Natural Mid-Atlantic : PA Tyler Arboretum: Beyond the Perimeter Fence

Saturday, December 17, 2022

PA Tyler Arboretum: Beyond the Perimeter Fence

#43 2022 52-Hike Challenge: Tyler Arboretum Hiking Trails, 5.5 miles

The Arboretum charges a fee for entrance and I was happy to hand over my $15 on this dreary day. Happy that there was no one else on the grounds and no one else except for staff and volunteers. Happy that I had the place to myself. Happy that I could take my time to study the winter forms and bones of the formal gardens (even in the drizzly rain). But oddly, what made me most happy was that I had paid to walk through the perimeter fence. Tyler Arboretum owns over 700 acres of Delaware County forest land and over 20 miles of hiking trails beyond the deer fence. I'd heard there were some surprises out there.

Winterberry, Ilex verticillata

The pay window staffer handed me a hiking trail map. She pointed out some places to hike to and said "Don't miss this....don't miss that." Soon I was through the formal gardens and out through the perimeter fence (there are many of them) and on to the wilder side of the arboretum. I had to use both the paper map and my phone app to keep me on the right trail. There are so many paths it is easy to get turned around. I picked up my first two deflated mylar balloons and ribbon strings within the first 30 minutes and added three more before closing time.

Pink Trail loop

Most of the trails loop back on themselves or into other trails so I did a lot of circling around. There were a lot of deer and coming down the hill towards a road crossing I scared up a small herd who bounded across the street. Luckily no cars or trucks were coming. Yikes. I crossed over as well and began looping around watershed of Dismal Run. More deer and then the magnificent arch of the South Farm Stone Barn ruin where I stood on the tumble of rubble that had once been its high walls. In 1861 English Quaker Thomas Minshall bought this land directly from Quaker William Penn who bought land directly from the Lenni Lenape people.

South Farm Barn ruins

William Penn was one of the very few who conducted honest land purchases from the local native people in the the 1600s to establish his colony. Unfortunately, his sons were not so honest (and not so Quaker) regarding dealings with the Lenapi and in a "series of land theft, swindles, and violent, oftentimes murderous actions" removed Lenape from their Lenapehoking homelands. Eight generations of Minshall Quakers farmed this land, however, and to it they added magnificently built stone barns, homes, spring houses, and cottages, the ruins of which litter these woods today. Quaker communities flourished in the area and many Lenapi people stayed on the land. The Painter family, also English Quakers, married into the Minshall family and the combined properties and farms would later become the Tyler Arboretum. The land I hiked all over was once Lenapi forest lands, then cleared for farming for hundreds of years, and is now back again to forest. (See Notes on Leanpe homecoming)

Pink Hill Serpentine Barrens

The trail crossed over Dismal Run which was not very dismal. It was fat and happy with full day and night's rain, burbling over logs and frothing against the banks. Soon I was at the gate of another perimeter fence and discovered an unexpected treat - the Pink Hill Serpentine Barrens. The wet and weathered serpentine rock gave the trail and all the exposed soils in the grasslands a bright green hue, contrasted against the red brown fallen leaves of Red Oak and Post Oak. This is the only surviving - and thankfully protected - patch of serpentine barrens in Delaware County, just a postage stamp, really, of three acres. Development has consumed the county's eleven serpentine ecosystems. Pink Hills is all that remains.

Wet serpentine glows green!

Post Oak

The Dismal Run Loop was divinely not dismal, just sayin'. But soon I was looping around again, this time on the Red, White, and Blue Trails. With the water high I was unable to cross Rocky Run so I just switched to the Blue Trail at the intersection and looped again.

The trails widened into old roads and my pace quickened downhill and uphill. A few slips and slides on wet leaves and a near tumble over who-knows-what-that-was had me putting on the brakes with my hiking pole. More deer.

I decided to stop and ponder an almost hidden petroglyph that the staffer at the entrance window assured me was there with a "don't miss this." She was amazed at how many people do miss it since it requires a little searching along a rocky boulder field on a creek gradient off trail and is often leaf covered. A volunteer explained that it wasn't until 1906 that it was unearthed and recorded and that maybe it had even been relocated from deeper in the rock field to its present location above and out of the tumbling waters.

"Indian Rock" is located on the trail map

Wheels and crosses, he said, are not uncommon in ancient Lenapi rock art in the Northeast, but no one truly knows their meaning, though the arms of the cross seem to line up with the cardinal directions. The more I studied the rock at the site, however, the less like a cross it looked as two of the arms had extensions that fanned out in other directions. Maybe it was only part of a larger design that broke away at some point? In any case, the petroglyph showed the classic peck markings of stone-on-stone carving and it was very old.

Dismal Run

Speckled Greenshield lichen

My final loop brought me back to a perimeter gate and I slipped back inside the formal gardens just as a cold wind began to blow and tiny slivers of blue sky clouded over again. The drizzle returned and I stopped to pull my rain jacket back out of my pack after a mostly dry hike of two hours. I decided to have a snack in a pretty replica of Thoreau's cabin and listened to gentle rain patter on the cedar shake roof. Though the original cabin no longer exists (it was dismantled after 1847 and its parts repurposed by locals) Thoreau left notes on how he built it and today there are replicas of it all over the country. There is one on the campus of Penn State Altoona that is very nice and I've done a nature journal class there. I've even thought about constructing my own Henry House as a writing studio.