PA Laurel Highlands: Indian Creek Valley Trail

 

While I had hoped to walk the full 8-mile out-and-back on the southern-most section of the Indian Creek Valley Rail Trail (ICVRT), Amos and I had two close calls with falling trees and honestly I didn't want to test the old "Three Times The Charm" rule. Had we made it through the trail would have taken us to the terminus at the Youghiogheny River, but the walk above the noisy waters of Indian Creek Gorge was wonderful and six miles O&B seemed all my coonhound wanted to do anyway.

The Steyer Bridge 

The Indian Creek Valley Railroad (see Notes) was once a very busy industrial line hauling coal and lumber from mines and mills from the heart of the Laurel Highlands. At only twenty miles in length and with several spur lines, the ICVRR was the connector for many bustling coal patch towns, resorts, and lumber yards. Abandoned in 1969 it began its conversion to a recreational trail in the 1990s and is close to being finished. There are still a few miles left to connect it all up and all but a few traces of its hard-working past remain. 

Mill Run Reservoir 

My original plan for the day was to hike to Cucumber Falls in Ohiopyle State Park where we'd been camping, but two nights before a wicked bad storm crashed into the great bend of the river and demolished trails as well as damaged the beautiful river path in town. Downed trees were everywhere in the valley. The storm was described later as a microburst and had left the park and town without power, crushed some cars under fallen trees, and destroyed several trails. So, I decided the ICVRT about ten miles out seemed like a safe option. Welp... 

Mississippian sandstone

What a beautiful trail! It was great to spend time in the railroad cuts to study the stacked layered beds of sandstone for who and what might be living among the cracks and crevices. A fence lizard! This rock was formed as shallow sea bottom some 340 - 320 million years ago and it is the most common rock type found in the Laurel Highlands of SW Pennsylvania. Associated with Carboniferous sandstone types are veins of coal and knowing their geology, those ICVRR speculators connected the start-up coal towns with their small pit and shaft mines with rails along the most prominent coal veins that followed the creek valley. Although considered a small coalfield by Pennsylvania standards, this field provided lots of coal, jobs, and community for almost seventy years. 

Tick-trefoil 

Two miles into our walk I was feeling pretty confident that the storm hadn't impacted the area as badly as it did Ohiopyle. But then while admiring a patch of Woodland Sunflowers and Trefoil, there was a familiar and terrifying sound - POP! Crack! .....  Pop pop pop! It seemed the falling tree was not too close so I kept walking albeit a little more slowly while still admiring the flower glades. A bicyclist who'd passed us at the start came cruising by, returning from his ride. Over his shoulder he called "That was a short ride! Be careful - the way is blocked. You might be able to get through but I couldn't - and it's still coming down." Uh-oh.

Woodland Sunflower

As is becoming more and more common in our state, episodes of heavy, heavy rain (even without the wind) in summer and fall cause flashfloods and forest damage. Woodlands on steep slopes are particularly vulnerable. Heavy rain adds tremendous pressure to full canopy forests and these take the brunt of monster downpours. Inundated steep slope soils slip and fail. The weight of water begins to affect the integrity of the tree causing limbs to droop and sag and leaning trunks to dip beyond recovery position. A water weighted tree can fall slowly over hours or days as parts of its structure, unable to rebound after the rain event, begin to release under the pressure.  

Boulder glade

Delayed treefall can happen hours or days after such an event. Hikers walking through areas that have experienced heavy, sudden rainfall events like this should be on guard. Watching for slope failures, landslips and slides, and arched, leaning trees over trails is more than precautionary. Knowing when to leave an area by reading the land and forest is a skill much needed in our heavily wooded state. 

Before long I came upon two areas where the trail had washed out, one a landslip and the other a weakened culvert drainage that had recently been repaired. We were able to skirt around each safely but as we got closer to the river there was more storm debris to step through and around. I started to have teenie tiny flashbacks of when once a trail gave out under me on a high bluff and I tumbled twenty feet down a slope, breaking my leg. Hmmm...

Indian Creek Gorge

Then I started to hear the popping, groaning, creaking, and crashing. We walked cautiously along with me literally talking to the trees "You all don't get any ideas!" or "Stay where you are!" and Amos looked at me with a worried look on his face - easy to do for a coonhound - floppy ears way back, bushy eyebrows up, jowly head a-tilt.  I observed how many oaks and maples were bent heavy over the trail head. A few freshly snapped hemlocks trunks and pitched over pines were evident on the hillside below. Maybe about now would be a good time to ...

Mountain Angelica

...when the popping trees were too close for comfort. I held on to Amos' leash tightly as he was more curious and wanted to go see just what was causing that sound. Instead, I talked him into backing up while keeping my eyes on the stretch ahead of steep sloping woods. I saw bunches of leaves begin to flutter down and some movement in the canopy as a tree slowly leaned into its neighbors. Pop! Pop! Groannnn! Then - CRASH! 

Glade Fern

Like dominoes, the neighboring trees caught in the fall, a dozen mostly smaller oaks and a few beech, began to slip and tumble. We backed up with a bit of a jog and with the first blockage now in sight behind us, I decided now was the time to turn the hike around. Stuck between the two blocked sections, I felt a little (actually a lot) uneasy about getting trapped on the trail. With the sound of yet another tree somewhere on the steep downslope beginning to creak, we quickly threaded our way back through the first tree jumble and kept up a quick walking pace until the sounds were far behind. 

Tree fall

Not until we were back to the flatter valley of the Mill Run Reservoir did I feel like we were clear of the gorge and its restless trees. We sat along the shore and had our snack. Mallard ducks with nearly full grown young popped in and out of young willow branches that brushed softly on the water. As my mind is apt to do, I thought about all the "hiker killed by fallen tree" stories I'd heard this year - and there were a lot - including three incidents in PA. A flash of cobalt blue shook me out of my thoughts as a Kingfisher swooped my and landed on a limb over the water. Monarchs and Tiger Swallowtails drifted over a tall stand of Joe Pye Weed nearby. 

Snack stop 

The O&B for six miles was just enough for Amos who seems (like many of us) less and less able to deal with high heat and humidity. How much of our hiking experiences in summer nowadays are affected by changes in our summer weather patterns? Here in PA it has been a summer of intense and frequent storms, tropical deluges, and stupid hot and humid weeks on end. Sound asleep in the shade, I watched his chest rise and fall with rapid breaths. It had gotten hot again. The breezes had disappeared and big storm clouds were building again on the horizon.  Know when to go!

Our hike section in RED

Back at the truck where I had parked in the new-ish gravel lot across the road from the large Camp Christian grounds, I helped Amos up into his backseat and put the AC on high. As the truck cooled down I read about the camp having once been the site of Killarney Park, a hugely popular day retreat for residents of Pittsburgh. 

The ICVRR built a spur line with a station to accommodate several trains a day filled with visitors out for amusement rides and picnics. By 1910 the park had added overnight lodging (cabins and an inn), two large lakes for boating, and a dance hall. Having grown up on a summer church camp property that had also once served as popular retreat park, it was fun to drive around Camp Christian and felt like I'd come almost home. Plus, it felt safer to be inside as the next round of afternoon storms began to roll through! 

Notes: 

Mountain Watershed Association  Indian Creek Valley Rail Trail

Killarney Park/ Camp Christian From Park to Camp

PA Lancaster Junction Rail Trail

You know the old saying that the place we know the least about is our own backyard? Welp. I decided to finally walk this little local gem of a rail trail following a long meeting at work. The Lancaster Junction Rail Trail gets a nice mention in the guide book Rail-Trails Pennsylvania (see Notes) and I am trying to complete all the trails mentioned there, so this is an easy one to check off. Why wait? I needed a good leg-stretch after a few hours sitting and what the heck, it's on the way home (sort of), so why not? 

Drink stand and honor box

The original Reading & Columbia Railroad line was begun in 1861 to link Reading to the transportation hub at Columbia then on to the Susquehanna River where goods and resources were transferred to the Tidewater Canal that delivered produce, lumber, and especially coal to Chesapeake Bay markets. Later the line ran directly along the eastern shore of the Susquehanna all the way to Perryville, Maryland.

This line was active until the 1970s with a busy freight and passenger service between Lancaster and Reading.  I walked from the trailhead at the Emergency Services Training Center out to Lancaster Junction where the rail trail ends and turned back. At Lancaster Junction, once a busy freight center and RR community, the rail trail meets with an active freight where a passing train sounded its horn at all the road crossings as I walked back. 

Chiques Creek

Chiques (Chick-eez) Creek sidles up against the old rail bed for a mile or so before it veers away to the west to makes its zig-zaggy way to the Susquehanna River and the Chiques Rock cliffs. This little creek is prone to flash flooding and with recent torrential downpours, the woods on either side of the trail were stacked with muddy, woody debris, scrubbed clean of living vegetation. 

American Toad, 

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail on New York Ironweed

Orange Coneflower, Rudbeckia fulgida

Early Goldenrod, Solidago juncea

So about that little drink stand and honor box (pictured at the top) that I came across about halfway to Lancaster Junction... seeing as it's summer in Pennsylvania, it is almost sacrilegious not to have an ice cold root beer and, being a devoted fan of homemade root beer, I could not pass up the opportunity to drop $2 into the honor box and grab a bottle from the cooler. Would it be the real thing I wondered as I unscrewed the cap.

Lancaster Junction

Historic freight warehouse

Why this devotion to homemade root beer? Let's go back in time to when I was ten and on my annual summer visit to stay with my Great Uncle Russ and Great Aunt "Ginn" Virginia who lived in the Appalachian/Blue Ridge Mountains. They lived in a cabin just up the hill from the Shenandoah River and tended their own orchards, hunted and fished, raised bees, foraged the woods, farmed a little, and generally lived off the land. Every summer Uncle Russ, a proud Welshman, produced a heavy wooden flat filled with tall, glass, recapped Coke bottles filled with dark homemade root beer - the fizzy kind with a kick. My Aunt Ginn, who spoke German when she was especially proud to serve us her tinctures and home cooking knew that I lived for her root beer. I dreamt about it all winter. I begged for it when I got there. And when I turned ten and was allowed to drink a whole icy bottle by myself (no more little jelly jars portions!) I cried. It was that good. "Der Sommer ist da!" Aunt Ginn declared. Summer is here!  

Beer and the lemonade chaser 

Well, I cried again on the Lancaster Junction trail today as I gulped that nice fizzy cold root beer. Just like I remembered, it zinged of sassafras and birch root. It sang of sarsaparilla and ginger. And just like that old family recipe (still in the family but made with "Big H" Hires Root Beer or Lancaster's own Stolzfus extract today) it faded away with hints of cinnamon and clove and a touch of honey. Holy moly.  It was good German stuff that would have made my Uncle and Aunt applaud. And, just like the summer tradition of offering a chaser of ice cold lemonade to follow the root beer, just in case "the fizzy makes one dizzy" as Aunt Ginn would say, I returned the empty bottle and then bought a homemade lemonade for the walk back. 

The real deal. 

Notes:

My favorite rail trail guide, Rail-Trails Pennsylvania, is available through the Rails to Trails Conservancy  which serves as an organization dedicated to the national rail trail movement to promote community accessibility, connectivity, public spaces, and local recreational economies. Note that federal rail trail funding has been hit very hard with the passage of recent legislation that claws back hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to helping communities develop their rail trail infrastructure. Please consider supporting RTC as they fight to restore funding, restart grant programs, and stabilize community rail trail transportation and recreation projects. I do!  

About that root beer recipe - here's what almost every Amish root beer brewer in Lancaster County uses today and I'm telling you, it's that good. https://lancasteronline.com/news/homemade-root-beer-appears-at-scores-of-roadside-stands/article_be7b5324-3011-5113-b97a-c705661fbd5e.html While local homemade root beer does contain a tiny bit of alcohol as a result of fermentation (the "kick") it really depends on the amount of sugar put into the brewing to feed the yeast that allows the taste of real birch, sassafras, and sarsaparilla to come through. Our family recipe also calls for a little cinnamon and ginger. Too much sugar and the root tastes are overpowered by the sweetness. It's still sweet but a little beer-bitter too. Mmmmmm! 

PA Gallitzin State Forest - Bog Path Trail

The Bog Path Trail is part of the John P. Saylor Trail (JST) system in Gallitzin State Forest and has been on  my list of wetfoot muck walks to do this year. In early July I had my chance to walk it and wanted to make another loop with the JST. It was hot and very exposed, however, and my big black dog Amos did not care for any of it, so we made a quick four-mile out-and-back hike instead. A few of the board walk sections were slightly flooded since there has been so much rain and the main trail was a bit mucky, too, but all the better for a good muck and for cooling off in the shady edges.

The Great Bog 

Bogs form when old lakes, ponds, or wetland fill in with Sphagnum Moss. In older bogs the moss can often can be several feet thick! I pushed my hiking pole into the moss mat at several locations and found the moss to be about three feet before touching the bottom of this shallow wetland. There was very little open water except for a stream inflow and lots of open sky. Where the Sphagnum was thick enough to create little spongy islands, some trees, Spruce, Alder, Poplar, and White Birch grew.

 

A bog is mostly dead plant material trapped beneath a cover of living Sphagnum. This creates an oxygen-poor, highly acidic, nutrient poor environment. With such difficult growing conditions that reach extremes of cold and hot seasons during the year, few plant species thrive in the open here so plant biodiversity can be low depending on how far from the wooded margin they can grow. The plants that do survive in a bog, however, are super interesting and right away I came across one of my favorites. 

Leaves adapted to catch insects - Northern Purple Pitcher Plant

A very sweet treat - Northern Purple Pitcher Plant 

Northern Purple Pitcher Plants (Surracenia purpurea) appeared as soon as we stepped out of the hemlock woods into the sun. I'd hit the bloom period just right, happy to see all those weird flowers poking up like War-Of-the-Worlds spaceships high above mounds of highly adapted, insect-catching leaves. It was prime time for insect capture and for every pitcher leaf I peered into there were two or three insects captured in enzyme-laced water inside. How do Pitcher Plants avoid capturing their own pollinators like Bumblebees? The flower grows high above the pitcher leaves, often by a foot or two (!), and the pollen and nectar of the flower is incredibly sweet smelling and tasty, super attractive to Bumblebees. The scent of the pitcher leaf water,  however, emits an odor not so attractive to bees but very attractive instead to flies, beetles, and ants. 

Tawny Cottongrass

As we continued across board walk sections out onto the open bog, Tawny Cottongrass (Eriophorum virginicum) lifted its spidery flowers above the thick moss blanket. Come fall these flowers will look like wads of cotton held aloft by their spiky bracts. Neither a relative of the cotton plant nor a grass, the cottongrass is a sedge that grows only on deep, old peatland. Seeing Cottongrass is a sure sign you've found an old bog. 

Dewdrop, Rubus dalibarda

Margins in the cool shade

To keep Amos from overheating I brought him out of the sun into the cool, moist shade of the woods edges quite a few time and explored the margins of the bog. Here I found Dewdrop (Rubus dalibarda) growing in profusion. I'd hoped to see this showy little groundcover at least once this year and here it was growing throughout the hemlock margins where ever we ducked into the shade. Dewdrop loves bogs but not too much sun, so encountering it here was a real treat. In PA it is only found along the Allegheny Front and only around but not in the open bog. 

Feeder stream

We crossed a feeder stream where Amos wanted to grab a sip of water but he soon discovered it tastes pretty bad, quite acidic from tannins and peat. He drank all of his water bottle and half of mine in his little collapsible bowl but nothing seemed to help with the heat except to keep ducking into the cool muddy margins of Hemlock and Rush. I knew it was time to start heading back to the truck after a few miles in. It is no fun being a big black dog during a Pennsylvania heat wave in an open bog!

Cool mud beneath Rush beds

We found an old section of boardwalk that helped us cross a small stream back into the shady woods. The old wooden planks were cool on Amos' paws. As he gets older, now eight years old, he - like me has grown less and less tolerant of heat. I sometimes worry about this and today was a worry day. It was brutally hot with high humidity and I didn't want him (or me) to get sick out here especially since he'd gone through most of the three liters of water I was carrying. We got back to the truck where I keep a five gallon jerry can of cold water and he drank his fill while I started the engine and the air conditioner. 

Back to the woods

Back at our campsite at Blue Knob State Park high on the mountain (where it was at least ten degrees cooler than in the bog) Amos climbed atop his camping bed in the shade and quickly zonked out. We kept the next day's hike to the cool mountain summit trails. We'll be back when the JST is cooler to enjoy another muck hike before the year is over. Well done, old boy. 

Yellow trail (4 miles) out-and-back

Notes:

Flora of Pennsylvania - Dewdrop  https://www.paenflowered.org/apgii/rosales/rosaceae/rubus/rubus-dalibarda

U.S. Forest Service - Pitcher Plant https://www.fs.usda.gov/wildflowers/plant-of-the-week/sarracenia_purpurae.shtml

Gallitzin State Forest (maps) https://www.pa.gov/agencies/dcnr/recreation/where-to-go/state-forests/find-a-forest/gallitzin

PA Buzzard Swamp Wildlife Management Area - Allegheny National Forest

Buzzard Swamp Wildlife Management Area is a partnership project area shared by the Pennsylvania Game Commission and the Allegheny National Forest. We visited this vast wetland system and hiked an out-and-back on its main loop trail for about 2.5 miles. Pleasantly surprised by the beauty and the richness of wildlife here, we could have stayed the whole day but decided to make a half-day of it due to the heat and biting flies and my big black dog being uncomfortable with both. 

We took our time and admired every view, pond, meadow, and lake and were pretty much awed by it all. With over 1,200 acres of protected wetlands, a chain of ponds and lakes with large wetland marshes is partly managed by humans with small culvert and sluice gates but the real water managers were the beavers and muskrats. We found evidence of both everywhere we went from beaver dams and beaver lodges to muskrat cattail huts along a main gravel road. There were deer, so many birds, and plenty of scat on the path - coyote, mink, raccoon, even fisher. 

Beaver dam against the road

Butterflies and dragonflies were everywhere in the road, most feeding on salts found in scat piles or preying upon the flies that hung around the scat. Monarchs were common thanks to vast meadows of Milkweed, Indian Paintbrush, and other host plants. The beaver-made wetlands are critical habitat for two Clubtail Dragonfly species of concern in Pennsylvania. We stopped at Pond #5 (out of 15) for a water and snack break and watched families of Barn Swallow swoop out of the culvert we were sitting over, We could hear the young begging from the nests inside the culvert. 

An Osprey adult flew with her two newly-fledged young who were just earning their wings over the largest lake behind us. A juvenile Broad-winged Hawk flashed through a spruce woods that ringed with Red Maple and grassy marsh. We had just experienced an adult Broad-winged Hawk wheel at eye-level over the truck on the rough road up from the Clarion River, so seeing a juvenile within the hour was a treat.

Milkweed

Spruce opening

This is the kind of place that whispers to you when you hike through. The wind in the meadows creates a kind of sigh that is perfectly punctuated by Red-winged Blackbirds. You can almost hear the flap of Tiger Swallowtail Butterflies as they cruise close to your ears. Green Frogs and Red-eyed Vireo compete to be the loudest until the Marsh Wren shows up. To not stand still and listen to the chorus of meadow insects and the whirrrr of dragonflies over the ponds is a mistake. Take the time to stop and do nothing else but listen. 

Looking out across this vast basin of ponds and marshes I felt somewhat reassured that everything will be alright. Migrating waterfowl will begin arriving by September and Atlantic Flyway will again be full of birds moving steadily south. There was something tremendously hopeful in how this wetland complex was so full - absolutely crammed - with animals, birds, bugs, reptiles, and amphibians. We came across a Snapping Turtle nest that had survived predation and showed the prints of tiny turtles fanning out from the nest to the edge of a pond. The cycles of life large and small wound round and round, full of promise. 

While on our camping break in the Allegheny National Forest I had learned about the passing of Joanna Macy, American Buddhist and great lover of all things wild. I'll write more about Macy in my companion blog Uphill Road over on Substack later this week, but here in the middle of the great wet meadows I had the sense that this was a place I could find her if I needed her, a traveling poet spirit on the breeze in "widening circles" through the watery landscape not unlike and nor far from her Western New York childhood home. 

“To be alive in this beautiful, self-organizing universe—to participate in the dance of life with senses to perceive it, lungs that breathe it, organs that draw nourishment from it—is a wonder beyond words."

- Joann Macy, World as Lover, World as Self (1991)

Notes:

Allegheny National Forest trail map for Buzzard Swamp WMA https://www.alleghenysite.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Buzzard-Swamp-Trail.pdf