Hiking Beaver Creek State Park (and onward)

Peaceful stream-side trail along a wild section of Beaver Creek

The North Country Trail is notorious for its meandering course.  It takes 4600 miles to get from upstate New York to central South Dakota compared to 1395 miles 'as the crow flies'.  Along the way it comes as close to Kentucky as it does to Canada.

Kentucky?  North Country, y'all?

How does the North Country Trail manage to make its way to Kentucky?   Blame Ohio's Buckeye Trail.

Leaving New York the North Country Trail makes a diagonal through western Pennsylvania then joins Ohio's state trail.  There, the people who were designing the North Country Trail in the 1980's decided to defer to the older, already established Buckeye Trail's route rather than develop a route of their own.  The Buckeye Trail circles Ohio, a big jagged 'O'.

But the part of the trail across Northern Ohio is almost all on roads.  The wilder parts of Ohio are in the south and east, so that's the way the North Country Trail designers decided to go.  I wonder whether they were secretly thinking "Hey, let's make this the longest National Scenic Trail in the country".  Maybe the Buckeye Trail supporters were lobbying to have most of their trail part of this nationally designated system, because it helps bring funding and awareness.

In any case, in order for the North Country Trail to connect to the Buckeye Trail from western PA, it has to traverse a chunk of eastern Ohio on its own, and as I mentioned in my last report, this section of trail feels sort of like an orphan or a foster child, relatively neglected, even unwanted, by comparison with the state's 1444-mile signature trail.

Most of this connecting trail is on roads.  In my last report I discussed two short sections that are dedicated foot-travel only trail.  One is on private land and offers a good wild woods walk, and the other is on an abandoned rail bed beside a designated Wild and Scenic River.  The latter is just a mile of trail, the former no more than four miles.

There are two more sections of trail in this 'connecting zone' that are closed to vehicles.  One is a six mile section of wonderful trail through Beaver Creek State Park.  More on that in a bit.  From there a road walk of about ten miles takes the hiker to the other off-road piece, a rail trail that starts in the town of Lisbon.

The North Country Trail follows that paved rail trail for just 2.7 miles and then there are more than fifty continuous road-walking miles to negotiate before the orphan-stretch ends and the hiker reaches the first off-road section of the Buckeye Trail proper.

I went to Lisbon and looked at the trailhead at the starting point of that 2.7 miles of rail trail.  I found absolutely no signage or blue blazes identifying it as part of the North Country Trail.

Paved rail trail is nice, but it rarely provides the fix of 'wild' that a foot-only trail can.  I'd be done with that 2.7 miles in less than an hour, and then I would face the better part of three days hiking on roads.

Looking at my own maps I could see that there was a much shorter route by road between Beaver Creek State Park and Leesville Lake, the first piece of off-road trail on the Buckeye Trail, if only I would skip the 2.7 mile rail trail piece in Lisbon.  It would save me twenty miles of road walking.  I'd follow Ohio 39 through the towns of Salineville and Mechanicsville and on through Carrollton.

What the heck.  I decided to do it my way.  Carrollton here I come.

Okay, first came the nice six miles along Beaver Creek in the state park.  It was pretty rugged trail, with a couple climbs and descents from river valley to ridge and back.  It was all in the deep woods.  And I was surprised to find three old canal locks along the trail, remnants of an early 1800's spur canal connecting the Ohio River with the Ohio and Erie Canal.

I was out of the woods all too soon, and hitting the road to Carrollton.  I crossed Beaver Creek on a quaint old bridge on Y Camp Road before joining Highway 39.

Then there was another pleasant surprise where 'old Highway 39' comes into Salineville.  There is half a mile of good old fashioned real brick street.  And it was in great shape.

These were specially designed road bricks, like cobbles, with beveled edges, not the flimsy easily broken bricks used to build houses.



Town square, downtown Carrollton, Ohio

When I got to Carrollton I took a break to go visit another trail for a day, not part of my continuous footpath.  The Holmes County Rail Trail may be unique in all the world.  It's an Amish highway, open to horses and buggies but not to any form of motorized traffic.  Look for all the particulars in my next report.

Here are the GPS track maps of the three day hikes it took to get me through Beaver Creek State Park and on to Carrollton.

Back on the North Country Trail, Slippery Rock Gorge to the Ohio Line

It was late June and I was out in western PA hiking westbound on the North Country Trail, when Dad went into the hospital with his final illness.  By Thanksgiving family affairs had settled and Mom was adjusting well to her new situation, so I thought I'd head back out and see how far I could get before winter drove me into hibernation.

So here I am.

Back in June I had just finished hiking Moraine State Park, near New Castle, PA, and was ready to hit nearby McConnell's Mill State Park where the trail traverses the deep narrow gorge of Slippery Rock Creek, passes the namesake mill, and takes the hiker right through the adjacent covered bridge.

My first day back was a typically dreary one for late November in western PA.  But the cloudy sky and intermittent drizzle didn't dampen my joy at being back in the woods.  My spirits were as bright as this sunny fungus.

The trail climbed and descended.  Sometimes I was high up on the bluffs, but without views of the stream,  Other times, and those were the best ones, the trail kept me right beside the water.

Yes, the rocks were slippery.  But somebody got a few of them to work together as if they were coated with glue rather than slime.

There were about seven miles of trail in this small park, so by late in the day I was out doing a road walk, headed through the trail towns of Wampum and Darlington and toward another rendezvous with real foot trail in the woods.

Beside a roadside pond, I encountered a delightfully clever sign.  It spells a word, a familiar name to be precise, and the eye naturally translates when it views the sign straight on.  Can you tell what it says?  If not, I'll provide a couple of hints at the end of this post.*

The next section in the woods follows a branch of Little Beaver Creek out of Darlington.

It then passes through some recently timber-harvested forest, but eventually returns to a wild setting along the creek with some wonderful walks atop bluffs with sheer drops down to the water.  In the photo below, the trail is in the thick hemlock stand right at the top of the cliff.

Much of this country was strip mined for coal long before the era of modern regulation.  Since then much of the damage has been left to heal naturally.  Forest has reclaimed most of the land, but the odd mix of level strips and steep slopes makes for unusual hiking.  One of the level spots, one with a decent view, has been selected by the Wampum Chapter of the North Country Trail Association (NCTA), as the site for a brand new shelter.  When I passed through it was under construction, with only the floor completed to date.

It only took me four day-hikes to get to the Ohio Line.

This is the eighteenth state that I've now connected with a continuous string of my footprints.

The character of the trail changed when I got into Ohio.  The first off-road section follows an old railroad bed beside a designated 'wild and scenic' river.  The steel tracks had been removed, but not the wooden ties.

I'm guessing that Ohio trail builders focus mostly on their state-encircling trail, the Buckeye Trail.  Coming out of PA, the North Country Trail eventually merges with the route of the Buckeye Trail, but to get to it there are a few dozen miles of 'orphan' trail that seem rather neglected.  Besides the railroad bed, this orphan section has only two short bits of foot-travel-only woods trail.  One is on private land, and is not 'certified' by North Country Trail's governing authority.

The other is much nicer, but is only six miles long.  It's in a state park; and I'll cover that in my next post.  The NCTA doesn't even publish a map of the rest of the connecting route, all on roads.  Worse, the road segments are poorly blazed where they are blazed at all.  I'm looking forward to getting through.

If only it was as easy as slipping into a portal in a magic oak tree.

Below are the GPS tracks of the four hikes that got me to Ohio.  They're arranged from east on top down to west (and the state line) at the bottom.

*Hint to translating the sign:  The negative space forms the letters.  We celebrate his birthday very soon, Dec. 25th.

Split Personality - The Enola Low Grade Rail Trail

View upriver to Wrightsville from Turkey Hill gets my vote as the best of many great Susquehanna River views that are accessible only by foot.  This viewpoint is reached from the Turkey Hill Trail, which is a footpath that parallels the multi-use Enola rail trail for three and a half miles of its northern-most segment.

The Enola Low Grade Rail Trail is thirty miles long.  It is named for the very gently sloped rail line designed to transport heavy freight across this rolling country with a slope (grade) everywhere less than one percent.  It runs through half a dozen townships in Lancaster County PA from the Susquehanna River east to the borough of Atglen.  Each township is in charge of developing and maintaining its section of the trail.  There is no central authority.  Some of the townships have fully developed their length of trail, with fine packed gravel surface and fully developed trailheads.  In other townships the trail is just a weedy muddy track where nothing has been done since they ripped out the rails and ties back in the late 80's.

A summary might go like this:  Low grades for the east, high grades for the west.  But it's not really that simple.

The east end of the trail has a setting that is wonderfully distinctive.

It runs through the very heart of rural Lancaster County - gently rolling, rich soil, well drained but moist - perfect for farming.  Here, along the trail, virtually every farm is Amish owned.  Well kept boxy homes with no power lines, neat, clean barns and outbuildings, clotheslines strung on a pulley rope from house to high on the side of a barn or to the top of a pole.  Beside the barns sit tractors with big steel wheels, never taken to the fields.  I saw two little boys in blue shirts, black pants with suspenders, flat brimmed straw hats climbing on the fence of a brown-egg-laying chicken's pen.  Every farm has well tended vegetable gardens, dairy cattle browsing the fields, and of course the boxy gray-painted Lancaster County settlement's horse-drawn buggies going to and fro, hauling kids to the one-room Amish schools or parked at a local hardware and feed store.  It's an idyllic setting, but the trail through here is not ready for prime time.

In contrast, the western part of this trail runs along the Susquehanna River.  To maintain the gentle grade they blasted its steep sided bluffs.  The views are at times spectacular, and there are designated rock climbing areas that show signs of frequent use.

But this section of trail is severed by a significant gap.  The long high trestle over the Conestoga River beside Safe Harbor Dam has not yet been opened.

I hiked this unique trail in five day hikes.  The two western hikes covered the two sections along the river, separated by the off-limits trestle bridge.  A smaller but still impressive trestle over Pequea Creek has recently been reconstructed.  I already showed you this trestle from below, as seen from the Conestoga Trail.

Now here's the perspective from the Enola Rail trail.

From this trestle west is where you'll find the breathtaking scenery.

My three day hikes in the east were rural and quaint, as described, except where the trail passes through the town of Quarryville and where it merges with the active Amtrak rail line and peters out, becoming weedy and unused as it approaches the planned eastern trailhead in Atglen.

Now, since I was doing out-and-back day hikes, I had the chance to do a loop hike that included the Turkey Hill Trail, which climbs high above the Enola Rail Trail and roughly parallels it for three and a half miles.  Apart from the Turkey Hill viewpoint featured in the headline photo, the trail passes two giant windmills.

On the other side of this hill is the Turkey Hill dairy's manufacturing plant, and, enigmatically, between the creamery and the windmills is a huge active landfill.  On the day I passed, there was a breeze coming off the dump.  Not pleasant.  Fortunately the stench lasted only half a mile.

Near the south end of the Turkey Hill Trail are two more spectacular, even scary cliff-top views.

The drop from this latter viewpoint was so sheer, and the exposure so treacherous from the jagged rock that I was afraid to stand.

I crawled out on the most out-jutting rock on my belly, like a snake, and reached my camera out to get this shot straight down.

For perspective here is how that frightening viewpoint looks from directly beneath it on the Enola Trail.

The odd sluice-like structure in the view from above carries the runoff from a stream, and bridges over the lower railroad track, which is still in use.  There were three such structures along the trail.  Here's a look at another one, where Mann's Run drains into the river.

Mann's Run was a pretty spot, showcasing some lingering fall color.

Finally, here are the five GPS track maps of this trail, in geographic order from west to east.  If you want to do just one of these five hikes, beyond question the best is the Turkey Hill/Enola loop hike from the huge paved Turkey Hill Trailhead, the first of the five maps below.

The little 'tail' in the middle of this track is the connecting road from the Conestoga Trail route to a nice trailhead parking area on the Enola Trail.  It's just a quarter mile between the two.

The north-south segment of this track is a road walk along Pumping Station Road, part of a planned twelve mile connecting road walk to my Mom's villa in Oxford, PA