The Quehanna Trail: A Western Loop

 

The Botanical Hiker and Amos Thunderfoot on the Quehanna Trail!

A week ago today, I loaded up the car with weeks-worth of food, extra hiking clothes, jugs of water, a selection of books, Amos’ favorite snacks, and of course, my very heavy backpack. This too was loaded to the gills. There may have been times when I approached ultralight, okay maybe light…but those days are gone. This experienced hiker now carries more stuff than ever and I attribute that to Amos. His food bag weighs more than mine with wet food and kibble, plus he’s got his own sleeping bag, nanopuff blanket, jacket, tie-out, and due to a skin condition he’d developed at home, a can of antifungal mousse and a bottle of antibiotics. I have also learned to carry extra water and extra food for him just in case. Still, he is my companion and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’m the lucky one who gets to walk miles and share a tent with a coonhound.

Amos all geared up passing through some rhododendron

We drove west through Pennsylvania, watching the leaves grow more vibrant with every passing mile. What a thrill to see that Welcome to the Pennsylvania Wilds sign as we coasted through the mountains. By the end of the day we pulled into Parker Dam State Park, start to the Quehanna Trail. The Quehanna Trail has been on my radar for the last couple of years, however I couldn’t figure out how to do the whole trail with Amos. We don’t do big miles and there’s no resupply for the 75-mile loop. However, given our time, I decided we’d split the loop in two, using the East Cross Connector Trail as our cut-through, so that we could resupply ourselves.

The Quehanna Trail passes through what’s called the Quehanna Wild Area, which is roughly 80-square miles, and the largest Wild Area in the state of Pennsylvania. The Quehanna Wild Area is within the sizable Moshannon State Forest; the trail also travels through a bit of Elk State Forest. However, it is this Wild Area that has the most colorful past, and that’s putting it nicely. In the 1950’s the Curtis-Wright Corporation, with a contract from the U.S. Department of Defense, purchased this land to experiment with top-secret nuclear-powered jet engines.  The venture resulted in the Quehanna Highway, a road that traverses the Wild Area, a nuclear reactor and waste storage facilities. Though these facilities didn’t stop them from dumping nuclear waste into a creek or burying toxic waste in the woods. Their experiment lasted all of ten years and then various other companies made use of the nuclear facilities until 2002. By then, the Wild Area, was again state-owned, finally abandoned by business and highly contaminated. In 2008, the nuclear reactor was sealed off and demolished. Due to the radioactivity, robots were required to do the work. Contaminated soil was dug up and replaced, small buildings buried. $30 million dollars later – the Quehanna Wild Area is open to hikers, fisherman, and hunters. This storied past, too, had dissuaded me for some time. I didn’t want Amos and I to return from our hike glowing. However, after talking with locals, rangers, trail folks, and finding at least two accounts of persons – one a hiker and one a ranger – that explored the trail with a Geiger counter, I am satisfied that the area is just as safe as anywhere else with industrial impact.

We have now completed our western loop, totaling around 52 miles over 5 days. What an incredibly stunning a very different landscape from any place I have ever hiked before. I may be a Pennsylvania native, but this place is wholly unique. It is home to elk, which I could hear bugling at dusk in the far distance. One morning, Amos spotted a large black bear padding through the forest. Another day coyotes called from forest. Nightly barred owls serenade.

 It is rife with flowing creeks. Water dances over boulders and cascades along large flat stone. The shores are a mixture of moss-capped rocks and blond sand. Never would I have expected to walk any sand along this trail. Rhododendrons crane their branches overhead, violet leaves and ancient lycopodium speckle the forest floor. Amos gets so many dips a day. I’m pretty sure he thinks this is our walking tour of swimming holes.

Considering another dip along one of the Quehanna Trail's many creeks

The forests are full of beech trees, as well as yellow and black birch, black cherry, swamp tupelo, eastern hemlock and white pine, among others. Yellowing hay-scented fern sometimes carpet the forest floor, other times its huckleberry, mountain laurel, and wintergreen. The path sometimes a carpet of green moss, other times a crunchy path of freshly fallen leaves intermingled with thigh-sized roots of some of the biggest trees I have seen on the east coast. Periodically we weave through house-sized boulders, naturally fractured with age, creating shelves and hollows. I wonder what secrets they keep within them. Atop them grow leggy yellow birch and sometimes even an eastern hemlock.

Through a fern-filled forest

When not in the woods we travel along the edge of marshy valleys, created by the resident beavers. Here golden vases of cinnamon fern grow, and the gray trunks and scarlet leaves of red maple stand stark against the blue sky. I envision returning and simply tromping through them one day.

A marshy valley with golden ferns

The East Cross Connector Trail was by far the most beautiful of the leg of the journey. Here I walked through what are called “meadows” although very different from the grassy wildflower meadows one typically imagines. For miles we wound on slender grassy path between wintergreen ripe with minty-tasting berries, blueberry and huckleberry shrubs, and bracken fern. Clumps of trees stood here and there and the sun shone down upon us. It was challenging in midafternoon, and I took the lead keeping an eye out for rattlesnakes which are said to be very present, but what a stunning stretch of trail. These meadows were interspersed with dry woods filled with the orangey mittens of sassafras and deep evergreen mountain laurel and dark hemlock glens. Here we walked the heart of the Quehanna Wild Area, even passing an old pumpstation that was tied to the nuclear reactor. I wondered how humans could lay eyes on such a paradise and think let’s dump toxic waste.

An eastern hemlock glen

And so we’re taking a day in between our loops, giving all six of our legs a rest, cleaning up, eating, and sorting gear for the eastern half. Thanks for following along in our journey and thanks to all the folks that make this trail possible, it is well maintained and a treasure.

*Photo uploads were limited given service - so many more to come! Check out The Botanical Hiker on Facebook and Instagram to see more photos in the next couple days.

*The Quehanna Wilds backstory is attributed to Ben Cramer and his book A Guide to the Quehanna Trail.

 

Wandering the Pennsylvania Wilds

 

It's that time again. Time to hit the trail. To plan, prep, pack and after this flurry of anticipation, walk into the unknown. Our long walks have become annual. These, our autumnal pilgrimages, are my opportunity to place both feet firmly on the ground and let the wonder seep in. 

This year, given all that it has delivered, I decided to do a twist. Rather than walking end-to-end, from here-to-there, I will walk in circles. That's right. I plan to walk many miles and end up right where I started. This will afford me the ability to plan less, to schedule less, to stop looking forward and be in the now. I have discovered in the last few years that my home state, Pennsylvania, has enough miles of trail that it alone could likely keep me hiking the rest of my days. But even more surprising is the number of loop trails it encompasses. I have set my sights on several, most within the Pennsylvania Wilds region. The Quehanna Trail. The Allegheny Front Trail. The Susquehannock Trail. The Old Loggers Path. I've done my fair share of planning for these treks, however, how many I'll hike I have yet to decide. I've got almost four weeks.

Most of my long hikes have included my father. Most all of them he delivered or retrieved me from the trailhead. Many of them he joined me for several days. On one - my thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail - he hiked hundreds of miles with me. Just last autumn he drove with me six hours to the start of the Tuscarora Trail in northern Virginia. In February he passed from this life into the next. I had a friend tell me now he is everywhere. And I firmly believe that. I told him in his last days of all the trails he'd see with me when his body would no longer hold him back. 

My saddleback, block-headed, coonhound (a Florida native once gave this description of Amos) will be joining me, and we'll be in good company I know. My only goals for this hike are to be. here. now. The last year has been one of letting go, adapting, of embracing every day even the hard ones. Sometimes reluctantly. And so, that's what we'll be doing while we're walking in circles in the wilds of Pennsylvania. Willingly. All while listening close to the chitter chatter of birdsong and breeze through the trees, lingering with asters and witch hazel and blue-stem goldenrod, struggling over rocks and roots and sweating up summits, sitting in the dirt, sleeping close to the earth, and eating mostly the same thing every day. I'm sure there will be much more I have not anticipated. That's the deal you make when long distance hiking - a surrender to the unknown. But I'm ready. Service will likely be minimal, yet I'm looking forward to sharing the story with you as it unfolds.   

A Season of Immersion

 

Enjoying black birch tea at the conclusion of our opening forest bath in the Milford Experimental Forest

I spent my spring and summer in the company of a small collective of plant enthusiasts, nature lovers, and aspiring herbalists. Six sweet souls joined me at the school for the Plant and Place Immersion, an herbal medicine program dedicated to cultivating kinship with the natural world. Beginning in early May and finishing at the end of August, we met two full days every four weeks and thread our time together with virtual sessions to keep connected and learning. Our classroom consisted of wildflower meadows, the protected Milford Experimental Forest, and nearby wooded trails. A tipi sheltered us from rain and bright summer sun. I was their guide, but the plants their true teachers and conduit for connection.

Journaling sensory interpretations with Yarrow

Learning botany and plant identification

Participants explored herbal medicine through five modules:

• Basic Botany and Plant ID
• Ethical and Wise Foraging Practices
• Cultivated Herbs for the Home Garden
• Tree ID, Ecology and Medicine
• Mushroom ID, Ecology, and Medicine

Sensory interpretation of both the plants and within our own bodies were a constant thread and provided participants with an understanding of how herbs can foster balance within the body, mind, and spirit. We monographed a variety of plants ensuring that each participant would complete the program with their own detailed materia medica, essentially a guide of the medicinal attributes of the plants we met, how to prepare and work with them for a variety of ailments.

 

Wild green cake topped with Garlic Mustard (recipe courtesy of Alan Bergo)

We cooked up wild green cakes from plants freshy harvested by participants - a blend of stinging nettle, violet leaves, cleavers, and garlic mustard - and sipped a spring tonic of chickweed and burdock root. Participants learned how to craft their own infusions and decoctions from herbs utilizing herbs they had harvested and dried themselves, as well as how to create mineral-rich vinegar extractions.

Sensory time with the plants - before monographing a plant, participants took solo time with the plant to document their sensory impressions.

Participants discovered the importance of fostering relationships with the plants that share our place and how integral these relationships are for working with plants medicinally. The natural world is all too easily perceived as a collection of resources, commodities available for the taking. The indigenous worldview perceives the natural world as a community of individuals, subjects rather than objects. There are plant people and tree people and rock people - this is not personification - but rather a recognition that these are sentient living beings with intrinsic value. Given this animacy we should behave as we ideally would in our human relationships, with respect, compassion, and reciprocity. They are after all our kin. May we foster relationships with the plants, work with them, rather than merely using them as a means to an end.

Making herbal salve infused with calendula, plantain, and chickweed

Labeling salve with all the important details

We crafted herbal infused salves from wild harvested and cultivated herbs and learned a myriad of ways in which these topical preparations can heal irritated tissue due to wounds, insect bites, and dry skin.

We crafted numerous tinctures and discussed the virtues of both folk tincturing and scientific measurement, working with dried herbs and fresh herbs. Participants particularly enjoyed harvesting fresh lemon balm from the garden and whipping this into a delicious and medicinal alcohol extract as well as learning the more complex double extraction of reishi mushroom.

A collection of preparations

Harvesting Lemon Balm in the garden

Straining tincture

Combining a water and alcohol extract for a mushroom double extraction

Guest teachers shared their insights and inspired participants to listen closely and offer gratitude, build soil, walk barefoot, and become acquainted with the many four-legged, winged, and fuzzy living beings with which we share our home. Lakota pipe carrier, Scott Weis shared stories with us his time with indigenous elders and led us in ceremony. We visited lifelong gardener Paul Cardillo at Earthman Farm and learned how to make compost to nurture a variety of plants. With Barefoot Ken, we padded around sans shoes, wriggled our toes with glee, and discovered how to sense place through our feet. Naturalist Emily Woodmansee taught us how to let curiosity lead the way, how to map birdsong, and walk with heightened awareness.

Naturalist Emily Woodmansee with treasures from the forest

Walking barefoot makes you smile

Gardener, Paul Cardillo at Earthman Farm

Homework included daily sit spot, sensory walks, and solo time identifying and researching herbaceous plants and trees to encourage participants to better get to know their personal places that they call home. These practices imbued them with a sense of belonging, rooting them to place in ways never before known. We shared our experiences through group shares and storytelling and learned from one another in community as our ancestors surely did. 

Participants Christina and Shelley holding herbal bundles - keepsakes from the land - and our mandala offered in gratitude to place

We finished our time together exploring the forests and fields that had nurtured our growth. We greeted now familiar plants and yet still met new plant, tree, and fungal people. A guided forest bath gave us time to reflect, give thanks to the land and one another, and contemplate where our paths might lead next. Participants finished with full hearts, a variety of preparations, a journal filled with observation and herbal monographs, and certificates recognizing their dedication to plants and place, a culmination of 120 hours of study in bioregional herbalism. 

I poured my heart and soul, sweat and labor, into this program all of which was fully reciprocated by the enthusiasm, wonder, and dedication these participants shared with me. I am already dreaming up next year's curriculum and looking forward to who might join me in the Plant and Place Immersion 2025. 

If you'd like to deepen your connection to the natural world of which you are a part, discover how to work with plants as food and medicine, and make herbalism a part of your everyday life, then reach out and secure your spot in the upcoming Immersion! To learn more about the program and other offerings from the School of Plant and Place Connection, visit: www.SchoolofPlantandPlaceConnection.com.