MD Palmer State Park - Ironworks Trail

American Beech

 A heavy line of storms rolled through the evening before. With the day off, I decided to take Amos on his favorite kind of hike, a turtle tracking. The ground was wet and temperatures had cooled down from the stupidly hot week we just had, so it was perfect for box turtles to be active. When we arrived, I learned there had been a tree struck by lightening in the middle of Parker State Park area and a field crew was currently deployed to the interior, but, the lone firefighter waiting at the trucks and trailers assured me it was fine for hiking. 

Strike shards at 100 yards!

We followed UTV tracks and soon found strike shards littering the trail. They were long and pointed and ragged, like spears thrown down by some angry forest god. I launched one into the brush at an imaginary mastadon but not being very good at spear throwing, I  missed.  We climbed up the knoll where a great red oak, laid down by firefighters, smoldered and smoked. The soil was grubbed all around for fifty feet in every direction. The smell of acrid oak smoke made both Amos' and my eyes tear up. Back to the trail...

Lightening strike

We headed around the  Hornbeam Trail in hopes of picking up a turtle trail. The smell of smoke lingered the whole way and I began to wonder if there was another smoldering strike site somewhere else. If there was, we never came across it. Soon enough though, Amos began tracking and we were off the trail proper and deep into the woods. 

Jack-in-the-Pulpit berries

White Wood Aster

Blue Lobelia

Groundwort ("wart"), Thelophora vialis

Wrinkled Crust, Phelbia radiata

We came across old quarries cut into the hill where miners extracted iron ore, flint quartz, and ironstone. Scree slopes of waste rock flowed down the sides of the hill but the woods were thick reclaiming the rough ground, burying the scree with leaf litter and puctuating the quarry pits with grand old oaks, stately beech, and enormous tulip poplar. 

Braided bark of an older Tulip Poplar

Furrowed bark of an American Hornbeam

"Fingerbone" bark of a Mockernut Hickory

Checked bark of American Dogwood

Buck-rubbed bark of American Beech

The turtle tracking didn't take long. Amos stood at alert at a small female box turtle which was so well disguised in orange and black that even when I walked right up to Amos I had to wait a second or two to see it. She was maybe ten years old at most and rested, unfazed in the duff. I said "Good boy, Amos! You found a turtle!" while digging into my pack for some turkey jerkey to reward him. Oh the joy! So much joy that the little brave turtle let out a big hiss and fully closed up as Amos danced around her for his treat. 

Success! 

Box Turtle, Terrapene carolina

We returned to the Ironworks Trail and followed the crest of the hill towards even bigger quarry pits, cloaked in forest. Bathed in golden light, the forest seemed to shimmer all around us while some trees let loose a shiver of falling leaves, yellow and brown. Dead wood was speckled with tiny mushrooms, shelf fungus,and molds probably brought on by recent, much needed rains. A patch of Wrinkled Crust fungus was so bright orange I mistook it for flourescent orange spray paint.

Knoll above Deer Creek

Hard to spot the yellow blazes in a bright yellow green woods

Wild Ginger

This was the kind of early autumn day that sweeps your mind clean of all the stupid-hot days of the last month and makes you crave the autumn coolness even more. Still, there's a lot of green yet to contend with and it was practically glowing up from the ferns and wild ginger below to the ceiling of deep green of the creaking old oaks overhead with full canopies of lobed leaves.  

Basidia, spore openings, beneath Bracket Fungus. 

Seed bracts of the American Hornbeam, Carpinus caroliniana

Climbing up on a pile of dark basalt lavastone, Amos sniffed the air again, head held high in hopes of catching another turtle track. Knowing that what he really wanted was another turkey jerky treat, we sat together and shared a snack and some water. From our perch I could see the woods all the way around from knoll to valley  thinking, yeah, this is my element.  Amos kept his eye on the jerky bag, his element. 

Ironworks Trail

Leaving the forest for the meadow walk out, I had to look back to remind myself that the night before was a wild time in these woods - wind, torrential rain, lightening, deafing booms of thunder. And somewhere back there, a forest elder was lying sectioned up and blackened.  Back at the parking lot, the one lone firefighter was still leaning on his fire rake, assigned to monitor the site for the next few hours. He asked about the hike and I showed him the picture of the little female turtle and he said "Good boy, Amos!" at which point Amos began his happy dance for more turkey jerky. 

Notes: 

Palmer State Park, Harford County, Maryland State Parks.  

Palmer State Park, Harford Land Trust. 

MD Palmer State Park: A Post-Industrial Forest

 #41 2022 52-Hike Challenge:  Palmer State Park, Iron Works & Flint Mills Trails - 4.5 mi. 

Amos and I hiked almost five miles at Palmer State Park as we walked the Flint Mill, Iron Works, and Hornbeam Trail up and over and around this very undulating landscape. We stopped to stare down into the flint (quartz) quarries and explored the flint mill ruins on Deer Creek. I found an arborglyph I hadn't noticed before and wondered at its age. It definitely was not recently done and compared to others I've documented on American Beech in the southern PA/ northern MD area,  it looked old.

Arborglyph 

I documented the glyph with a photograph and GPS coordinates in case it should have any historical value. Archeologists are racing to record these kinds of markings in the west as important artifacts of the Basque culture when shepherds carved trees from the 1890s through the 1930s. They are hurrying because Aspen trees do not live beyond a hundred years. Seeing this deer on skis, a vivifact - an artifact created on a living thing, reminded me of a Seneca arborglyph I saw in Western PA of a deer on skis that dated from the 1940s. It was carved into the inner bark of a Birch tree but the tree had died so the owner of the property has tried to preserve the wood. 

Ruin of the Husband Flint Mill come into view

Surviving twin furnace

Mill race and wheel pit

This is one of my favorite local parks and so I've posted before on Palmer State Park. It's just a few miles south of the Mason Dixon Line in Maryland and only a 25 minute drive from home. It's also one of the most important pieces of the northern Maryland forest that creates connectivity and corridors for all kinds of wildlife, especially interior woodland birds, reptiles, and mammals. But a hundred years ago this landscape would have been just beginning its recovery from its long industrial use. Today it is mature Oak, Hickory, Poplar, and Beech forest but in no way is it old growth.

Spring seep and its emergent stream

Deer Creek

As we swung up the hill from our exploration of the flint mill ruins, I noticed another trail that continued below us along the creek bank. I'll have to come back and follow that path up to the old bridge and find the ruins of the Deer Creek Iron Works Forge. With the deep quartz quarries to our right we looped around on the Iron Works Trail and were stopped in our tracks by a coyote trotting across the rim of the pit across from us. Amos made such a fuss! Lordy. 

To the quarries!

Super deep quartz quarry

Coyote (not visible here) was running the opposite rim

As Amos was losing his mind and the coyote long gone, a group of Turkeys swept over the pit on dark wings and glided downhill to a place they felt safe from wild and domestic dogs.  Back to hiking and on on the Hornbeam Trail towards the parking area, we met with a loudly talking couple who I've seen out here before. They stopped to pet Amos. "We never see anything!" laughed the nice lady with her Scooby Doo water bottle as I told her about our encounters. She was convinced that Amos is not a coonhound but an undocked Doberman. I didn't argue, but her husband reminded her that Dobermans don't have those huge jowls and four neck rolls. 

1858 Map of Harford County: Husbands Flint Mill and Deer Creek Iron Works

Notes: 

The ecological and forestry study for this new park determined that the Palmer tract serves as a hub for interconnected forest corridor which is considered critical habitat.  See:  https://dnr.maryland.gov/publiclands/Documents/PalmerLandPlan2012.pdf

MD Palmer State Park: Going with the Flow, An Igneous Landscape

Just south of the Mason Dixon Line is this little gem of a state park that tells a giant story. Palmer State Park is fairly new to the Maryland State Park system. I decided to check it out on my solo Saturday morning walk close-to-home. Everything is new - trails, parking area, signage. But the dark and white rocks I constantly tripped over told a tale of two geologic events that helped shape the landscape through which these new trails wander.

Young beech trees still cling to their fall leaves the following spring. 

Along the Pennsylvania-Maryland border just east and west of the Susquehanna River is where metavolcanic rock is visible at the surface. These rocks were formed when Supercontinent Pangaea formed 335 million years ago as plates of earth's crust collided. What is now North Africa rammed into the mid-section of North America's eastern coast, rapidly closing the Iapetus Ocean that preceded the Atlantic. A chain of volcanic islands developed ahead of the advancing North African plate and when the two continents met, the islands were trapped and crushed between them.  Many of the hillsides that lead down to Deer Creek contain outcrops and scree fields of this angular igneous debris. It is dense and heavy and dark and easy to recognize as hardened magma.

A new trail crossed a magmatic rock debris field.

Cutleaf Toothwort, an early spring eastern native.

Walking over a volcanic island

As I walked across the hills of volcanic rock I tried to imagine what this landscape must have looked like as, for a short time, geologically speaking, Pangaea held together for about 100 million years.  The Appalachian Mountains were as high as the Alps, pushed skyward by the collision.  According to fossil records, we know that the regions west of the mountains were arid and dry, while the regions here and to the east were lush and tropical. Ferns would have soared above my head. Amphibians were the size of my car and proto-crocs and alligators swam in the shallow watery basins that filled with decaying plant matter. This was the Permian - the origins of coal that would someday make Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Western Maryland known the world over as a top producing coal region. 

Dead Red Cedar and Nuthatch cache. 

This was a time when the hard or leather shelled egg became a good evolutionary idea.  A few reptiles tried out feathers and wings.  I noticed the hulks of dead Red Cedars now surrounded by deciduous forest. These trees reclaimed the land from farm fields in the 1940s but when this was part of the Supercontinent trees were small and ferns and clubmosses would have soared over our heads. Although Red Cedar is an ancient species that predates flowering trees, it barely would have reached my knees.

Magmatic rocks weather in blocks with angles and edges.

Moss and lichen communities were first on the scene as magma cooled at the surface. 

After only 100 millions years, Pangaea began to was tear apart and with it went parts of the Appalachians, drifting on continental fragments across the birthing of the Atlantic Ocean. (Fragments of our mountain chain can be found in Greenland, Iceland, Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, England, Ireland, France, and Spain. An international extension to the famous Appalachian Trail is forming now with hiking chapters in all those regions.)  As the crust tore apart, flows of molten material injected upwards from deep within the mantel to fill the gaps. This material cooled and hardened as quartz and can be found throughout the park in large veins.

Deer Creek.

Over time, water found its way into the rifts caused by the separation of Pangaea. North of here the mighty Susquehanna makes a series of hard turn along these rift faults while in this region many of our local ravine and gorge streams like Broad Creek, Deer Creek, and Muddy Run, eroded their way through bands of hard gneiss and metaconglomerates by dissolving and following the softer quartz veins, though this process took an additional many millions of years. Under this trail massive veins of quartz come to the surface and weather out here at the surface. Easy access to tons of quartz became an important asset in the 1800s and the quartz mining industry transformed the landscape yet again.

Vine roping.

Water- smoothed magma boulders with a quartz boulder nearby.

The trail leads downslope across magma scree fields and into the Deer Creek valley. Never mind the huge of hunk of white quartz I tripped over down there, it's fine. Ouch. In the 1880s the Husband Flint Mill was established here to take advantage of easy access to the quartz.  I came upon  foundations and ruins of the mill. Large white boulders of quartz glistened in the middle of the river and the trail glistened with quartz-crumble.

Ruins of a quarry outbuilding foundation.

One of two kilns that survives on the bank of the creek.

Hammer room foundation at the base of the kilns.

I climbed up on the kiln and looked into the chimney which has become a trash bin. Sad. Looking over are the ruins of flint mill. The hammer room is still clearly visible (but may not be once the leaves are fully out). Large oaken hammers were raised and dropped onto pans of "cooked" quartz and were water-powered, attached to wheels turned by creek water flowing through mill races. The hammer room crushed the brittle quartz into coarse sand that was then ground by mill stones which produced fine powders used in the porcelain and pottery factories in nearby York, Lancaster, and Baltimore. Though floods have swept away the timbers of the millstone and hammer rooms, it is still an impressive ruin. I hope the park service can do what it can ($$) to repair and preserve these ruins.

Quartz boulder in front of a sledge pile of unused shovel-sized quartz feed material for the kiln. 

About 25 men and three times as many mules provided the horse and man power to remove the quartz from the quarry pits and move it to the breaker piles where it was sledged into shovel-ready fragments carried by wagon to the kilns. There are many mule trackways that can be seen coming down from the quarries in the hills above while a large pile of unused shovel quartz sits at the intersection of the mule paths and a wagon road.

Robins were the bird of the day!

Leaving the creek valley, the trail leads uphill to the quarries. Robins were everywhere singing their spring songs, rooting around in the leaf litter for food.  One of our favorite thrushes, the males are sporting their fresh black hoods that remind me of the jackdaws in the UK, "boys in black hoods." Rooting around in the bottoms of the quarry pits seemed to be a favorite gathering place as I counted over 50 robins in one quarry and many more in a second large pit.

Large quarry pit (adorned with robins) 

My four mile loop trail ended where I started at the top of a Piedmont hill underlain with the memories of volcanic islands, a supercontinent, and a great rift that tore it all apart. In the land plans for this park, educational panels are proposed to mark important historical features and I hope geological ones as well, because without the story of the underlying geology it's just a bunch of dates and ruins. We all need context to place our stories and the robins (formerly flying lizards) would appreciate the shout-out.

Entrance to the small parking area

* At the time I walked this trail, we were in the early stages of our great prevention intervention of social distancing to flatten the curve of the C-19 virus. It seems the advice to "take a walk" has been well heeded and many popular parks are filling up, parking may be difficult (even illegal), and some cases of vandalism and trashing have been reported. Palmer has only a small parking area and there is no parking on the narrow road which is lined with established homes and farms. Please be respectful and take care of the parks that are taking care of us during this uncertain time. 


Notes:

Archaeology Report HA-1226: Husband Flint Mill
https://mht.maryland.gov/secure/medusa/PDF/Harford/HA-1226.pdf

Land Plan for the new park: https://dnr.maryland.gov/publiclands/Documents/PalmerLandPlan2012.pdf