Road Trips and Hike Reports

It was a little warm by the time we got to this trail.  This 'state forest wild area' is the largest in Pennsylvania at over 50 thousand acres spanning 3 counties.  I'm not sure what exactly differentiates a state forest wild area from a normal state forest.  The largest state forest in PA is astonishingly large at 300 thousand acres.  The Quehanna Wild Area is a fascinating and under-visited area.  The drive through (on th Quehanna highway) is exhilarating with lots of curves and dips and very little traffic.  It was previously home to a number of defense industry research areas including a small nuclear reactor.  This hike actually started just off of 'Reactor Road' which led to that, now completely demolished, nuclear reactor. The variety of scenery along this loop trail was phenomenal.  There were areas that were very dry and even semi-arid feeling but also wet and muddy areas.  The vegetation varied a lot from mostly hardwoods in some a...

This hike was the start of our long weekend trip to Pennsylvania.  I really wanted to get away for a trip before summer crowds and heat set in.  We stayed Friday night at the casino in Salamanca (NY) then 1 night at a motel in southern PA before a planned 2 night stay in a Yurt at Ohiopyle state park (PA). The hike was a good start to the weekend.  This was not a site we'd been to but, like about half of our NY hikes, it is along the Finger Lakes Trail.   There was, on a per mile basis, a fair amount of climbing on this hike.  

This was a good vigorous hike on a part of the FLT that we hadn't done before.  Almost the entire length of the trail goes through 'Hoxie Gorge' which, despite starting almost beneath a tall bridge carrying I-81, was fairly wild feeling.  I don't know the name of the creek that we were walking along but really it a series of different little streams constantly splitting and merging.  It was hard to even keep track between stream crossings if we were crossing the same stream multiple times or different streams each time. The trail itself wasn't the most impressive piece of trail infrastructure. There were no bridges, almost no boards across muddy areas and a lot of areas where there wasn't any sort of a shelf for the trail so it was a little more tiring than it needed to be. This was also the first substantial hike with the new backpack. We bought a new backpack on our trip to Saratoga a few weekends ago with our friend Jim from Vermont.  The new backpack is the ...

This was a nice little hike that we haven't done before.  We bumped into a few people on the trail who were all part of a group of 6 people doing a hike together.  They didn't know where the others in their group were at relative to each other so it was fun telling them there was just 1 person in front of them or that they were the last group etc.    

Clearly this wasn't an expedition.  It was a brief stop on the way to dinner but it was a nice way to enjoy the longer days of spring.   Brian found a ring on the ground which I took back to the park the next day.

This was a new park for us.  I don't think I'd ever looked into it before.  A gulf, in this part of the country, is a deep gorge with a creek in it.  This Erie county park is over 500 acres and, as the county's park webpage clearly states, not developed.  There are 11 named and marked trails in the park but no bathrooms, garbage service and with the exception of 1 bridge, seemingly almost no trail structures to make creek crossings easier.  The markings were interesting.  All the trails we used were color marked matching the map from the website.  Some of the trails that were only a mile or two had dozens of fence stakes with color matching, sequentially numbered little markers on them.  Still, we had to do a lot of visual scanning to follow the route because it has been very wet and in this early part of the season there weren't super obvious tracks in some areas. We haven't been hiking that much lately so this was a good spring, get back into i...