Pilgrimage 2018: St. Cuthbert's Way, Scotland - England

I've been home for a little over a week and I haven't yet really gone through all of my journal, sketches, and photographs to share. But for now, let's just agree that this was a great hike over some challenging hill country with a spectacular finish on the Northumberland Coast. I started in the city of Carlisle in Northwestern England and spent 2 days doing research for my fellowship from the Institute of Pilgrimage Studies. A whole day was at a small country church named for Cuthbert not far from Hardrian's Wall were my son, cousin, and I hiked last year. Cuddy, my carved eider duck, a favorite bird of St. Cuthbert's, was quite popular here and whenever I took him out on this hike. This being a Big Tree themed hike year, I made sure to see as many ancient trees as I could and started with this 2,000 year old yew in the churchyard of St. Cuthberts in Beltingham, one of the "Parishes of the Wall."

Can you find Cuddy?

After Carlisle I took a scenic two hour bus ride to Galleshiels and began my walk on the Border Abbeys Way literally paces from the bus station. I walked through Tweedbank then into Melrose where I found the start of the St. Cuthbert's Way. I visited the ruins of Melrose Abbey where Cuthbert began his life as a monk the I walked up into the Eildrons and visited the first of many Iron Age hill forts I would encounter for the next six days. Nevermind being run into by an old man on senior scooter or being argued with by a staff person at the abbey, the effort it took to climb the first set of hills erased any grumbles I may have had at the start.

Eildon Hills, where Cuthbert worked as a shepherd before entering the monastery at Melrose.

Up and over the Eildons, through a tiny village, along creek then out to the River Tweed and into the beautiful little town of St. Boswells where I stayed two nights. My second day was mostly along the River Tweed and up the Roman road "Dere Street" stopping in Harestanes for lunch and on to Jedburgh for the day's finish. Bus service provided my lift back to the inn at St. Boswell's and forward my third morning to pick up where I left off in Jedburgh at the amazing abbey ruin there.

River Tweed, leaving St. Boswell's with the Eildon Hills beyond.

Cuthbert's Cross is the trail marker symbol. 

Amazingly, I met very few people on the trail though a hard-charging Norweigian pilgrimage group seemed never far from passing me when I was panting and trying to catch my breath! Through tiny villages scattered amongst the foothills of the Cheviots there was stunning scenery every step of the way. My fourth night in the small village of Kirk Yetholm was my last in Scotland before crossing the border into Northeastern England and in Northumberland National Park.

A Norwegian pilgrimage group and I kept leap-frogging each other all the way to Wooler. 

Leaving Scotland, entering England.

The tiny village of Morebattle provided a wonderful pilgrim break at the St. Cuthbert's Cafe before tackling a big rise of hills beyond. More later on all the wonderful people I met like Margaret and Richard as all these folks have a part to play in the fellowship write-up and a book chapter on pilgrimage.  But for now, I'll stick with scenery because it was just stunning all the way to the sea.

The high-rise hill after Morebattle was a breath-taking (literally) climb.

Miles through misty purple heather.

The Cheviot summit in the distance was shrouded in mist as I made my way from Kirk Yedholm in a light rain and over a dizzying array of hills and valleys for a long day onwards to the Border's town of Wooler. I crossed the highpoint and unofficial (and incorrect) halfway point at Wideopen Hill. The solitude was all encompassing and I felt very small in this section. The Norwegians appeared again and I followed them a little ways until I though my lungs would burst. They are fast! I stopped to chat to two wallers repairing a stone fence and learned that both young men were fifth generation wall builders and this is all they do in good months. "There's always wall work," they said, "So as long as we can lift stones we have a job." There's way more to it than that, I said. It really is an art form and from what I could see on their summer job in this section, they were real craftsmen.

Wallers rebuilding a 300 year-old livestock fence.

Wallers help install stone steps for hikers to climb the fences when stiles won't do.

I can see down into Wooler, where I stayed two nights.

Finally, my longest day of nearly 20 miles brought me to Wooler where I stayed two nights and did a day of rest and research with Rev. Brian Cowan and the wonderful church folks of St. Mary's. This was the only place I found pilgrim mass and joined the Norweigians for an early morning service. I had two great pub suppers and lunches at the Angel Inn and the Back Bull and totally enjoyed wandering around this town to find people to talk to. I met two hikers who were doing a weekend section of the trail and who had been to the U.S. many years ago to visit places where John Muir walked in California. They remarked that the U.S. doesn't have a very good public pathway system does it? Nope, I said. (Note to self - The John Muir Way is in Scotland ...) I climbed Tower Hill and saw the troop of hard-charging Norwegians walking out of town. This was the last time I'd see them. The next morning I continued to the final destination and trail's end at Holy Island, Lindisfarne, on the North Sea. But there was still a lot of hiking to go!

I met the striding saint as this fantastic wood carving. Note the otter!

St. Cuthert's Cave where the saint's coffin was hidden and guarded against Vikings by monks from Lindisfarne.

This last day included walking past several WWII "pillbox" bunkers, so I knew the sea was near. I stepped aside for a herd of cattle trot past and talked to an older farmer on his ATV. He had stories of his mother and father who served as aerial observers during the war. "They saw and reported quite a few German squadrons," he said. "From the hill tops with good scopes, they could see warships as well as watch for planes." As I walked past other farmers bringing in huge harvests of hay, I left for good the Border's valley and began the climb up the sandstone ridge to visit St. Cuthbert's Cave and have my first clear view of Holy Island and the North Sea on top.

My first look at the North Sea with Lindisfarne, Holy Island just off the coast.

Before crossing the high speed train tracks, all hikers must get the all clear via phone.

I spent one last night on the mainland before crossing the sand flats at low tide to Holy Island. I was not prepared mentally for the amount of tourist traffic that poured on to the island just as I was arriving to find my quarters at Marygate House. The town is very small and at low tide - during safe crossing times - the population of this tiny fishing village swells to 5,000 and more in summer!  Holy Island has always been a pilgrimage destination, but so few come via the trail I had just completed. Most come by road in cars or buses - by the thousands! Most folks, said Don at Marygate, only stay a few hours to see the abbey ruins, have a pub meal (there are five pubs for a permanent population of 150 people!), stroll out to the cove or climb to the castle. Then they leave. My full day exploring Holy Island was thankfully spent without gads of tourists as I wandered the wild dunes and sea side cliffs.  Of course I had to find the farmers on the island and from a wonderful woman on horseback following sheep, I learned about salt hay and the many hidden fresh water wells - some still in hiding from past invaders like the Vikings and threat of German occupation.

Miles of hiking through the wild dunes and sea cliff area. 

Cuddy reaches the sea - at low tide.

All told, counting my extensive wandering on Holy Island, Lindisfarne, I walked 80 miles with two days rest, one day in Wooler and one day on Holy Island. Throughout the hike I conducted interviews and visited sites important to my fellowship research. This included another two days in Durham where I didn't walk except to get back and forth from my host's home to the Cathedral for more work and meetings. 

Finishing my fellowship at the Shrine of St. Cuthbert in Durham Cathedral was the perfect end to nearly two weeks of walking and research. It was a wonderful walk and without the extra days doing work, a hiker could complete it easily in 5-6 days, or, if one is Norwegian, in four days!  I am really very grateful to the Institute of Pilgrimage Studies at the College of William and Mary in Virginia for this amazing opportunity. There's still more work to be done, more conversations to have, interviews to transcribe, and so many more books and articles to read thanks to the recommendations made by my interviewees. Next year (2019) I'll present my paper at the conference in Williamsburg and hopefully be ready to publish the book!

Notes:

Institute for Pilgrimage Studies https://www.wm.edu/sites/pilgrimage/

The Yew has a long and rich history associated with religious and sacred sites in the U.K.   https://www.nationalchurchestrust.org/explore-churches/ancient-yew-trees

Official website of St. Cuthbert's Way, an amazing week-long walk that left me breathless on several levels. http://www.stcuthbertsway.info/

Pilgrimage 2018: St. Cuthbert's Way with Cuddy the Eider Duck

St. Cuthbert's Prayer by Kate Leiper

My long walk this year begins August 3 in Carlisle, U.K. with a visit to St. Cuthbert's Church near Hadrian's Wall in Beltingham, Northumbria, England. Then on to Melrose, Scotland, to start the pilgrimage path of 70 miles to Lindisfarne on the North Sea Coast and Holy Island. This long walk is sponsored by a generous fellowship from the Institute of Pilgrimage Studies, College of William and Mary, Virginia. This experience is part of my ongoing research into the ecology of pilgrimage, how environment and nature intersect with the spiritual and religious journey of intent. 

A Wild Bird and A Cultured Man, illustration by Maria Sergunia for the forthcoming book by Alexandra Goryashko (2019).

Walking the newly established path of St. Cuthbert's Way will be a chance to explore northern pastoral landscapes, the edges of the wild sea, and to talk to the people who are the stewards and keepers of the sauntering saint's favorite routes that connected Holy Island at Lindisfarne to the Bishop's Abbey at Melrose. I'm taking an eider duck to keep me company. Really, there's an eider in my backpack...

Cuddy, carved by Mike Lathroum, ready to ride in my pack across Scotland!

Now that the English Reformation Era ban on pilgrimage has been lifted (Summer of 2017) it will be interesting to see how this nearly lost art of the sacred saunter will return to the landscape - who will take it up, when, where? Will we see a new body of poetry, art, and literature come of it? I hope to speak to church folks, wardens, and vicars about how they will welcome and support pilgrims who come through their villages and towns. In a conversation via email, a vicar of one of the Parishes of the Wall, wrote "It is high time we walk again with our beloved saints across this land."

Notes:

Kate Leipet is one of my favorite illustrators, a Scot of the North Sea Coast, who explores the stuff of northern legend through our love and longing to connect with birds, sea animals, and the wildlings of Scottish mythology.   http://kateleiper.co.uk/

Excellent blog post by Dmitri Lapa for Orthodox Christianity on the story of Cuthbert,  Holy Island,  and the many places that carry his name. http://orthochristian.com/92028.html

St. Cuthbert's Way website for routes and sections. http://www.stcuthbertsway.info/

Parishes By The Wall is an association of churches near Hadrian's Wall (the path my son George and cousin Molly hiked in 2017) that has been very helpful in prior research to Cuthbert's travels along the Roman and Frontier Borderlands region. I look forward to meeting the church warden at St. Cuthbert's in Beltingham where the saint preached during a rest in his travels returning from from the Synod at Whitby as he made his way along Hadrian's Wall to the North Sea Coast. https://parishesbythewall.org.uk/

With deep gratitude to George Greenia and the Institute of Pilgrimage Studies for making this year's long walk possible! https://www.wm.edu/sites/pilgrimage/

PA Black Moshannon State Park: Wandering

On a recent professional training visit to State College, PA, I took a few hours before heading home to enjoy one of my favorite PA State Parks. Black Moshannon contains over 3,000 acres of Allegheny Front wetlands and forest.  Once the setting for multiple lumber camps, lumber mills, and a thriving 19th century village the main area of the park in the early 1990s had a large hotel-tavern, dry goods stores, post office, a bowling alley (!) and a school.  Now only the school remains while equally historic CCC structures replace the structures of Antes, a ghost town with only an historical marker to remind us of the busy logging town.  

The lower section of Black Moshannon Lake is marshy and fringed with bog habitat.

When the lumber ran out in the early 20th century (of course, no one ever believed that could be possible in the 19th century) the landscape was littered with the remains of forest and subject to frequent wildfires. I've lived in northern Vermont where the forest history is much the same. The devastation of slash fires, too frequent to allow the forest to recover, kept the landscape deprived of its pioneer growth. Erosion scarred the land and silt built up behind old mill dams. What is now Black Moshannon Lake is the silted-in expanse of mill ponds now covered in shallow freshwater marsh.

Button Bush, Cephalanthus occidentalis

During the 1920s, former Chief of the U.S.Forest Service, Governor of Pennsylvania, Gifford Pinchot tried out a new idea on this and dozens of other deeply damaged landscapes across the Commonwealth.  He and fellow Governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, had devised a work-to-restore program that in both states served as the model for the Civilian Conservation Corps.

Present camp store was built by CCC and used as a park residence. Built to last!

When FDR became President, he made the CCC one of the premier New Deal programs that brought employment and much needed recovery to both people and the land. Black Moshannon though, was already under restoration thanks to 200 men encamped at the former Beaver Mill lumber logging camp site.  As one of the first official CCC demonstration projects in Pennsylvania those boys had a bit of a head start first fighting fires then replanting the forest. They went on to build park structures and develop the trail system.

A juvenile Eastern Phoebe hanging out in the shade of hemlocks.

I had no destination in mind as I wandered around the park, sampling this trail then another, in all about five miles. I walked a few miles on the Mosse-Hanne Trail, did the Bog Trail coming and going, then did the 1 mile loop on the Sleepy Hollow Trail. I made a mental note that the Allegheny Front Trail, a 40-mile circuit around the park through the state forest might make a great off-season multi-day hike. I checked out the cabins, available year-round for rent. Oy - I need to come back!

A bouquet of carnivorous plants - Pitcher Plant.

The Bog Trail boardwalk was a nice but short excursion into the acid tannin water bog of a side cove and there I observed pitcher plants, lots of flycatchers (Wood Peewee, Phoebe, Kingbird, Great Crested) all diving and zooming around catching winged things.  Hidden from view but startling me on the way out was a Great Blue Heron hunting just beyond the cattails. He didn't go far, however, and stalked along parallel to the boardwalk making short work of fish who thought they were safe beneath the lily pad cover.

Wood Peewee.

Returning to the forest, I wandered down a trail with old plantation pine to one side and thick maple/beech/hemlock woods on the other side. Red-eyed Vireos followed me along above in the maple canopy while Chickadees followed me through the pine woods. My escort kept up until I came to the trail intersection with the Allegheny Front trail when - tempted as I was to go farther - I turned around to head back the way I came. I noticed all the mossy stumps of harvested trees scattered throughout the older forest.

Skid team at Star Mills. 

Lumber camp near Beaver Mill, later the site of a  CCC camp. 

Pine plantation.

I walked a shady lane lined with old cabins and cottages, a car pulled up and a nice lady asked if I was there to lead a group of kids from a summer camp. Now, I had had an experience with another nice lady in State College who, just hours before who - for the life of her - could not figure out my front registration plate as the Scottish national flag. She kept insisting it was a southern confederate flag - a symbol of racism. The nice lady at the park was insistent too, so naturally I was a little leery.  "Certainly you are our tour guide! You are!" I quickened my pace and she rolled along in her car behind me. "Where should we meet you?" Seeing another trail ahead, I politely explained I was there for a few hours hike and that I was sure a park ranger or naturalist would be by soon. She looked defeated. I ran for the trail head. A park ranger did drive up and a busload of LOUD kids invaded the bog trail. No wonder the nice lady was so insistent!

Woods minus the gypsy moth oaks. 

As I fled the scene, I entered another landscape transformed - Sleepy Hollow Trail - where once giant white oaks towered the valley. What was missing, however, were the oaks. The gypsy moth infestation of the mid-century had resulted in a massive salvage harvest of dead oaks in the 1990s.  A new forest of spindly maple and stick-wide hickory is taking their place.  A very nice ranger supervising a trail crew spent some time explaining to me how the loss of the white oak forest has taught him to see the woods in new ways, but he was worried. "The combination of losing our oaks, increasing summer temperatures, intermittent drought, and a longer growing season means we really don't know how to plan for new pests and invasions. If the gypsy moth taught us anything it was to ready for surprises." A few old oaks and giant pines persisted along this trail, however, and they sheltered tiny ecosystems in their root pools, stem hollows, and canopies. 

Mayflower and Partridge Berry in a pine stem hollow.

White oak offering space for a small fern and a carpet of moss. 

Back to my wandering, I tried to focus on the quality of the forest floor. Indian Pipes grew in clumps among the singular leaves of Mayflower and Partridge Berry.  A wounded but open and healing forest enclosed the trail but there was such vibrancy of birdsong and the mosaic of color in the leaf litter,  that when I happened upon a singing brook I looked up and saw such a beautiful glade of young hemlock that it almost took my breath away. The glade and the little brook seemed to hold each other in dappled sunlight, deep shade within a sun-filled forest of new growth.

Indian Pipe.

How can you not think of Gibran?

Think not you can direct the course of love, for love, 

if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Love has no other desire but to fulfill itself.

But if you love and must needs have desires, let these be your desires:

To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.

To know the pain of too much tenderness.

To be wounded by your own understanding of love;

And to bleed willingly and joyfully.

To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving;

To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstasy;

To return home at eventide with gratitude;

And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart 

and a song of praise upon your lips.

- Kahlil Gibran, from The Prophet (1923)

Black Cohosh, Actaea racemosa.

Kahil Gibran, 20th century Lebanese poet, came to mind as I sat on the shady bank of the small brook. The little stream had a song of its own that I hadn't been aware of while hiking down the path through the cut-over woods. Listening closely, I could make out verses and refrains, music of  water over root and rock so sweet that Gibran's poem came to mind of  "a brook singing its melody to the night."

White Oak stump crowned with moss.

I left the beautiful little glade and passed a final White Oak stump along the trail, crowned in moss like a bird's nest in which acorn caps were nestled along with the brown, thin leaves of black cherry. I stopped by the CCC-era camp store, once a residence and general store. The very sweet staff person at the counter shared her knowledge of the history of the place. She cooked a few hot dogs, one for me and one for herself. I love log cabins from that era, built tight, bright white chinking contrasting with dark stained logs. Just outside was the old school, its bell on a stand in front.  I walked back to the Bog Trail where I had parked along the road lined with tidy cottages.

Bullhead Lily, Nuphar variegatum.

Fragrant Water-Lily, Nymphaea odorata.

Rounding a bend in the road, Black Moshannon Lake came into view spanning the horizon from near to far, blanketed with pond lily and cattail. What great bass habitat - but not so much for fishermen who often grumble at having their lures tangle in the tangle of stems and roots below the surface. There were quite a few Great Blue Herons hunting! Mallards and Canada Geese paddled purposefully through the carpet of round leaves and blossoms, pulling up juicy bits and pieces of stringy roots. Among the white blossoms that were fully opened a riot of bees and flies hummed busily. 

Pond lilies as far as the eye can see!

Yellowneck Caterpillars snacking on blueberry leaves.  

Meadowsweet.

Counted 12 Great Blue Herons for the day, many of them juveniles.

Wandering back to the parking area via the Bog Boardwalk one more time (I walked it three times as I love bogs so much) I met a young herpetologist and his dad enjoying the bog together. He had just seen and photographed a  Smooth Green Snake - a lifer! Hurray! So many Great Blue Herons along the way and a beggar of a Red Squirrel who was convinced I was about to share my trail mix with her. When I didn't I got scolded for being a rude human.

Red Squirrel

Not a very high mileage day, maybe four miles. But I do plan to go back with more than a few hours to spend in this magnificent area. The Allegheny Front highlands area has so much to explore, not to mention several multi-day backpacking trails and the large state forest that surrounds the park. Pennsylvania has a few ghost towns and Antes is one of a dozen lumber town sites marked. The park office has many historic photographs inside - worth a stop in to take a look.


Notes:

Field Guide to PA Pond Plants http://wcdpa.com/wp-content/uploads/Pond-Field-Guide1.pdf

Black Moshannon DCNR
 https://www.dcnr.pa.gov/StateParks/FindAPark/BlackMoshannonStatePark/Pages/default.aspx

PA Swatara State Park: Bear Hole Trail - Swatara Rail Trail 11 Mile Circuit

My plans for Sunday were radically altered after hearing a story from a fossil thief.  I decided to make a sleuthing trip to find evidence of his last and riskiest heist attempt. I found it ten miles into this long, humid day hike on my second summer visit to the Blue Mountain Complex in Central PA. Someday this will be heck of a mystery story, I told him. "Just publish it after I'm dead," he said. " I don't want to go to jail in my 80s." What was it? You'll have to wait for the book. In the meantime, enjoy the puppy.

My little pit after an hour digging - one cool little fish impression popped out. 

Swatara State Park is probably best known for a now defunct fossil bank that once existed under the I-81 bridge over Swatara Creek. So much Devonian material was collected here that fossil hunters literally undermined the bridge to the point that it was unsafe for both hunters beneath and heavy trucks above.  A few years later the park tried to make up for closing the site by inviting diggers to a spoils area to dig through dump trucks of road cut material from a nearby construction project. The piles were reduced to bits within the year. Now all that remains of that site is a public digging area where some small but nice marine fossils can be found - with a lot of work and patience.

Old shale beds make for a nice public pit for digging and keeping what you find - but it's steep!

The whole park takes up a long stretch of sedimentary Devonian shales and mudtsone. Newer siltstone and sandstone banks can be found in old railroad cuts on the opposite side of Swatara Creek.  So if you know where and how to look, you can find lots of great stuff in situ but for pictures only. The public dig site is the only place in the park where you can dig and keep what you find. So I went to check out the public pit first and dug maybe an hour with my rock hammer and chisel (wishing I had brought my knee pads!) and found some nice small marine fossils and a fish - a small plated fish about two inches long.

Small plated fish with barbs - no tail. 

Very sharp shards - bring gloves. 

The pit is found along the very beautiful Bear Hole Trail hike/bike trail about a mile from the  Swopes Valley Road parking area. I was the only one in the park it seemed until about ten when folks started showing up with their dogs, bikes, and horses.  I made a quick return trip to the car to put away my digging tools then started out on an eleven mile circuit that combined Bear Hole Trail, a bit of the Appalachian trail, and return on Swatara Rail Trail.

Lock 5 of the old Union Canal.

A short way down the Bear Hole Trail, the Mifflin Trail leads to Lock 5, part of the long defunct Union Canal which was destroyed by a devastating flood in the 1860s. Parts of the canal are still watered but only in ponds and ditches, making for some great frog and turtle habitat. The bullfrogs in Lock 5 were impressively loud. The walls of the old lock are a fern lovers delight. Nature's original idea for a green wall.

Maidenhair Spleenwort growing in the canal wall.

Back on the Bear Hole Trail I spotted some lovely open forest glades that I assumed were old cabin sites since the trail was once a paved road. Most of the cabin-dwelling folks who lived in this area were forced out when the park was being established in the 1970s. These forest openings  are filled with wildflowers, humming with bees and sparkling with dragonflies. Poke Milkweeds were standing tall and seemed just about everywhere.

Poke Milkweed

Bordner Cabin

Several miles later I discovered by accident (I hadn't researched this trip at all so really all of it was a splendid surprise!) the incredible Bordner Cabin. It doesn't appear on the trail map, but I think the best places to explore aren't found on maps anyway.  I wandered in and out, sat on the porch, admired the view from every window, and read about the builder, Armar Bordner, a retired woodshop teacher and his wife, who were granted the only life-lease of all the cabin/cottage dwellers who were forced out. Granted, many of the cabins/cottages were in various states of disrepair and were not as beautiful as this hand-built log cabin, but I always feel a twinge of anger when hearing about displacements and losing home and camps under eminent domain.

View from  Bordner's great room of Aycrigg's Falls.

Armar and his wife, Peg, fought the loss of their cabin home to the state when the new park boundaries were being drawn up. Completed in 1939, Armar and Peg moved in during construction in the mid '30s and lived there for 70 years. When Armar passed away (in the cabin great room, looking up at the falls through the magnificent window) the cabin was adopted by the Boy Scouts then a Friends Group to care for it and keep it in good shape. Bordner, at age 89, gave a lovely interview in 1993 (now archived on You Tube - see Notes below), on his career as a tech ed teacher and how the cabin came to be. As a cabin dweller myself, this place really spoke to me.

Aycrigg's Falls

I could have stayed at the cabin all day but I had to remind myself of my mission - to find evidence of and confirm the fossil hunter's story. I hurried past more open glades of flowers and ferns, remembering that these spaces were once favorite family gathering spaces, hunting camps, or homes.
Nature has reclaimed all of it, but somehow the Bordner Cabin seems so perfect to be where it is.

The creek starts its wide turn to the south and I checked out a few more old locks. A threat of thunderstorms was looming and with the intensifying humidity a chorus of bullfrogs and tree frogs erupted from the watered lock near the intersection with the Appalachian Trail. 

Compare this view with a 2012 visit by fellow long-hiker, "Gone Hikin' " (see Notes below)

Thunder started rolling and the frogs started calling!

I took a quick run down the AT to see the I-83 overpass where fossil diggers undermined the highway. Though I didn't think to take pictures because the thunder of traffic and thunder of an approaching storm kept me moving pretty fast, you can find good views on the "Gone Hikin'" blog post from 2012. You can plainly see how deep the undercut had become and how much cement was poured to shore up the road above! (See Notes below)

Waterville Bridge - a really nice truss bridge! 

I ran back to the bridge. The skies were darkening and I still had six miles to go. The Watervale Iron Bridge - an iconic waypoint for AT hikers - was engulfed in a cool mist rising from the creek. I turned right on to an abandoned road, now the Swatara Rails to Trail path - though there was a solid mile-plus of open road hiking in the humid overcast before the turn on to the old rail bed. If it weren't for the birding and the butterfly watching I would have been more discouraged than I was. I was beginning to think I'd been told a tale, but as soon as I was on the RR path I re-oriented to the directions I was given.

Catbird was scolding me for attempting to pick a berry - "My patch!!"

Exposed formation of sedimentary sandstone tilted vertical.

Northern Pearly-Eye Butterfly

Shade at last!

Bikers zipped past. Lots of tilted seafloor in the RR cuts. I examined pieces of very pretty siltstone that had fallen out of place during freeze-up/thaws. Then some really nice claystone showing ripples and worm burrows. This would have been extremely shallow water, sunlit, and full of filter feeders. I found what I had been told would be there and took lots of pictures. The storms rolled over and the sun was shining again, dappling the forest floor with light and color. I love a good mystery and the Father Brown in me was quite satisfied with the discovery. Onward.

On the old Philadelphia and Reading Line.

When is it appropriate not to share an exciting find in nature? I learned the hard way that publicly posting the location of an uncommon bird species nesting in a neighboring county brought grief to a property owner. I've seen poorly behaved photographers tramp over delicate habitat and disturb animals for "money shots" having learned of exciting finds on social media.

Eva, age 6 months, standing in for the fossil site picture. Cuter than old rocks!

Even though the creature has been long gone and is quite extinct, I feel its important to protect the site, though damaged from the heist attempt in the 1980s, from future harm. I think its important to protect the storyteller too, who confessed his past deeds to me in confidence. He'd read my recent post here about our trip to Penn Dixie Fossil Park in Western New York and wanted to share his excitement for fossil hunting - which happened to include his confession - hence the radical altering of my weekend plans. When I told him the site is still there, just as he described it he said "Well, let's hope its stays that way."  Here - look at this adorable search and rescue puppy-in-training instead. I'll let you know when I write that book.

Notes: 

Armar Bordner's interview on YouTube  https://youtu.be/r-jQBYR3xT4

"Gone Hikin'" did a lot of what I hiked this weekend, except back in 2012. Though it's only been five years, I found her winter shots of some of the same places I stopped to be great comparisons for how the forest and landscape features have changed. The company store at the end of the Swatara Rail Trail, however, is no longer there. It looks to have been burned very recently. I took no pictures. http://gonehikin.blogspot.com/2013/03/swatara-state-park-pa-with-state-game.html

Geology of Swatara State Park
 http://www.docs.dcnr.pa.gov/cs/groups/public/documents/document/dcnr_20032568.pdf

Trail maps are available at the parking area kiosk - there were lots.  Here's the pdf map, too.
http://www.docs.dcnr.pa.gov/cs/groups/public/documents/document/dcnr_003057.pdf