PA Forbes State Forest: Spruce Flat Bog and Beam Rock Ramble

 2022 52-Hike Challenge #22  (4 miles)

With the truck repaired and time to make a second try for the Laurel Summit area, we started out early in the morning to avoid the humidity and heat. Luckily a cold front had swept through overnight and the temperatures were pleasant, even cool at the top. Amos had some pep in his step at long last. Back up into Forbes State Forest we drove until we reached the summit and the breezy, cool parking lot at Laurel Summit State Park.

I combined two trails and a forest road to make a loop to encompass the high altitude bog and the outcrop of sandstone pillars at Beam Rock. It was slightly misty but the sun was beginning to burn through the rain clouds. Carpets of moss lay all around. White Pines and Hemlock towered over the CCC-era picnic area, dominating the tiny 6-acre embedded park within the state forest. Named for British Brigadier General John Forbes who commanded his expeditionary force to blaze a wilderness road in preparation for an attack on French-held Fort Pitt (Pittsburgh) in 1757. The old Lincoln Highway/ new-ish Rt 30 traces roughly the path through these mountains. 

Ghost Pipe barely above the height of thick moss

We walked out to a rare sight: a high altitude bog where acres of white Cotton Grass and Northern Pitcher Plant stopped me in my tracks. Each summer I seek out a bog just to visit the Pitcher and tiny Sundews and all the other acid-tolerant plants that make a bog or fen their home. This place, however, was special - ringed with krummholz and flag trees, a windy, cold environment that just now was enjoying a brief summer month or two before the cold Allegheny autumn returns. Dragonflies by the thousands danced in the breeze. Ravens croaked. The wet-carpet musty scent of a bear somewhere out in the berry bush caught our attention. Amos began to holler but didn't pull. 

Cotton Grass - a northern species more common in New England and Canada

In the mid-19th century these flats were covered in old growth Hemlock hundreds of years old. The loggers who found this summit called the trees Spruce - as anything evergreen with needles was called in the 1800s.  The logging continued through the early 1900s, then using various small engines and tramways to ferry the trees to the mills. The mountains were laid to total waste. By the 1920s the state stepped in to buy the degraded mountains, much to the chagrin of the locals and lumber companies, many of whom complained that the governor was wasting state money. But soon the CCC moved in and built park infrastructure, replanted forest using seed banks and sapling stock carried up from the less accessible ravine forests. 

Spruce Flats after the logging, c. 1910

The thick forests that blanket the mountain today are mature but not original. It is all second growth except for the bog where no trees returned except those that now encircle the shallow bowl of bog that formed in the absence of the ancient trees. Ecologists suggest that without the ancient Hemlocks to absorb the water naturally trapped in the depression of the flats, the bog formed in its place. Even in this dry, low precipitation month of August it is holding tons of water. I measured a standing six inches of water collected through rain, fog, and snow on the mountain. 

Northern Pitcher Plant - so many huge clumps I could hardly believe my eyes

Amos must have scared that bear out of the berry patch because suddenly I became aware of the silence. I had been so caught up in the spectacle of the bog I hadn't noticed he'd stopped hollering at the bear scent and had laid down for a snooze. A fit older woman came tramping out on to the boardwalk that juts out from the end of the trail. She swung off her pack and greeted me with "What a crazy amazing place!" Joan was hiking the Laurel Highlands Trail and detoured off to see the bog and to have her second breakfast. Amos asked for her turkey jerky and a breakfast bar which she shared with him. Joan has hiked all over the country, some long distance trails, some a week or two long. The Laurel Highlands Trail is 70 miles long and she was giving it a full week to complete before heading down to Washington D.C. to visit her older sister. She asked how old I was. I told her I just turned 62. She said she was 78. "Don't wait. Don't wait," she said as she hoisted her pack and headed back to the yellow blazes of the Laurel Highland Trail. How'd she know??

Woodland Sunflowers

From the bog we walked back to the picnic area to find a connector trail to the forest road that would lead us to the rocky overlook at Beam Rocks. Mushrooms were just everywhere in all shapes, sizes, and colors. I found a new (to me) mushroom that looked like it was bleeding and sure enough it was a Blood Tooth or Red Juice Tooth mushroom. So cool. The pines were soon overtaken by Chestnut Oaks and Mountain Ash and great thickets of Rhododendron. We found our way onto the gravel Laurel Summit forest road and past acres and acres of Woodland Sunflower. 

Red-Juice Tooth

Scarlet Waxy Cap

Silvery-Violet Cort

A mile or so later and we arrived at the first red blaze for Beam Rocks Trail. The path dipped down and down, crossed a boulder maze, and opened out on to the tops of pillars of wind eroded sandstone. The breeze lifted a cool mist up from the Spruce Run ravine. I looked out over the tops of Ironwood, Hop Hornbeam, and Black Cherry clinging to the steep slope under the outcrop. I watched three Broadwing Hawks soar south along the opposite ridgeway. Fall migration has begun for these long-distance hawk wanderers. 

Red blaze for the Beam Rock Trail

Boulder maze

Pillars of sandstone and a 30 mile view

We retraced our steps back up to the road and walked straight back to the truck, but on the way we passed by this wickedly cool, seen-better-days observatory that I later learned is an Airglow Observatory built by the University of Pittsburg in the mid-1960s. Although the Airglow Program through is still active, I wasn't sure if this observatory is still in use. It looked decrepit, a little sad, in need of some seal sealer and paint. The Airglow Program studies the ionosphere, specifically the aural spectrum and oxygen interaction.  At the time it was built out here, 25 miles from Pittsburg, the night skies were not as affected by city lights as they are now. But newer observatories have been built since in better dark/twilight sky locations in Peru and New England.  The program is still managed by Pitt.  It would be cool to know if this observatory has been decommissioned or is still in use. It would be cooler still to be able to see inside!

Airglow Observatory, U. Pitt/ 

Notes:

DCNR Laurel Summit State Park - elevation at almost 3,000' and home to the beautiful Spruce Flats Bog as well as a major trails intersection.

Forbes State Forest has units across three SW Pennsylvania counties, Fayette, Somerset, and Westmoreland. 

Purple Lizard Maps produces this excellent outdoor recreational map for Ohiopyle State Park which includes on one side all of Forbes State Forest and the many small state park units embedded within it. It was a valuable resource for me in navigation since I had no cell signal.  They make the best maps and are a local PA company!

From the most current grant funding statement awarded to U. of Pittsburgh for the Airglow Program:

A program of upper atmosphere dynamics studies is proposed that involves work at the University of Pittsburgh, at the equatorial Airglow Observatory in Arequipoa, Peru, and at the midlatitude Millstone Hill Observatory in Massachusetts. Determinations of Doppler shifts and widths of nightglow emission lines will be made by upgraded Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) instruments to yield velocities and temperatures. The FPIs are of both conventional and all-sky designs that make use of CCD detectors to provide greatly improved sensitivity. Accurate determinations of the Doppler shifts will be provided by zero velocity reference sources, either using the PIs newly developed oxygen afterglow reference source (OARS) that emits the forbidden OI 630.0 and 557.7 nm lines or by more portable Secondary Standard sources that will be interferometrically calibrated against the OARS standard. The improved precision will permit accurate determinations of the (small) vertical velocities, supplementing the usual horizontal velocity determinations to provide a 3-dimensional characterization of the thermospheric flow.

For the equatorial measurements in Peru, the new, multi-wavelength capability of the FPI will broaden the ongoing 630 nm studies of upper thermosphere dynamics to include mesopause wind and temperature determinations via OH (731.6 nm) nightglow line studies. The all-sky FPI at Millstone Hill will be used to examine coupling effects between the midlatitude lower and upper thermosphere by sequential determinations of their wind and temperature fields using the 557.7 nm and 630.0 nm airglow emissions. At both latitudes, the neutral dynamics results can be compared to the ionospheric dynamics measurements obtained by either the Jicamarca or the Millstone Hill incoherent scatter radar.

https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0221920