PA River Road and Susquehannock State Park: Close to Home, Week 3

This is the third Saturday of stay-at-home. Early on, I took a tea cup and traced a circle around where I live on a map of York County. This I designated my ten mile radius for a close-to-home range of exploration, food shopping, and farm store. So far so good. As the weeks have rolled by (who staying at home is keeping track of time anyway?)  I am encountering some not-so-nice effects of overuse of our area trails, no matter how remote they may be. There are way more people in parks with some of them coming from away, not so close to home. Crowded parking lots. Some trail damage. Lots of trash, which means litter picking on my daily walks.

Greening up!

One day this week I had a raft of online meetings that started early and couldn't get out for a walk until 4pm. I pulled into my local state park across the river and found this normally empty park now crowded. People flowed up and down the two-mile-long paved entrance road in a procession of families, bikes, joggers, some with dogs on leashes, others with dogs off leashes. Amos is always leashed but I was concerned with walking the road because of the other dogs running free. As goofy as he is, he can sometimes get aggressive/protective when strange dogs lunge or taunt, even when they are leashed.  Instead, I beat feet to the farthest trailhead from the road and hiked a solid three miles without encountering another soul.

Tulip Poplar

As I write this, a friend has posted to the Thousand Steps FB page that her son was bitten today by an off leash dog on that popular hiking trail. Unable to find the owners to confirm that its shots are up to date, she is now faced with having to take her boy into a crowded hospital for treatment. She is pleading online for anyone belonging to any of our hiking groups on FB and other social media to help her find the owners. She posted a picture of the back of her son's arm, bruised and indented with bite marks as the dog came at him from behind. She said the trail was crowded and no one she asked seemed to know who it belonged to.

Bloodroot in the morning.

Mayapple ready to unfurl.

Fiddlehead of a wood fern.

Amos is a big, athletic black-and-tan coonhound. He and I both need our walks. Without a solid few miles each day he gets antsy and sometimes gets in trouble at home trying to work out his energy (i.e. disemboweling cushions and pillows!) Without my own three miles a day, which I consider my mental health medicine, I can get a little down and gloomy. So no matter the weather we've always walked everyday, often out early walking the country roads just out the front door. Lately this has been less dangerous because there has been so little work traffic to contend with. The river is just six miles away as the crow flies and in the predawn I can hear the water flowing over the dam at Holtwood, the CSX train rumbling along in the river valley, and every rooster on every farm around. So that's a plus.

Bluebells.

As the week wore on, however, I was wearing down from so much time attending online meetings, conference calls, and reading the daily deluge of emails. I decided we would get up a little earlier in the dark and drive down to the River Road for our three to five mile out-and-backs on the white gravel road which is easy to see in the predawn light and doesn't have any traffic at all, save for a few joggers.  Not much opportunity for flower photography, but the frogs calling and early bird song were easy trade offs. What I noticed in the light of my headlamp however was an increased amount of roadside trash. Seems a lot of folks have discovered our beloved River Road and feel it is easier to pitch the soda bottles and chip bags out the window than pack it home. I tied a plastic bag to Amos' harness and filled it with snack trash in the last mile back to the car.

Female Bluebird tending her nest.

Male Bluebird guarding the nest box. 

Seems to me there are a lot of folks now discovering these beautiful areas close-to-home who could use a little primer on Leave No Trace. Judging by the number of cigarette butts I've picked up - with gloves on, always - there are a lot of nervous and stressed out people as well. In all my years of walking this road, I can't recall a time when there has been so much litter. I told Amos we would come back prepared to litter pick from here on out.

Lichen woods.

I met up with an early morning jogger who slowed down to say hello to Amos. "Where are all these people coming from?" she asked. I didn't have a clue. When we returned to the car after our out-and-back I found the parking area crammed with cars by 8am - on a Thursday. We litter picked the parking area and placed dropped sunglasses, a dropped cell phone, and a dropped set of car keys on the gate post. People sure do drop a lot.

Bloodroot in bloom.

Today for our Saturday hike, Amos wore his backpack with the two saddle bags. We walked the River Road and litter picked the road filling one side bag, then climbed on to the Mason Dixon Trail at the dam and hiked up into the hills for a short section hike back to the car. By the time we arrived back to the car, his second bag was stuffed full.

Dutchman Breeches 

The Mason Dixon Trail is a designated long distance hiking trail that runs two hundred miles from Chadds Ford, PA, to intersect the Appalachian Trail at Whiskey Springs. There is one "official" wilderness camping spot on our local section at Lock 12 and when Amos and I reached it we found it  trashed. I didn't have another bag with me so I crammed what I could into Amos' now overflowing backpack. Rather than give a disgusting inventory of what we found, let's just say that whoever has camped here this week has an ample supply of toilet paper, cigars, Clorox wipes, and Billy Bob's Beef Jerky.

Litter picking on the Mason Dixon Trail - Amos' backpack is overflowing.

Add to that, the beautiful hemlock gorge has some trail damage as people who have no idea what switchbacks are for have cut straight up and down the steep ravine bypassing the zig-zag trail. Given a hard day of rain, the soft soils of the hemlock woods will quickly wash out and create a gash where people have bushwhacked. With a few more days of heavy rain, which is becoming the norm for this area, the gash will become a v-cut ravine. Our trail club chapter will have a ton of work to do in this one short section just to stop the wash outs and build rails to keep people on the switchbacks.  I need to sign up for some trail crew days...

Holtwood Dam from the MDT

All in all,  I am happy that people are taking walks and finding places that help calm and restore them. Lord knows we need it now more than ever. As we continued along the ridge and met people coming the other way (with their unleashed dogs) I politely asked  them - as I stepped carefully off trail so they could pass six feet away - where they were from. I was surprised to hear not a single local. Instead, I learned that people had come from Reading PA, Baltimore MD, Newark DE, and Wildwood (!) NJ. Wait, I thought, what happened to staying close-to-home?! I wished them all a happy hike and asked if they could remember pack out what they pack in. Everyone was very nice. It was wonderful to talk to folks about how they were spending their time, but one hiker said he is required to go in for work as he is a UPS driver. Thank you! Thank you!

Coonhound on the summit with his garbage haul for the day. 

By the time Amos and I descended the trail back to River Road, there were cars lined up at the trail head parked on both shoulders, and more trash, small things really like juice box straws and candy wrappers.  The small parking area a mile further where I had parked was jammed. Some one else had been litter picking and left their collection bag tied to the gate. I grabbed that too since I know there are no maintenance crews to collect it out here. But I thanked them anyway, whoever they were, for the effort and for caring about our River Road.

PA River Road: Keeping Close to Home

Even in the midst of a pandemic, even in the middle of human-made and human-borne catastrophes, the rise of spring comes to the Susquehanna valley as the woods swell with birdsong. During the first week of lock-down/stay-at-home/restricted travel I broke the rules and ventured down to the River Road to remind myself that life goes on without us, maybe in spite of us, and to find some peace and quiet from a suddenly, unbelievably busy online work world.

Spring Beauties and Lesser Celandine

I walked a small patch of woods near the river where no matter where you walk, there are combinations of native and non-native plants erupting from the damp soil. The river was heavily used for early commerce and people from away made the lower valley their home a long time ago so some non-native plants like English Ivy and Daffodils came with them.  I know that some folks go nuts when they see Lesser Celandine or Garlic Mustard or Dandelion and holler (especially on social media where hollering seems especially prevalent) about how invasive and unwelcome they are.  It was somewhat strange and a little discomforting, however, to see early emergent shoots of Knotweed already getting a headstart on the spring ephemerals and I cringed at the idea that by summer this whole area will be inundated with it. The bees like it, so I reminded myself to let it go, let it go.

Spicebush

Dutchmans Breeches

There are very few people here and we keep a great distance between ourselves. I like it that way and I feel no need to acknowledge them. I let the voices of the river woods enfold me - Spring Peepers, Phoebe, Chickadee, Canada Geese. It is not necessary to talk and interrupt what is already an ongoing conversation between river and woods, sky and earth. It is not necessary to understand what is being said. It is enough just to listen and accept it as a balm for these scary times. 

Lock pool.

It's enough to know that I am walking through a library of river wisdom that contains the how-to's and encyclopedic treatises on why spring comes to this place when and how it does. My memory of the spring wildflowers is based on a recognition  of stages of bloom and color that I acquired at my Grandmom's side. My intuition alone, however, tells me that my pattern of memory is interrupted by early proliferation shoots and buds I don't recognize so readily, and for that I feel a little sad. A Turkey Vulture surprised me as he spread his wings to catch the sun in a patch of open ground in the woods. Before he opened his five-foot spread of black wings, his presence had not even registered in my mind as a bird, despite his enormous size. I saw him initially as a blackened stump and gave him no mind. But the Vulture gave a couple of loud flaps and turned his wings wide to the sun and his eyes on me. No stump, friend.

Now that I'd been recognized as an intruder on the road, I moved out towards the river and sat awhile on the bank until the Vulture felt I belonged there. No hunting, no searching, no seeking, just sitting. I even opened my arms and hands to the sun and like the Vulture and absorbed its life-giving warmth. I wanted to go deeper and be even more apart from people and just sit there with my dog (Amos loves sitting in the sun) and just breathe. But it is time to go back to work as this little excursion was just my lunch walk and there are more virtual meetings to attend and more human conversations to have today. Good work. Important work.

Going home.

So these are some scary times and I hope you can find a place near home to take a daily walk and relieve the stress and feelings of uncertainty.  Unlike the places that have been flooded with folks who are hitting the trails as a kind of stay-at-home-vacation and causing many problems for our overburdened and underfunded park system, a simple back road walk can offer all the solitude and distance you need to see you through the day. Go out every day, rain or shine. Be well, stay well.