Disclaimer: This page represents a personal view of our amazing Commonwealth from a non-native. Offense is not intended. Neither are errors. If you have any comments E-mail: Peter Fleszar, February 17, 2008
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The "Keystone State" is central to the Northeast Corridor megalopolis but it's NOT all paved. There are millions of acres of public and some private land open to hikers and others who enjoy the outdoors.
This page is intended to help you get oriented enough to interpret trail guides and other published descriptions.
I moved here from Iowa, a state with a thoroughly rational form of government, in 1998. Pennsylvania is a lot more fun, but unlike some other places it takes a bit of effort to discover where and why.
If this page gives you a bit of a boost on the learning curve, then I've met my objective.
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State roads come in three flavors:
Interstate highways have blue shields with little red caps just like in other states. As in other states they often intersect each other, but sometimes in Pennsylvania they don't bother. Just like in the rest of America north-south I's have odd numbers and the number gets higher further east, which explains why I-99 runs west of I-81, and I-81 runs basically east and west through the Harrisburg area. Interstate highway routes don't suddenly take obscure exit ramps or imperceptibly end, except in Pennsylvania. Get the picture?
Fortunately the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation (PENNDOT) furnishes a beautifully clear highway map for free. Don't bother buying a map or getting one from AAA, just keep stopping at rest areas until the corner of the tourist-brochure rack reveals an Official Transportation and Tourism Map or an attendant has pity on you. When you finally find one you will also find, to your absolute delight, that it shows SOME (used to show all, shame!) the major hiking trails of the State.
Traffic routes is the term PENNDOT uses for roads with black-and-white large numbered signs. In these web pages a "US" road refers to a traffic route bearing a shield shape and a "PA" road is a traffic route with a Keystone shape sign. You will quickly find that the number on a road bears no relationship to its relative importance. In southcentral PA, PA 17 goes from US 11 to Blain, a town even smaller than it sounds. But PA 581 is a major highway with onramps and offramps, or at least part of a major route that manages also to have three other numbers in the space of twenty miles. There was once a sort of logic to this arrangement, back in 1928, probably before dyslexia was a described disorder. Click here to explore the subject of Pennsylvania route numbering further, if you care to.
State routes are the roads that in other states are maintained by counties. You will not find the blue-and-yellow shields found in some other states. However, after a bit of looking, you will find these roads numbered on "segment markers," which are low black-and-white signs at intersections with other State-maintained roads. In these pages these state route numbers are called "SR xxxx." This is always a four-digit number because SR's with lower numbers are traffic routes or Interstates. Some PennDOT county offices, just to make life confusing, insist on making all the segment number signs four digits by adding zeroes, such as "SR 0008" for what I would refer to as PA 8. Often native Pennsylvanians who pay a bit of attention to such esoterica will call these roads "legislative routes" and still in hiking guides the occasional "L.R. 54032" designation creeps in. You need to ignore the five-digit numbers because you won't find them on signs anymore. Current editions of the DeLorme Pennsylvania Atlas & Gazetteer usually show the four-digit numbers. Once you get used to this odd system of nomenclature and marking you will find these indispensable for accessing PA's wild lands. These low white signs generally separate the roads that go kind-of-somewhere from the roads that suddenly end amid a knot of NRA Life Members interrelated for several generations who just happen to be cleaning their guns as you try suavely to turn around in their driveway.
But like any human invention you will find downsides. First, the roads change number when they change from one county (meaning one PennDOT maintenance district) to another one. As an example, SR 4004 in Franklin County becomes SR 2018 in Huntingdon County which it enters briefly before becoming SR 1010 in Fulton County. Second, the state is trying to get the local municipalities to take over maintenance responsibility for these roads so sometimes you will find that a road clearly marked as "SR 2032, Big Hollow Road" in the DeLorme is now called "T-664, Joe Schmo Road" on all the signs when that local township takes it over and the low white signs are gone, meaning you are now lost...
Hiking is a human’s most direct experience with our Earth. If people walk strictly for exercise they might walk around the track, the block, or maybe the neighborhood park. Hikers differ from walkers because they want the different sense of place, a momentary change and alteration in their senses through experiencing a different place. A basic understanding of geography, or the basic spatial relationships of an area, can help you not only stay found as you hike but also to appreciate your temporary spatial displacement. (Still with me? You MUST be hard core!)
Pennsylvania was originally settled by a mixture of ethnic and religious groups, such as Huguenots, Slovaks, Quakers, and Scotch-Irish, but in the southcentral region the "Pennsylvania Dutch" predominate. These folks have origins in the zillion principalities of the former Holy Roman Empire (famously none of the above), i.e. southern Germany, and Switzerland, and attend such churches as Lutheran, Brethren, and "Otterbein" United Methodist.
Politically they have re-created the Holy Roman Empire in the New World, but even more so because there are over 2,000 independent municipalities in the state. These can be called cities, boroughs (a nearly unique-to-PA term), townships, or town (there's only one), each with very broad powers that some exercise with wisdom and vision and others don't bother with at all. There are also 67 counties. Counties do such vital things as maintain records (with the help of such folks as a prothonotary (pro-THON-no-tear-ree), recorder of deeds, register of wills, all of whom are separately elected in what seem to be hard-fought campaigns...why???) and plan for solid waste disposal. Occasionally there are county parks.
On road signs you will see "Village Of..." These communities are unincorporated parts of one or more municipalities (so are even more numerous). These, rather than the municipalities themselves, are shown on the Official Transportation Map. Sometimes, like Drab in Blair County, you will find them on the map but no trace on the ground. The reverse is also true, even for places with a post office like Artemas and Mahanoy Plane.
A very small subset of the Pa. Dutch adhere to one of the so-called "Plain Sects" such as some branches of Mennonite faith and Amish. Naturally these Plain Sect adherents are the folks who stand out to the casual observer because they wear black clothes without buttons and drive horses from buggies. Lancaster (pronounced LANK-uh-stir) County is known nationwide as a center of the Plain Sects and many thousands of residents there still profess one of these faith traditions. However there they are greatly outnumbered by other Americans (referred to as "English" as distinct from the Plain Sect folks) and surrounded by suburban sprawl. You can still see buggies on multi-lane US 30 in front of "The Amish FARM And House" but these are either tourist rides or especially determined. The Plain Sect folks have spread, sometimes many generations ago, to other parts of Pennsylvania and other states. One area where their rural lifestyle still seems in tune as well as in place is the Kishacoquillas (pronounced "Big") Valley of Mifflin County which has so far escaped the kitschy tourist traps and multi-acre outlet malls. You will sometimes even find Plain Sect adherents on Pennsylvania's trails, sometimes in great numbers in apparently organized tour groups. Now if only we could get them to do trail work...
Place names in Pennsylvania sometimes confuse outsiders because the legal names of municipalities can repeat and the common name of communities frequenly bears no relation to their legal name. "Hershey" is known worldwide as the home of North America's leading confectionery manufacturer, and the Chocolate World and Hersheypark tourist attractions. However, there is no city, town, borough, or township called Hershey, it is within Derry Township (Dauphin Co.), whose good citizens just voted for the second time not to change the name to Hershey. The (parentheses) are needed because there is also a Derry Township in Mifflin County, another in Westmoreland County, and elsewhere besides. Penn Township? There are more than twenty of them in the state. Just get used to it.
This Guide is written for the Susquehanna Appalachian Trail Club in the Harrisburg area and is the companion to its Hiking Southcentral Pennsylvania on-line starter trail guide. If you listen to the radio stations in the Harrisburg-York-Lancaster media market you will more frequently hear "Central PA" but one look at the map will show that the middle of Pennsylvania is State College and that's two hours away, except on some fall Saturdays it's twelve hours away--or at least seems that way when you're trapped between two RV's, both festooned with magnetic Nittany Lion paw prints, and filled with kegs. (The astute hiker will look up the Penn State home football schedule and plan fall hikes around not going anywhere near any road heading to State College on those dates, but I digress...) The area within the day-hiker's radius (let's say 75 miles) of Harrisburg is generally called the "southcentral region" by State agencies such as the Department of Environmental Protection that feel the need to divide the State into more than "eastern" and "western". One popular series of trail guides, the "50 Hikes in X$ Pennsylvania" will define X$ as Western, Central, and Eastern but this is somewhat of an exception.
When you are in the middle of the State one sometimes wonders how to divide "eastern" Pennsylvania from "western." For me personally the telephone area codes provide the most succinct definition: 814 and west is western, 570, 717, and east is eastern. This makes Harrisburg eastern PA and State College western PA. State College could be called neutral ground but they watch Altoona TV and Altoona is definitely western so the distinction fits. Another way of drawing the line is at http://www.popvssoda.com/: if you seek a carbonated beverage and get a "soda" you are in the east, a "pop" places you in the west.
Hikers will find other humans sharing time and space with them in Penn's Woods. Usually these are fishermen or hunters.
Fishermen suddenly appear on the waters, like mosquitoes, on the "first day of trout" season in April. Fishermen sometimes beat down trails to access waterbodies. Sometimes the non-fisherman who encounters these will wonder at the thought of carrying something long with a sharp hook on it, on these fishermen's paths where nothing is cleared whatsoever. Fishermen and hikers compete for the same parking spaces if a trailhead is near a creek but otherwise share the same needs and desires for wild, quiet places.
Hunters appear in the woods in May, and October through January. Pennsylvania typically sells over a million hunting licenses each year. One archaism Pennsylvania should never get rid of is the law banning hunting on Sunday. (Pay attention, they keep trying.)
Hikers all year round often find the woods denuded of vegetation between eye level and the ground, except possibly for ferns, briers, and mountain-laurel (not ideal deer food). This is a sure sign there are too many deer in the forest. You will see this phenomenon all around the state. Hunters kill deer, which is a good thing for the forest, and good to eat too. Rifle season for deer is the two weeks starting the Monday after Thanksgiving. Rifle bullets can travel over a mile with lethal effect. Hiking season is not these two weeks.
Hunters use the same trails hikers do, and often in greater numbers. Hunters and hikers have many of the same needs and coexist well in Pennsylvania, except for those hunters who sneak in their ATV's illegally to drag their deer out, and those hikers who don't understand the importance of mutually beneficial ecological and political relationships.
Hunters also kill black bears during a three-day season right before Thanksgiving. In some areas bear hunting extends into deer season, and maybe even longer now. Hunting bears is good for hikers because, although bears are not very good to eat, the bears have learned to associate humans with hunters and therefore stay away from humans, instead of eating them. Hikers who wear all black Polartec fleece during bear season are placing themselves in quite a bit of danger. (I've seen this...)
Turkeys are hunted in two seasons. In the spring season from the end of April to Memorial Day Monday (extension effective in 2008), "gobblers," or male turkeys, are the prey. The Game Commission will tell you hunting is "by calling only." That means the hunter sits under a tree with an orange band around it and makes noises using various non-electronic (if legal) contrivances trying to sound like a hen in heat. This is what the smart hunters do. But there are a lot of dumb hunters afield in spring turkey season. Since no one hikes during deer season, but hikers are trying to shake off cabin fever--plus hunters are deliberately trying to stay quietly hidden--spring turkey season is probably the most dangerous time to be in the woods in Pennsylvania. Hikers need to wear orange if they are out during spring turkey season, not just "deer" season in the fall.
One thing hikers should NOT do during spring turkey season is wear red handkerchiefs and blue jeans. (I've seen this, too.) To a bleary-eyed hunter who got up way too early looking for a red head on a blue body, you could become a target.
Fall turkey season is co-ed, either males or females are fair game. Fall turkey season also overlaps with small game season where such animals as rabbits and squirrels become prey. After a brief pause "muzzleloader" season for deer starts. This period runs roughly from Columbus Day weekend, to the week before Thanksgiving. Squirrels are good to eat fried on a sandwich if someone else picks the bones out. Turkeys are good to eat fried if someone else tends the turkey fryer, because the fryers have a tendency to catch fire. Hikers are not good fried, so avoidance, or orange clothing, is in order.
The hunting culture seems strong among Pennsylvanians, especially males with rural roots. Although hunting is said to be in decline, it always seems both to hikers and hunters that there are probably too many hunters, especially where you happen to be. In the cities and suburbs you often see pickup trucks with front plates that say such things as "Potter County-God's Country" or "Kettle Creek-Tamarack," (have you figured out yet that PA requires only one plate?) and on May weekends or in the fall you see these trucks heading up roads like US 15 or PA 36 to "camp." Two counties in Pennsylvania (Forest and Sullivan) according to the 2000 U.S. Census boast more seasonal residences than permanent ones, and many Pennsylvania hunters even of fairly modest means have "their" camp, possibly their family's or their club's. Camps vary in accommodation from mild to wild, as do their autumn inhabitants. A common thread is "POSTED No Trespassing" signs around each one. A rare sighting is a female human in any one, especially in fall.
The State Forests used to lease lots for folks to build camps on. No new leases have been allowed on State Forest land in the last thirty years, and Forest Districts vary in their enforcement zeal of the lease terms. The number of these leased camps is slowly declining but there are still so many that they will be around, and visible from State Forest trails, for many years to come.
Private land adjoining State Forest or State Game Land tracts is prime for development into hunting camp sites if it isn't already. Since these are "POSTED!!!" it is often difficult for footpath builders to arrange to get onto or off of relatively isolated public tracts, due to jealous guardianship by out-of-town property owners who might be around for three weeks a year at most. In the Northern Tier counties these out-of-town folks are called "flatlanders."
The deer have gotten smart and move into the cities and suburbs as the hunters leave for camp. Bowhunting has become popular among diehard hunters who are more interested in deer than in deer camp. Bowhunting involves even more sitting still than most other forms of hunting, the Game Commission accommodates these with seasons earlier (warmer) than traditional rifle season. Arrows travel silently at limited range, and reloading is impossible, so a bowhunter needs to have a high degree of certainty that his target is a deer and not a hiker before launching. Hikers don't encounter happy bowhunters, as the act of walking down a trail snapping sticks and spreading scent drives the deer away they were waiting all day to see.
If hikers see other humans not engaged in fishing or hunting, especially at other times of the year, generally they are Riders. Dr. Thomas Thwaites, professor emeritus at Penn State University, has published an insightful analysis of the Rider's motivations in the journal "Brushwacker," incorporated herein by virtual reference http://phoenix.goucher.edu/MSTA/brushwacker/2003spring.pdf (click link then go to page 3).
If the other humans make even more noise and stir up more mud than the Riders then they are probably Loggers. Hikers do not usually like Loggers. However the Logger has his place because his activities pay for public land management, certainly to a greater extent than the Hiker does. Timber management keeps the entire forest from being the same age and thus vulnerable to devastating disease. Timber harvesting operations sustain local economies and enable wise use of renewable resources. (Should I mention here that I graduated from a forestry college, and my in-laws own a sawmill?)
Hikers need trails, and trails need land to cross.
As elsewhere, in Pennsylvania the wildest natural environments, and hence most trails, are on public land. It was very rare for the state to have kept land from pre-settlement days (unlike the public domain in the West), so the public lands were almost always once private, often cut-over lands the lumber companies didn’t want after 19th century clearcuts. Pennsylvania’s geology dictates broad belts of land worthless for farming, so the early 20th century mindset of believing the cut over forests were good for nothing else, thus resulted in the default and reversion of significant connected tracts of public land that make long-distance trail networks feasible, so most hiking in Pennsylvania is on public land.
However, there are several different types of public land here. The different types affect what trails are built, and even what you can legally wear while hiking!
There is well over 2 million acres' worth of State Forest land in Pennsylvania. These tracts are shown in green on the Official Transportation Map, and are administratively divided in a score of Forest Districts. Each District covers several individual tracts which vary greatly in size. These Districts are numbered 1 through 20, but also have names like Weiser and Tuscarora that are more commonly used for hiker reference. The Districts come under the Bureau of Forestry (BoF) of the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR).
Logging is a major source of revenue for BoF and an important source of livelihood for many rural residents, so management for timber is a prime objective of BoF. The relative weight of timber management versus motorized and non-motorized recreation varies by District, and District Foresters have significant latitude in establishing their land management objectives within the broad framework of statewide regulations.
Trail maintenance is a cooperative venture between hiking organizations and the Forest Districts, and trail maintenance responsibility varies widely by location and District within the State Forests. Generally, though, the connected long-distance trails, and many of the shorter trails, are maintained almost exclusively by volunteer hiking organizations such as SATC, organized statewide within the Keystone Trails Association (KTA). DCNR supports these efforts through material and sometimes financial resources. If you don't like how the trail is taken care of, volunteer some of your time to change that. Increasingly, mountain bikers also maintain trails in State Forests, obviously these are not "hiking only."
Most Districts also include Natural Areas, which are small tracts of especially scenic or sensitive environments, and Wild Areas, which are larger tracts where logging is permitted only under severe restrictions, and routine motorized use is banned.
Public Use Maps are available of each individual District. These can be downloaded from DCNR's web site, or are available free in semi-water-resistant form from the Bureau of Forestry in Harrisburg. Some of them can be picked up in person during the day, weekdays not holidays, from a rack at the Environmental Education Center on the ground floor of the Rachel Carson Building on Market Street.
Many State Forest trails have individual maps published by BoF as well, more detailed and up-to-date than the Public Use Maps. These are usually hidden on the sixth floor behind the guard, call 717 783-7941, or stop at a District office, for these.
For the individual hiker, the most important general restrictions in the State Forests are (more fully on their website):
Over a million acres of land is administered by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, a semi-independent agency of the Commonwealth not connected with DCNR. Game Commission land management is organized into six regional offices, and individual land managers working in one or more counties within a region.
Each State Game Land tract is known by a number, referred to as, say, "SGL 211." Sometimes, unofficially, certain tracts have acquired more romantic names like “St. Anthony’s Wilderness.” SGL's appear in dark yellow on the Official Transportation Map, and the tract numbers appear in tiny type thereon.
Unlike State Forests that were almost always acquired in the first half of the 20th century, the Game Commission continues to buy land. However, usually they legally can pay only $400/acre, so in practice when Game Lands are acquired they need significant contributions from conservation organizations to make up the difference between the $400 and the real price. The $400 part comes from income the Game Commission realizes from logging, ammunition taxes, and hunting license sales. Hunters often complain about paying $20 for a license but point with pride at all the land “they” bought. Some hunters and many hikers know that’s not the whole story. One example is the "Thousand Steps" tract near Mount Union where the Central Pennsylvania Conservancy "sold" steps for at least $100 each, to make up the six-figure difference between what the Game Commission would pay, and what the corporate landowner would sell for.
Rules for using State Game Lands and the rest of the State Game and Wildlife Code are enforced by Wildlife Conservation Officers (WCO), Land Management Officers (LMO), Deputy WCO’s, and maybe even other abbreviations, all of whom are more numerous, better armed, and generally taken more seriously than DCNR Forest Rangers.
True footpaths are often allowed and sometimes welcomed on Game Lands, always maintained by a volunteer group rather than the Game Commission. More recently-established trails operate under a somewhat peculiar set of rules, prohibiting certain practices such as marking side trails. So you need to read the maps (that is, the ones published by the hiking organizations) closely.
Game Land maps are available in printed semi-water-resistant form for $1.00 each (that’s 94 cents plus tax) either by mail or during the day, weekdays not holidays, over-the-counter at the Game Commission’s headquarters at 2001 Elmerton Avenue in Harrisburg. The same map can be downloaded for free from the Game Commission website (click http://www.pgc.state.pa.us then click "State Game Lands" in left menu, click the county of interest, then look for the game land number) These “Sportsmen’s Recreation Maps” vary widely in quality from one Game Land tract to the next, often the grassy “management roads” so visible on the landscape are left off the map completely, or what looks like a major trail on the Game Land map has been completely overgrown for 25 years. Hiking trails, even if marked on the Game Land maps (most aren’t), often reflect the trail’s former route left behind two decades ago.
State Game Land restrictions are (more fully on the Pennsylvania Code website):
Pennsylvania is fortunate to have many State Parks that serve either as hiking destinations in their own right, or as gateways to extensive trail networks on nearby public lands.
There was a drive in the 1970’s to establish a State Park within 25 miles of every Pennsylvanian, so many State Parks are located in rural or remote areas. Conversely there is not a State Park in the State capital or surrounding Dauphin County. When Tom Ridge was Governor in those halcyon days before September 11th, he plowed some of the State tax surplus into funding capital needs in State Parks through the “Growing Greener” program, rather than cutting taxes. Consequently Pennsylvania not only maintained relative fiscal soundness, but also State Parks with free admission and new bathrooms that are the envy of most neighboring states. (As an example, in New York State you can pay $7.00 or more to enter a State Park and find no trash cans, out-of-order CCC-built sanitary facilities, and trails that haven’t been touched since 1976, but thoroughly mowed lawns between broken-down picnic tables.)
State Parks vary widely in size and amenities. DCNR issues an annual map and guide to State Parks and State Forests, available at most State Park offices, that describes the facilities available at each Park.
State Park maps are now downloadable from DCNR’s web pages for each Park, these vary in quality from crazy cartoon doodles to GPS routes with contours. Fortunately the State Park mapmakers have updated most maps recently so quality has greatly improved. Some of them can be picked up in person, during the day, weekdays not holidays, from a rack at the Environmental Education Center on the ground floor of the Rachel Carson Building on Market Street in downtown Harrisburg. Oddly the State Park mapmakers seem loath to show the long-distance trails connecting the Parks with the less-developed public land universe, so one is sometimes left a bit of guessing room between the State Park map and the hiking trail club maps.
A recent development is the establishment of “Conservation Areas” under the DCNR Bureau of State Parks. Perhaps to make up for the lack of Parks two of these recently acquired Areas are in Dauphin County.
State Park rules are (again, more fully on their website):
Trail marking varies from nothing, to multicolored blazes on every tree next to timber-lined stone paths.
As part of the program to secure the route of the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, in Pennsylvania the National Park Service purchased outright lands that the A.T. either crossed or could be relocated to. NPS owns a belt of land crossing the Cumberland Valley east of Carlisle, and occasional chunks of mountain land along the A.T., connecting State Forest and State Game Land north and east of Harrisburg.
The Appalachian Trail Conference, through its Mid-Atlantic Regional Office in Boiling Springs and Trail-maintaining clubs such as SATC and CVATC, monitor conditions on and boundaries of these lands. A National Park Ranger in Boiling Springs will enforce rules on these lands upon discovery of an adverse condition by the ridgerunner or volunteers.
These rules are:
The closest National Forests to Harrisburg are in VA, WV, and NY. Then there is one in northwest PA. They say trails are maintained by paid staff, and you can camp anywhere. Not around here!
Pennsylvania’s hiking trails sometimes cross or use private land, generally to connect trails on nearby public lands. Some examples are:
Nearly all of these trails lack easements giving permanent right of passage, so the trail can be thrown off at any time by the landowner. This has happened many times on the Horse-Shoe Trail where the guidebook cautions you to follow the blazes carefully, regardless of what the guidebook or maps say.
General rules for hiking across private land are:
The two minute geology of Pennsylvania is: All the rocks started out flat, but then Africa started bashing into Pennsylvania so that while the rocks are still flat in the northwestern corner, they become more warped, folded, kinked, and mashed as you slice through the state from northwest to southeast. The rocks are layers of conglomerate, sandstone, shale, and limestone (or they started out that way), and they erode faster in reverse order.
Then the Ice Age came and, though glaciers didn’t reach southcentral Pennsylvania, it was very cold and tundra-like here. Rocks broke up by water repeatedly freezing and thawing in cracks. These broken-up rocks started at the top of the mountain but gradually crept or rolled downhill into talus slopes or boulder fields.
The results are, from northwest to southeast again:
Remember the freeze-thaw cycles? On the sandstone and conglomerate mountains the surface is littered with ankle-biter rocks closer to the glacial margin (further north), grading into larger boulders and knife-edge ledges closer to the Maryland border. The result is that Pennsylvania hikers need good boots to protect their feet from this abuse, with good soles to maintain traction on the bare rocks.
But the mountain ridges and the rock formations also create views and dramatic scenery worth hiking to. Since no one would want to plow and cultivate these rocks, after the virgin timber was cut the state was left with millions of acres of mountain ridges, laced with old roads, logging railroad beds, charcoal hearths, and occasional foundations and cemeteries.
Last but not least, the Pennsylvanian period of geologic time left layers of coal among the shale and conglomerate of the Ridge and Valley and Allegheny Mountain/High Plateau regions. The coal in the more highly folded and kinked area became warped and hardened, turning it into anthracite or “hard” coal. Beyond the Allegheny Front the coal remained in flatter beds of bituminous or “soft” coal. Underground oil and gas pools lie further away in the Allegheny Low Plateau region.
Pennsylvania literally means “Penn’s Woods” and the forest remains a defining characteristic of the state, especially for the hiker.
William Penn was Proprietor of many white pine, American chestnut, hemlock, and oak trees. The straight, strong white pines could be devoted to many human uses, such as ship masts, so they were cut thoroughly, not reseeded, so are largely absent from the southcentral Pennsylvania forest. Chestnut trees supported many kinds of wildlife but fell victim in the 1920’s and 1930’s locally to an imported Asian blight or fungus that killed all the grand chestnut trees.
The same fate now faces the eastern hemlock, Pennsylvania’s state tree, courtesy of the hemlock woolly adelgid. A few stands of uncut hemlock remain, most notably nearby in the Hemlocks Natural Area, Tuscarora State Forest, western Perry County, and in Snyder-Middleswarth Natural Area, Bald Eagle State Forest, northwestern Snyder County. Get out and see them while you can.
Hemlock regrew after tanneries stripped the virgin hemlock stands for bark (their wood was far less valuable) in the late 19th century. Oak trees were attacked in the 1980’s by the gypsy moth, many died on the ridges and fell across the trails. The oaks have rebounded somewhat, accompanied by trash trees like striped maple, and assorted briers to snag clothes and scratch skin. Yet the forest is still managing to grow faster than either we or the latest introduced pest can cut it down.
Of course the forest is not just trees, sometimes the understory shrubs create more of an attraction. The redbud blooms in late April or very early May and beckons the hiker outdoors after long hibernation. Pennsylvania’s state flower, the mountain-laurel, blooms in June as the hiking season begins in earnest. It is a fickle, acid-loving shrub that is very difficult to grow in a home garden but seems to thrive in awesome display just out of view of the road. I often wonder how many Pennsylvanians cannot recognize it, or have never seen it. The wild rhododendron follows by blooming in July, in impenetrable thickets in limestone valleys. Early settlers sought out rhododendron to clear and farm it so rhododendron thickets must be far less common than in Penn’s original Woods.
Here as everywhere else in North America the Indians were here first. During the contact period with Europeans Pennsylvania had been coming under the sway of the Iroquois Confederacy based in what is now upstate New York. Penn and his Quaker oligarchy carefully bought land from the Indians rather then fighting wars with them, possibly conveniently overlooking the fact that the Iroquois were happy to sell some other tribe’s land. This procedure was unusually effective, presently no Federally recognized tribe exists within Pennsylvania's borders. Indian paths became superhighways, few traces are identifiable today.
The only Indian features remaining are the streams and creeks, or at least the names. The original Euro-American mapmakers had an odd tendency to record the same name for separate streams entering a river from opposite sides near the same point, so we are left with the confusing legacy of (for example) Conewago Creek flowing from the east into the Susquehanna River at the Dauphin/Lancaster county line, facing another Conewago Creek flowing from the west into the opposite side of the Susquehanna. Just like the roads, it’s something you’ve just gotta deal with.
The Susquehanna River also has an Indian name. Rising along the river in a mythically powerful Kevlar-bottomed boat (to ward off the rocks) with helicopter rotors (to rise above the dams) to Northumberland, we find the river dividing into two branches. One is the West Branch. The other is not the East Branch, but generally either just "Susquehanna" or if needed to distinguish from the West it is the "North Branch." Another odd bit of nomenclature to just deal with.
From the very first the Quaker settlers were outnumbered by the Scotch-Irish and Germans who both poured into Pennsylvania in great numbers in the 18th century. The Germans sought out the limestone valleys and stayed and multiplied. The Scotch-Irish were more adventurous, remaining on the margin of settlement (around Harris’ Ferry, later Harrisburg, in 1750), pushing the Euro-American colonial authorities for more and more land.
One interesting incident occurred in 1758 when the colonial government decided to make an example of a Scotch-Irish settlement called Sydneysville, beside Sydney’s Knob just beyond Tuscarora Mountain which was then the legal settlement boundary. The government men came out, forced the settlers from their homes, and burned their cabins. The Indians were not appeased for long, since outlaw settlement had spread a hundred miles further west by then, spearheaded by Virginians who claimed much of what is now southwestern Pennsylvania. The French from Canada were only too happy to exploit the Indians' resentment. Their own settlements were small and far away, and their commerce relied on fur trade with the Indians that required settlement, especially by the hated English, be kept at bay. The Virginians sent out a young officer, George Washington, to parley with the French and the rest is history. During the French and Indian War Pennsylvania sent an army under General Forbes who cut a road past the former site of Sydneysville, which was then resettled under the name Burnt Cabins. You can hike part of the Forbes Road on the Tuscarora and Standing Stone Trails, and take in a dramatic view of Sydney’s Knob and Burnt Cabins village from Priceless Point on the Standing Stone Trail.
Once the French and Indians were disposed of it came time to more firmly establish borders between the colonies. The Penn family and Lord Baltimore jointly hired two Englishmen, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, to survey the border line. They even brought special stone markers from England with them (as if there weren't enough rocks here already!), most of which disappeared to souvenir hunters. Thus the border between Pennsylvania and Maryland became the "Mason-Dixon Line," and from the early 1800's to 1863 the line between slave and free states. The border was re-marked officially in 1901-03, and once more a hundred years later on the Mid State Trail with a routed sign bearing the legend: "Y'all come back now, ya hear?"
Colonial Pennsylvanians quickly moved from agriculture and established towns and basic industries. Iron making came to the fore even as early as the mid-1700's in southcentral Pennsylvania. Some local rocks could be smelted into iron in distinctive truncated-pyramidal furnaces, with remains that can still be seen, say along the A.T. at Boiling Springs and Pine Grove Furnace State Park, and elsewhere. Pits along the A.T. south of Boiling Springs once held iron ore. A furnace at maximum production could consume the wood from an acre of forest a day, and much of the original forest was made into charcoal at remote “pits” (actually just flattened spots) so all that wood didn't have to be carried off the mountain on the trail. Sometimes lucky backpackers seeking campsites encounter the remains of one of these charcoal hearths—flat, soft, and dry.
After the Revolution, commerce tried to establish itself on Indian paths widened into makeshift roads around and over the Pennsylvania mountains. The low passage between the Atlantic seaboard and the Great Lakes was turned into the Erie Canal in upstate New York, whetting Pennsylvania’s appetite for its own canal system so Philadelphia could hold off the commercial challenge from the upstart New York City. They tried so hard to make canals through un-canal-like terrain that canal boats even traveled on one of the first railroads over the Allegheny Front (now Allegheny Portage Railroad Historic Site), and one of the first tunnels was built just west of Lebanon (now Union Canal Tunnel Park). These canals were important for a time but fortunately for Pennsylvania were surpassed by the railroads. Pennsylvania has a few miles of trail following old canal ditches, but now many hundreds of miles of rail-trails, a result of likely the most active program of rail-trail conversion in the country.
Just as the canals were starting in the 1820’s, someone figured out how to burn anthracite coal. Very quickly the eastern seaboard stopped importing Welsh coal and adopted northeastern Pennsylvania anthracite coal, from portions of the Ridge and Valley region, for space heating. A few decades later first the railroads, then the iron and steel industry began using bituminous coal from the Allegheny Plateau. The “patch,” or company town, sprang up at each mine entrance, railroad junction, and beside factories, peopled by immigrants first from the British Isles, then Germany, and finally Italy and Eastern Europe. State laws allowed the company in each “patch” to own all the homes, run its own police, operate public utilities, and the like, and of course the company owned huge chunks of land around the "patch" to cut trees, or mine coal, or even in one case to raise cows for milk chocolate. These large landholdings often became State Forest or State Game Land, sometimes even including the former “patch” townsite and cemetery--as in Rausch Gap on the A.T. in SGL 211. Occasionally these landholdings have survived to the present day in the hands of a private company or trust: the Horse-Shoe Trail for 12 miles crosses the 9,000 acres owned by the Milton Hershey School Trust, where orphans formerly happily (?) milked cows.
In the 20th century the automobile arrived. Gifford Pinchot went from being Teddy Roosevelt’s Interior Secretary, preserving the public domain in the West, to Governor of Pennsylvania creating the extensive state highway system to get the farmer out of the mud. The first “Pinchot Road” was in northern York County, and Gifford Pinchot State Park was named for the road.
In an early rail-trail conversion project, the State during the Great Depression took over a failed railroad that had tried foolishly to tunnel through the Ridge and Valley and Allegheny Mountains, and from its ruins created the Pennsylvania Turnpike, “America’s First Superhighway.” (In 1940 when it opened from Carlisle to Irwin, there was no speed limit!) More and better roads quickly begat more and worse traffic, and one capacity-expansion project on the Turnpike in the 1960’s resulted in an abandoned superhighway, with two tunnels, in the middle of forested mountains in Fulton County. A good map (not the Buchanan State Forest Public Use Map that deliberately leaves the abandoned highway off the map!) will get you to where you can walk the road, gaze at the “no trespassing” signs over the intact tunnel openings, and get the same surreal feeling that our great-grandfathers would have had if they beheld a rail-trail. This abandoned highway may soon be converted into a more developed recreational facility, surely losing its "Mad Max" aura in the process.
The Great Depression also brought about the first major efforts at reforestation and resettlement, courtesy of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Many miles of trails we use today, and many trees we see today, and many of the recreation facilities we enjoy and fire towers we climb today, were built by CCC labor. Strangely, casual destruction of their labor remains commonplace, from ATV rip and tear zones in the State Forest to official action to demolish remaining fire towers.
Some more fortunate Eastern Seaboard city folks were galvanized by Benton MacKaye’s vision and Myron Avery’s action to build a long-distance footpath, the Appalachian Trail, completed from Maine to Georgia by 1937. It wasn’t possible to hike the whole thing at once, except that a young war veteran named Earl Shaffer from Adams County did it in 1948, followed now by hundreds each year. There certainly were more than a few places in 1948 where the Trail wasn’t really there anymore, such as through Fort Indiantown Gap where the Army took over the mountain and hasn’t yet let go. New volunteers had to be found to relocate and reestablish the Trail route around Harrisburg so in 1954 the Susquehanna Appalachian Trail Club formed to spearhead this task.
Better roads and the G.I. bill started many war veterans on the asphalt drive to the suburbs and vacation homes in the mountains. Interstate 81 was built and severed the A.T. across the Cumberland Valley. Expanding Washington DC-area suburbs reached the Trail near the Potomac, so volunteers built the Tuscarora and Big Blue trails as a fall-back A.T. route in the 1960’s.
But enough people could see that the Trail was worth preserving that the Pennsylvania Appalachian Trail Bill, and the National Trails System Act, were passed, making public resources available to protect and preserve the A.T. forever. The group now called Cumberland Valley Appalachian Trail Club took on the task of rebuilding the new A.T. across the Cumberland Valley. CVATC now maintains this unique section of trail, through woods and National Park Service-owned “farmland,” amid expanding subdivisions. The Tuscarora Trail remained a side trail making a grand loop with the A.T.
Environmental awareness in the 1970’s brought about new and enhanced
State Parks, new trails, and new volunteer groups to maintain them. If these
newer trails can be maintained and secured, then the hiking experience can continue
to be open to Americans sorely in need both of more exercise and greater environmental
understanding.
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