Category Archives: #Pennsylvania State Parks

Poking around the PA Parks

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Last year, as I might have already reported, my husband and I purchased a Pennsylvania State Park Passport, a chubby little guide to all the state parks and state forests in the state. It cost $10, and as we always want to get our money’s worth, we’re now determined to visit as many of the parks as possible.

We set out to visit three parks over the July 4 weekend, both within an hour and a half’s drive from our vacation home near McConnellsburg. The first one, Memorial Lake, was a bust since just as we were exiting our car for a scenic picnic, it started pouring! Nevertheless, we did get our passport stamped, and also got some good advice from one of the park rangers.

Without her enthusiastic recommendation, we would never have found “the cabin” which she assured us is a must-see at the other nearby park, Swatara. Why, we asked? Because it has a waterfall behind it, she reported. It is also not on the trail map which we picked up, but she marked it’s location with an “x” and we went on our way with hopes the sun would come back out.

After eating our picnic in the car while waiting for that illusive orb, we set forth on a rail trail toward the mysterious cabin-with-waterfall. It is actually a well-preserved but now open (as in, no glass in the windows, by design) sort of shelter for picnics and, by arrangement, overnights. And, yes, there is a waterfall behind it which makes for a very dramatic view from the back windows.

The cabin was built in the late 1930s by a local “shop” teacher named Armar Bordner. It wasn’t inside a state park then… it was just a hideaway he built with the help of his students – which was legal and perfectly okay back then it seems.

Eventually, the park was planned and eminent domain threatened to take over Bordner’s retreat. He cut a deal to stay until his death, then bequeathed it to the state (with some Boy Scout deal in there too as I recall). Through the magic of YouTube, we can hear Bordner’s voice and get some further details of his history, if you are so inclined. Swatara State Park also includes a fossil pit where you can search for the state fossil, the trilobite. We didn’t get to do this, though, because it started raining again.

The next day we met a friend for a picnic at Pine Grove Furnace State Park. This park has a lot to offer – access to two lakes, the Appalachian Trail, and the Appalachian Trail Museum, as well as a historic iron furnace and associated buildings.

I went kayaking on the larger of the two lakes, Laurel, which was a treat. The water lilies were in bloom, and it was acceptable, it seems, to kayak right through them. I worried a little that I would be harming them, but apparently they just bounce right back.

Two days, three parks, three new stamps in our passport. And the adventure shall continue…

The cabin.
View of waterfall from back area of cabin.
It’s always a thrill to walk even a tiny bit of the Appalachian Trail!
Kayaking among the water lilies.
row of historic lime kilns in Canoe Creek State Park

Industrial Echoes

#Pennsylvania State Parks, industrial heritage, travel,

A trip to one of Pennsylvania’s 111 State Parks is as likely to uncover some of the state’s industrial past as it is to introduce you to natural wonders. Case in point, our visit yesterday to Canoe Creek State Park in Hollidaysburg.

In this case, it is the state’s once-thriving limestone industry that we learned a bit about. I say “a bit” because although you can view what is left of the two historic lime kilns (see photos below), the interpretation consists of three pretty worn interpretive signs, and the small museum/interpretation area at the park office was closed. (Double bad luck for us as we were hoping to get our recently acquired Pennsylvania State Park Passport stamped!)

One of the signs reminded the reader to think about how this quiet, seemingly bucolic parkland was once teeming with sound, sights, and smells. My imagination ran even further into the senses, speculating that you could probably have even tasted industry in the air as smokestacks belched, engines sent fumes billowing, and sweat poured off laborers.

Now, all we could hear was our own footfalls, a few distant crows calling, a woodpecker drilling for insects, and – when our trail skirted a scattering of homes on the outskirts of the park – a tinkle of wind chimes in the distance. The air was fresh in the mid-40s degree weather, and the dappled sun illuminated what was left of the autumn leaves in the tall maples, tulip poplars and oaks.

Ghosts and echoes of industry past, fitting for a Halloween hike.

What’s left of the Blair group of lime kilns stand like sentinels to a more industrious past.
View from the top. Steve attempts to glean helpful info from the park brochure. Or perhaps starts mapping our course on the notoriously unhelpful trail map.
Limestone, limestone everywhere. The trees which have grown up in the hundred or so years since the limestone industry thrived here cling tenaciously to it.
The second kiln site is more ghostly, half hidden in the overgrown woods.
A portion of the trail follows the old road bed of the railroad which carried the processed lime to market. Traces of the crumbling railroad ties are underfoot.

View from top of ridge of small lake and mountains with fall colors.

Sensing Fall

#Pennsylvania State Parks, Central Pennsylvania, fall,

Wait, how did it get to be not only fall already, but close to the end of October? Is time speeding up? Maybe.

Last week was the most perfect of fall weather in South Central Pennsylvania. Sunny and into the 70s each day, with the colors, smells and sounds of the season fully awakening the senses.

Sound: The katydids, which had stopped their call and response at night during an earlier cold spell, started up again during the warmer nights. I love to leave the bedroom window open to the cool evening and let them sing me to sleep. Walking in the woods creates the shush-shush-shush of plowing through inches of crispy dry fallen leaves.

Shuffling through the fall leaves.

Smell: We purloined ripe red apples from the park’s small and totally untended orchard. No one cares, but you have to watch out for the wicked big hornets who also enjoy the fruit. Shaking the branches brings down a rain of apples; as they hit the ground they let off their sweet and tangy scent. They are not the prettiest of apples, with black spots, nicks from their tumble, and an occasion worm hole (sometimes with the occupant still inside), but they smell perfect. Apple sauce and apple cake planned in the near future!

Sight: Maybe not the reddest of years, but the oranges and yellows of the maples was intense enough. And the red oaks added their deep tones to the mix. Earth tones of the dried grasses, corn and soybeans contrasted with the bright leaves. We made the trek up to the overlook at Cowan’s Gap State Park to get the full effect from above. I always feel virtuous after this two-mile climb up the mountain and back down.

More sights in this group of pictures. Enjoy what’s left of fall and let it take your mind off everything else. I don’t think I need to elaborate on what “everything else” is right now.

A walk in Waynesboro, PA at that time of evening when the sun makes everything look even more intense than it is already.

A person in foreground at overlook over a fall landscape of small lake and mountains with fall colors.
The fall colors look good at least. Me, well, not so much.
Cowan’s Gap Lake in fall splendor.

Lake Affects I: Misery (Bay) Loves Company

#Pennsylvania State Parks, Presque Isle, travel, ,

After a spring and summer of way too much time on screens, I took a week and half off for a two-part vacation offering lots of water views. First destination to celebrate my husband’s birthday: Erie, Pennsylvania.

After a meandering trip through the back roads and small towns of western PA, we arrived in Erie just in time to catch a great sunset at Erie Bluffs State Park. After that we hunkered down in our semi-rustic cabin near Elk Creek.

The next day was our “discover Presque Isle” day. Presque Isle (“almost an island” in French) is a name shared with places in Maine and Michigan, so it will sound familiar to many. The Pennsylvania version is a peninsula, called aptly, The Penisula by the locals, jutting out between the bay and the open waters of Lake Erie. Erie is the next-to-smallest of the Great Lakes, but is still pretty darned impressive in size and scope. The Peninsula is entirely taken up by a state park with lots to offer for a day around, on or in the lake.

First stop was Misery Bay and the Perry Monument. I was thinking, Perry the Arctic Explorer and wondering what the heck the connection was. How wrong! We’re talking Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry, the War of 1812 hero here. Through the extensive series of historic markers flanking the obelisk honoring Perry and his brave men, we learned that after their grand defeat of the British navy, they wintered-over in this bay.

On a warm and calm late summer day, the bay near the memorial looks inviting and benign. Not so in the winter of 1813-14. And maybe in any other winter for that matter. It’s name, Misery Bay, stems from the freezing temperatures and sickness that killed off a dozen men that season, and made the rest of them, well, miserable.

Luckily for me, the winds were behaving and the air was fresh. I embarked on the Lady Kate, a sight-seeing boat which, with social distancing and everyone wearing masks (including our narrator, who regaled us with information for 90 minutes straight) took us on a trip across the bay into the open waters of the lake.

After the boat ride, we had a picnic, explored Horseshoe Pond with its ring of over twenty houseboats, and viewed the picaresque black and white channel marker from the shore. I dipped my toes into the cool waters at one of the beaches before we left in late afternoon.

The next day we did a bit of a walk-around in downtown Erie, parking on the edge of Perry Park which features a looming statue of the hero. “We have met the enemy and he is ours” is his famous quotation. For our part, we met Erie, PA and now it is ours in memory and pictures.

Sunset on Lake Erie from Lake Erie Bluffs
The sky kept getting more impressive after the sun set. Birthday Boy documents.
The Lady Kate awaits passengers near the Perry monument.
Houseboats of Horseshoe Pond.
Channel marker which looks like a mini-lighthouse, is as photogenic from shore as from the water view. There’s also a “real” lighthouse which is also much photographed.
The Man Himself presiding over downtown monument in Perry Park.

Bagpipes and Big Wet Rodents: Expect the Unexpected at Cowans Gap

#Pennsylvania State Parks, memories, ,

As I pulled up to the parking lot nearest the tiny beach of Cowans Gap Lake for an evening swim, I thought I heard bagpipes. In nearly thirty years of coming to the lake to walk, swim, boat, surreptitiously pick apples, and otherwise commune with nature, that was a first.

Cowans Gap is our default Pennsylvania State Park. Located about six miles from our cabin atop Tuscarora Summit, it offers year-round recreation. Sandy beach without jellyfish and sharks – though maybe a few stray Canada geese – boat launch and rental, and, most used of all by our family, a one-mile trail circumnavigating the lake.

We started coming to the park when visiting my (then boyfriend, now husband’s) friend John Small, who lived nearby. I recall, though he doesn’t, talking about our future on the one occasion I talked him into renting a paddle boat. (He’s not a boat person, and I now know it must have only been true love which drove him to acquiesce.)

Several years later, we introduced our baby daughter to the joys of walking around the lake on a cold February day. Not sure she was convinced then, but when she got older and we had built our cabin, many more weekends included a walk around the lake. We formed a ritual which included: 1. Always turn right from the parking lot and walk across the dam first. 2. Pitch a good sized rock off the dam aiming at the stream below. 3. Stop to walk out on the small fishing pier to look for fish or other wild life (salamanders, newts, etc.) 4. Skip stones at the shallow spot near the island. 5. Have a stick race at the bridge.

Over the years, we encountered many wonders walking around the lake. The eerie sound of ice cracking in a spring thaw. Exploring the contours of the lake bed the year they drained it for dredging. And once, while walking around the lake after dark (which they don’t let you do anymore now), a perfect luna moth glowing green in the moonlight.

But, I had never heard anyone playing the bagpipes before, and thought I might be imagining those faint but distinct notes of Scotland the Brave and Amazing Grace. To make sure I wasn’t going crazy, I asked some other beach-goers, and they heard it too. The music brought back memories of my one and only trip to Scotland in 1988, and another bagpiper playing the same tunes when we visited Loch Ness.

When I got home, I looked up the events page of the park to see if they had scheduled a program of bagpipe playing that evening. But all I found was an upcoming program celebrating Big Wet Rodent Day. The wonders of Cowans Gap never cease.

M.E. does not look all that thrilled at her first walk around the lake.
When Steve’s cousins visited, a walk around the lake was mandatory.
A few years ago, our friends Alex and Anastasia got married in the lakeside pavillion.
Fall glory, looking down on the beach from the overlook.
Even the starkness of winter brings its own beauty.
I guess not!
Moonrise. Nuff said.

On the Rocks at Trough Creek State Park

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If you like rocks, you’ll love Pennsylvania.  I swear half of the state is made up of rocks, especially judging from the back (and front, and side) yard of our property in Fulton County.  Some of these rocks are more famous and picaresque than the ones in our yard, however.

Case in point, Trough Creek State Park, home of Balanced Rock.  My husband and I hiked up to this geological phenomenon this past weekend, after a false start.  Clue, if you go:  take a RIGHT after Rainbow Falls, not a left.  The trail map is not very helpful, and there is no sign directing you to said Rock.  Since you can’t see the Rock for the trees, so to speak, you just have to go on faith.

Once you find it, after a steep (and rocky) climb, the Rock does not disappoint.  It is a sizable formation that appears to be teetering precariously over the edge of the cliff, although it has been like that for centuries and presumably will be for centuries more.  As impressive as it is, though, the Rock has not made it to the ten most famous balancing rocks in the world, I am sad to report. Nor does it have a cool legend behind it like this rock in Finland.

We took photos of the rock and then retreated to hike along the Ledge Trail, which connects eventually, after much rock hopping and dodging, to the Rhododendron Trail (lots more rocks, but also huge rhododendrons that must be amazing during the spring bloom) and back over the wobbly suspension bridge near where we entered.  This bridge put me in mind of the Q’eswachaka suspension bridge, a model of which Peruvian participants built at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2016 (though that was a lot cooler).

Even if I make it to Peru and that bridge some day, I don’t think I would muster the courage to walk across it.  So, this Pennsylvania suspension bridge, maybe built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, was the next best thing.  If you fell off this one, you would only tumble into the (rocky) creek below and get scraped up, instead of plunging to certain death in an Andean river gorge.

And, so, to coin a phrase, Trough Creek State Park (and most of the rest of Pennsylvania) Really Rocks.