint, grandmotherly little rooms full of antique furniture, old wrought metal beds, carved wooden dressing tables, and ancient woodland prints on the walls. (Okay, so I had some idea I was peeking in the windows, but it was pretty clear there was nobody home.) This place had the distinct feel of someone's granparents' house. It had a big fireplace in the living room, a wood stove in the kitchen, antlers on the walls, old fashioned trinkets. It even had a full basement!

But my favorite part of any house is its porch, and this place had one of the best, a porch worthy of The Chautauqua Institution: broad, deep, impeccably well-kept, with a view out over a steep forest valley and a little frozen pond in the front yard. All the Adirondack chairs were stacked upside down along a wall, so, like Goldilocks, I chose my favorite chair and sat on that enchanted porch for half an hour and listened to the melting snow as it dripped off the roof. My dreams in life are few and simple. I've already attained most of them. But this one still goes unmet; I want a cabin in the woods. I want one so bad I would give a lesser-used body part for it. (Use your imagination.) But life hasn't positioned us in a place where we can justify the luxury expense, and good property in the forest is never for sale.

The Allegheny's charms lie--in part--in the traces of humanity that you can discover in the forest. This is its paradox. We who love the forest are forever trying to resist all the human incursions into it, especially the expansion of drilling. And yet, it's precisely the "incursions" that make the place so fascinating to explore. Sure, it would be nice if we had a pure wilderness here. But the ghostlike traces of human presence and activity make this forest unique and enticing, the ghost towns, the abandoned industrial sites, the cottages tucked away in little pockets of private land, the grassy old roads leading nowhere, even the old oil works. They add their own dimension of human interest to the forest, giving the curious hiker opportunities to dabble in archeology and occasional Goldilocks ventures.

Deer Lick Run

Ever wonder how a place gets a name like Deer Lick Run? Is running what you do after licking a deer? Jeff Mitchell (peace be upon him), the guru of the Allegheny, is rarely wrong. But his entry on hiking the valley of Deer Lick Run is pretty much doe-doo-doo. Either he says "right" when he means "left" or else the lay of the land has changed drastically since he researched the chapter. (As if a single right turn would kill me after 40 years of leftward migration, but I tried that mistaken rightward course last time I was here.) Anyway, I find his directions a little misleading, but the good thing about following streams is that you can't get lost doing it.

Deer Lick Run is hard to find because it's tucked away behind a private campground near Sheffield, but it's one of those absolutely beautiful streams that meanders lazily through a broad valley, beneath hemlocks. There used to be a reservoir in this valley somewhere, and it still appears as a body of water on your ANF map, but I find no traces of it.

Of course, I've only ever visited this part of the forest in March...two years running. Last year, Jeff's directions got me so far off track that I considered the hike a kind of defeat. This year I decided to give it a second go, and though Jeff's directions were still a mystery, I managed to find great hiking down along the stream bed on forest roads.

This is the beauty of earliest spring. It was 4o degrees in the sun, warm and windless, bright and clear. And under those hemlocks, it still felt like winter. There are birds back in the forest, singing to each other about their recent vacations in Brazil. "Gladys, you're back! Where's Frank? Oh, we had the lovliest little spot in a mango tree, right on the banks of the Amazon this year! Say, did you see the Caldwell's birdfeeder isn't open yet?" You just have to wonder what those little birds have seen in their lives, the spectacular views that have been wasted on them. And why do they come back here while it's still so cold? The animals are all so hungry at this time of year, and the bears will be lumbering out of their dens. I came across several spots where deer had dug up the snow in search of food.

I'd like to come back to Deer Lick Run when the snow's gone to see if there are any lingering traces of the old dam that held the reservoir. From Route 6 approaching Sheffield from the east, take Toll Gate Road north into the forest. Ignoring Jeff's one and only printed mistake, just follow the stream.

March at Last

Life in the rural Northeast is more pleasant, fuller, more meaningful, for people who refuse to hibernate. As I've said before, and as many a wise person has said before me, if you're going to enjoy life here, you can't let the weather stop you from doing anything. Camping, kayaking, hiking. Do it regardless of the weather...(unless there's freezing rain; that stuff'll kill you). That's why--for the first time ever--I hiked all winter this year. In previous years, I stayed in during the winter and only began to hit the trails again in late March.

But there are two problems with that timorous "hibernating" approach to outdoor life: 1) March is really the worst month for hiking because the trails and forest roads are packed down with slippery, melting snow, and 2) by the time you actually get back out into the woods, in March, you've been cooped up so long that you need the perfect wilderness experience so desperately that a short scrambling slide on an ice-packed path is going to disappoint you sorely.

Last week on A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keillor said that "March is to show people who don't drink what a hangover is like." I know that there are still temps in the teens ahead of us, and probably more snow. But if you dig beneath the snow in about a week, you'll probably find the coltsfoot already in bloom. There's pollen in the air. And there are bugs, and moths, and insects out skipping across the snow.

New Jersey: 10 Reasons to Love It

Okay, I realize that I'm getting carried away, but when was the last time you spent a Tuesday at home with a 4-yr. old and a 5-yr. old? Besides, one of my most uber-cool young readers out in Seattle has recently given me permission to write about anything I want, and I want to write about the Top Ten Reasons to Love NEW JERSEY:

10) It has the courage (or effrontery) to call itself "the Garden State."

9) It has the Pine Barrens; an episode of The Sopranos is set in the Pine Barrens, and it ends with a really beautiful, haunting aria sung by...a soprano.

8) It can serve as a sort of Mecca for people struggling with identity crises.

7) People come from all over the world to pump gas there. (In fact, you're not even allowed to pump your own gas in the Garden State.)

6) There are some really interesting boulder fields near the Delaware Water Gap.

5) The Jersey Shore has its charms, especially Cape May. It's way better than the sterility of the Outer Banks.

4) The way New York Governor David Paterson intones the name "New Jersey" on Saturday Night Live.

3) The Palisades make it look defensible from a distance.

2) There really is some rugged and scenic countryside in the northwest corner of the state.

1) It just makes its neighbors look so good.

Okay, I wanted to write another Top Ten List for Ohio, but this blog has too many faithful readers in the Buckeye State, and I should go read a Dr. Seuss book to my kids.

New York: 10 Reasons to Love It

As long as we're on the topic of loving our neighbors, and as long as I have a day off at home with the kids, here are the top ten reasons to love our mighty neighbor to the north, NEW YORK STATE:

10) Meet the Parents is set on Long Island.

9) New York City: sometimes you just have to take comfort in its hugeness, its proximity, and its immense variety of seething humanity, with attendant cultures, religions, cuisines, and direct overseas flights.

8) That long, long border with Canada...largely unprotected.

7) It was the first state to outlaw talking on a cell phone while driving.

6) Those fake ruined castles along the Hudson River, which are just about the pinnacle of anglophile pretension.

5) Saturday Night Live's dramatic portrayal of Gov. David Paterson's scathing, hate-filled rants about New Jersey.

4) Saturday Night Live's dramatic portrayal of Gov. David Paterson.

3) There's widespread, popular resistance to drilling for Marcellus shale even among rural people in New York State, which demonstrates a concern for the long-term effects of turning a quick buck, as well as some forward-thinkingness.

2) The Adirondacks and the Catskills.

1) The vast, beautiful Allegany State Park, which is an almost pristine slice of western Appalachian heaven, or basically what our Allegheny National Forest would be if its recreational potential were maximized, its environmental well-being considered, and if it were protected from rampant logging and drilling. (If you don't believe me, hike the North Country Trail from the ANF into New York State sometime and see the difference!)

Vermont: 10 Reasons to Love It

The Top Ten List of Things to Love about VERMONT:

10) Fox News has never called it "a battleground state."

9) It's the only New England state where it's impossible to get attacked by a shark.

8) It shares a largely unguarded border with Canada...Quebec, no less.

7) Only Wyoming has fewer people.

6) There's no risk of its ever becoming the next trendy location in the nation. (It gets snow.)

5) They make cheese there, I'm pretty certain.

4) Frederick Buechner lives there. (If any mainline clergyperson in America tells you he/she doesn't want to be Frederick Buechner, it's a lie.)

3) It's not sitting on top of any oil, or natural gas, or coal.

2) Aside from the aforementioned Buechner--who's only famous among dorks--no other famous person is from there, nor has ever set foot there, nor could even spell the name of its capital.

1) They really take pride in their Green Mountain National Forest. Just compare its website to that of the Allegheny! Can you say "citizen involvement"?