"Two Kinds of Life..."

          "Their life is mysterious.  It is like a forest; from far off it seems a unity, it can be comprehended, described, but closer it begins to separate, to break into light and shadow, the density blinds one.  Within there is no form, only prodigious detail that reaches everywhere: exotic sounds, spills of sunlight, foliage, fallen trees, small beasts that flee at the sound of a twig-snap, insects, silence, flowers.  And all of this, dependent, closely woven, all of it is deceiving.  There are really two kinds of life.  There is...the one people believe you are living, and there is the other.  It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see."  
          ~James Salter, Light Years            

South Branch Kinzua Creek, Allegheny National Forest

           THE PARSON'S RETURN: DAY THREE.  Kinzua Creek lends its name to several things in this region: a reservoir, a famous bridge, a few streets.  The "A" at the end of the word isn't pronounced; locals call it KIN-zoo.  If you call it kin-ZOO-ah, you'll get yourself branded as a come-from-away.  But hell, they'll know just by your car, and your hat, and your backpack that you're not from these parts.  General Thomas Kane recruited a lot of Swedes to settle this part of the state because he thought they would tolerate the climate better than other Europeans.  They're goodhearted people up in this area, but they're not very effervescent or forthcoming with strangers.  Truly, with the gray skies and silent people, you could sometimes think you were on the set of a Bergman movie...

           Kinzua is a storied stream.  It flows past the rustic old Inn (with a top notch restaurant) at Westline and through some of the loveliest parts of the forest.  The word Kinzua evokes a sense of wilderness, beauty, and adventure in the minds of many folks in Western Pennsylvania and upstate New York.  It's our minor equivalent to the words Yellowstone or Yosemite.  In fact, until a rare tornado took out the famous Kinzua Railroad Bridge, there was a train from Kane out to the Kinzua gorge, with all the attendant B&Bs and tourism.  Most of the tourism is gone now, though motorcyclists still like to roll down US 6.  When I was living in West Africa--five years of endless summer--some family members took an October trip on the Kinzua train and sent photos to me.  Those pictures set my heart to yearning for home.

           My third and final day in the forest required me to trek in an area relatively close to the cabin we were renting, because my wife needed the car.  Since we were staying in the little hamlet aptly known as "Blissville," it only made sense to explore the South Branch of the fabled Kinzua Creek.  In all honesty, I would have bushwhacked along the main branch of the creek if I had been able to cross over to it, but neither the big bridge on PA 321 nor the little bridge in this photo appealed to me.  This region has a special place in my heart.  I learned to kayak on the waters pictured here.

           I know the rough forest road that goes from this area to the scenic village of Westline by following the north bank of Kinzua Creek, main branch.  But I'd always heard that there was a lesser-known passage along the south shore, too.  I set out in quest of it and, frankly, never found it.  Instead I found a spectacular old logging road that hugs a mountainside and gradually ascends a steep bank above the creek.

           I'd estimate that the road dates back to pre-National Forest days--one hundred years or more.  It's long since disused, narrow, and in places a little scary to tread in the snow.  The drop to the left was long and far into the icy waters of the Kinzua.

           The old forest road doesn't appear on any map, and I soon figured out that it wouldn't take me to Westline, which was fine; I didn't have time to go that far anyway.  See the stream as it snakes through this photo.  The road winds above this ever deepening valley on its way up the hill, and the views get better and better as you go.

           In time, the old road breaks away from the stream valley and trails off rightward into a hollow that divides the mountain's ridge into two separate summits.  This hollow leads toward a high pass between the two peaks, but this segment of the road is very old and so choked with jaggers that it would be impassable in high summer.  The hollow is pictured below.  Alas, I didn't have enough time to pick my way through the brambles all the way up to the mountain pass.  But I did rest on a boulder and play my panpipes: sad, medieval melodies, echoing out over rock and glen, for all the sylvan world to hear.

          If anyone is adventurous enough to make this unknown trek, it wouldn't be too hard to find.  Take PA 321 north out of Kane.  As you come up on the unincorporated village that locals call Blissville (about seven miles from Kane?), slow down and look for Forest Road  # 279 on the right.  If you pass Bob's Trading Post, on the left, then you've gone a little too far.  There are a few signs at FR 279.  One says, "Snowmobile Trail # 1."  Another says, "Road closed 500 feet."  Follow the road anyway to a parking area on the left.  Walk past the gate and toward a snowmobile bridge that crosses the creek, straight ahead.  Now comes the tricky part: measure exactly 95 medium-sized paces from the end of the bridge, then turn left into the brush.  Keep walking despite the absence of a trail; you'll ford a small brook and continue past an enormous fallen tree on your left.  The old logging road will appear in front of you as it begins its long ascent up the mountainside.  By far the best trek of this winter pilgrimage....

North Country Trail, from Nelse Run to Hopewell Camp

           THE PARSON'S RETURN: DAY 2.  If you follow PA 321 north exactly 7.2 miles from US 219, there's a little pullover for the North Country Trail.  Don't be fooled by all the other NCT signs that you see prior to this one; they'll lead you to segments of the trail that run alongside the road on the banks of the Kinzua Reservoir.  Roadside hiking is the worst.

           Follow the little connector path from the parking lot into the woods and turn right onto the NCT.  This segment of the trail runs along the banks of the scenic Nelse Run and ascends the mountainside just above a beautiful, broad valley of hemlocks.  I love hemlocks, and with the morning sunlight filtering through the delicate, lacy branches, it felt to me as if all the world was on the brink of being made new.  

          This is truly remote country.  Mine were the only tracks in the snow that day, and as the altitude gets higher, and as the valley gets narrower, the trail becomes less and less visible through the snow.  In fact, at the point where it crosses over the summit of the hill, the path is very hard to find.  Blazes are infrequent, too, which makes for slow going.  At some points it was downright frustrating to stand in the forest, staring into the trees, scanning every gray trunk for a blue rectangle to indicate the direction of the path.

           After summiting, the trail descends toward the lake, which glows icily through the trees far below.  My goal was the Hopewell Campground, which is one of those lakeside camps in the Allegheny National Forest that are only accessible to backpackers and folks who arrive in boats.  The patchy blazes and slick trail conditions meant that it took me a long time to reach my destination.

           Call me melancholic.  Call me morose.  I love being the only person in an abandoned place.  I love trekking to these summertime spots in the dead of winter.  The water level had been dropped for the season.  Not a bug, not a bird troubled the deep silence of the forest.  Once I arrived at the pleasant hillside campground, I looked around for a while, found a nice table near the frozen lake, and had a solitary winter picnic.  The wooded hills in the distance are lovely and serene.  They're quiet and dark, the keepers of ancient secrets.  The Seneca Chief Cornplanter made his home in the now-flooded valley between my picnic table and the distant hills pictured here.

          A snow squall moved in as I was relaxing at the beach.  Within ten minutes, the hills on the opposite shore were almost invisible through white flurries.  This troubled me because my only way to get back to the car was to retrace my footsteps through the snow.  The trail blazes were hard enough to find when the weather was clear; they would be impossible to see through falling snow.  And if it fell fast enough, it might obscure my footprints and leave me stuck in the wilderness, four miles from the car.

          As it happened, the snowfall wasn't heavy.  I picked my weary way back up over the mountain, down the other side, through the hemlock valley, and to the parking lot on PA 321.  This was the main trek of the two-night trip back to the Allegheny National Forest.  It took place on my 43rd birthday.  When I got back to the cabin, my wife and little girls had a cake waiting.  I gotta say, I'm beginning to feel my age.  But it's not every 43-year-old who hikes 8 miles in 15 degree temps.  Who is the Arctic Fox?  Who is the Snowbelt Parson?

Mill Creek Trail, Allegheny National Forest

           THE PARSON'S RETURN: DAY ONE.  My abortive, long-ago attempt to hike the northern half of the Mill Creek Trail--in the Allegheny National Forest--is described in some long-ago post.  It was an acceptable hiking destination.  All things considered, the southern half of the Mill Creek Trail doesn't make for a spectacular hike either.  It's a scrubby, neglected trail passing through mostly level terrain.  In fact, Jeff Mitchell warns that the trail eventually just disappears altogether.  And it does.  The northern and southern halves never quite meet in the middle.  There are plenty of ugly blowdowns in the area, to boot.  But I didn't care.  I was back in the Allegheny National Forest for my Second Annual Winter Pilgrimage, and my heart was content.  The forest was still there, exactly where I left it, waiting to welcome me back.  Despite the fact that I'd lived in this area for three and a half years, I had never bothered to trek more than a few hundred yards down the southern end of the Mill Creek.

          My last-ever hike as a resident of the ANF region was at Brush Hollow, which shares a parking lot and trailhead with the south terminus of the Mill Creek Trail.  If I returned to the unglamorous southeastern segment of the forest on my first day back in the Big Woods, it was only because time was limited, and I needed a quick hike close to the borough of Kane.  (As a general rule, the ANF gets better the further north you go.)  It was all of 7 degrees that day, but I gave not one damn.  I had three hikes planned for my two-night sojourn in the forest, and it was okay if the first one was the least dramatic.  I dropped the family with their friends and headed out into the hills.  Under a fine mist of snow, I hiked the old Mill Creek Trail north until it petered out, then backtracked to hike this natural gas pipeline swath eastward into that Big Woods.  So vast.  So varied.  So wild.  It was so good to be back.

The Parson's Return

Tomorrow, I return to the Allegheny National Forest for three days.  It's becoming my midwinter tradition to rent a cabin in the ANF and spend a few days reacquainting myself with my old friend...just once a year.  I've begun to call it my Winter Pilgrimage.  It will be so good to return.  

ANF Hiking Culture, Revisited (February 2012)

 There's a whole hiking culture that I sometimes forget, living so far from true hiking destinations.  

 Like the trail etiquette of leaving your walking stick at the trailhead for the next visitor to use.  

 The thrill of surveying the map before you strike off into new territory, and signing the visitor's notebook, mostly just to prove to the authorities that, yes, this trail is used, and so it deserves funding and upkeep.  

The preparatory rush of planning your route and then seeing how the various junctures actually appear "on the ground."  Hiking in the state game lands of Southwest Pennsylvania is good enough, but there's a whole hiking underworld in the best parts of the nation's public lands.  It's a civilization with its own rules, and tools, and assumptions.  It's something that I always love to rediscover.  

Twin Lakes, Revisited (February 2012)

           My first day back in the Allegheny National Forest was spent discovering new territory.  My second (and shorter) day was spent revisiting old haunts--much beloved spots from days gone-by.  Just to reassure myself that they were still there.  Just to dance a while with ghosts.

           Twin Lakes is one of those holy places for me, and so I made my wintry pilgrimage on Sunday.  An old hike that I often did in past years was to park the car along Forest Road 138 where it intersects the Twin Lakes Trail, then follow the trail all the way east to Twin Lake for a swim.  It takes about 45 minutes or an hour going one direction on a snowy day when the ground is so slick.

          It's as ironically named as any spot in the ANF; there's a single large pond at "Twin Lakes."  Some call the pond "Twin Lake," dropping the 's'.  Here the beach can be seen across the frozen water, with its old CCC-rustic-style bathhouse and pavilion.

           Most people probably don't think there's anything all that special about the place, but this little corner of the ANF represents something immensely freeing to me.  In the early days, when the forest had just begun to work its transformative magic in my soul, Twin Lakes kept appearing through the trees.  So many of my early hikes landed me there, as if accidentally.  In many ways, it became my central hub in the forest.  We camped here, and picked apples, and berries.  I brought my kids to swim in its frigid water.

          I saw my first wild black bears here at Twin Lakes, a little too close for comfort.  I came here in all the seasons, and especially loved coming in October--when the camp hosts and all the campers were gone--to set up my laptop in the pavilion and write stuff for work.  I loved nothing more than having this place to myself.  When I left the forest to move to the suburbs (in a successful bid to placate an unhappy wife), friends gave me a local artist's depiction of the above scene.  It's hanging over the mantel in the sitting room of my house in suburban Pittsburgh: a simple pavilion in the trees, a symbol of wholeness and well-being.

          Twin Lakes was lovely and haunting in the recent solitude of wintertime, even though there were two families there playing on the ice and strolling along the frozen beach.  About five years ago, the forest began a healing process in my life, and much of the beauty and power of that period I associate with Twin Lakes.  The surrounding southeastern quarter of the ANF can be a disturbingly eerie place.  The industrial incursions are many; two separate suicides took place in the scrubby "experimental forest" very nearby; the police have been looking for a certain Johnsonburg woman's body in this part of the woods for a long time--a drug related crime.  There's a flat, brushy quality to this section of the forest that makes it seem like a great place for lurking villains.  And I'm not scared of bears, but they're abundant in this area, and plenty cocky.  Even as far back as the 1930s, photos of Twin Lakes always show the resident bears.  And yet, Twin Lakes is one of those sacred places in my life.  To most people, it's a pleasant place.  To me it's beautiful, holy.

The Allegheny National Forest, Revisited (February 2012)

            The vast tracts of unpeopled land!  The dense forests pushing up against lonely roads!  The water, the snow, the sky!  The Allegheny National Forest is a sacred place to me.  When I lived up there, I mainly explored its southern marches because I lived in the south and hiked on a strict schedule--usually four hours every Sunday afternoon.  Time in the woods seemed better than time in the car, traveling to some faraway quadrant.  But the more northerly stretches of the forest are so much wilder.  It's only now that I'm beginning to discover them.

           Some of the more southerly reaches of the ANF can be a little depressing; the industrial incursions into the forest are frequent and so ugly: clear-cuts, oil wells, gas wells, logging, new dirt roads being cut haphazardly through the trees.  But PA 321 from Marshburg northward to the New York State line is like 20 miles of Alaska, right within reach.  Also, since this stretch is designated a "national recreation area," it's more protected than the tattered southern fringes of the forest.

          A national recreation area, yes.  Well-known and much-visited?  No.  I spent a full six hours on the Johnnycake and North Country Trails up there on Saturday and saw not another soul.  I was aiming for the Handsome Lake campground, an ANF camp site that can only be reached by boat or by one long-arse walk in the woods.  "Handsome Lake" doesn't refer to the body of water; it was the name of the famous Seneca Chief Cornplanter's brother.  Handsome Lake was a powerful medicine man and statesman.

          Actually, it was a nine-mile loop hike that should have taken four hours, but took me six because I lost the trail at mile-marker 6 and had to turn back.  An erratically blazed but well established trail gets less and less visible the further you go; finally, all blazes disappear, and it just peters out three miles short of its destination.  It was frustrating, but such a beautiful way to spend a day, alone in true wilderness, miles from the nearest human being, on snowy mountainsides overlooking a frozen lake.
     
         So apparently Johnnycake Run is a body of water named after "johnnycakes," those dense biscuits that our pioneering ancestors used to take with them on long journeys.  They were originally called "journey cakes."  I think this is going to become our new annual pre-Lenten tradition, to travel back to the ANF for some concentrated winter hiking before my life starts to get crazy busy.