Quehanna

Yesterday morning RGBisMe and I drove up to Quehanna Wild Area to do a little hiking. We chose the Crawford Vista Trail and looped back via Dry Marsh Trail. This has got to be one of the most pleasant and diverse hikes we have ever taken. It was somewhere under 4 miles in length but we were so energized from all that we had seen that it seemed like a level walk through the park all morning.

There were fiddle head from at least 3 different kinds of ferns along most of the trails. Lichen was blooming at Crawford vista. Warblers were darting here and there and we could always hear a Black-Throated Green Warbler somewhere nearby.

As we hiked away from the vista into Elk County we actually saw signs of an elk! I looked at the scat pile and said, "That's no deer!" RGBisMe made me take a photo using his compass for scale.

Dry Marsh Trail was actually elevated on a grade through an active marsh. An interesting thing about the entire 50,000 acres is what was state forest land and was sold in 1955 to the Curtiss-Wright Corporation. They used the area to develope nuclear jet engines and conduct research. The land was returned to the state in 1966 and now is managed as the Quehanna Wild Area in DCNR’s Moshannon and Elk forest districts. There are still traces of radioactivity in the wild area although the stateassures us it is minimal. They did, however, remove all hunting camps from the immediate area. The boundary of the wild area is a symmetrical 16-sided polygon.

The final mile or so along Meeker run was so beautiful. I reminded us of the best parts of hiking back to the geocache called Serenity. We think this was better because there was no road walking nor a camp at the end of the trail. There was an old camp foundation at one point but we now know how long that has been gone and why.

Quehanna is so much closer than we realized too. The trails are less rocky because it is out of Pennsylvania's ridge and valley section and is on the Allegheny Plateau. This is probably another reason why we were less fatigued. I can guarantee that this past Sunday will not be the last time that I explore trails in the Quehanna Wild Area.