Sunday, January 18, 2009

The Big Chill - Tiadaghton State Forest

Yes, I know this is suppose to be a Pennsylvania fly fishing blog. This post won't help you catch more fish, but it does have something to do with Pennsylvania. So flippin' sue me.

Full Moon Over the Hotel Manor on Pine Creek

"Fifteen under zero when the day became a threat
My clothes were wet and I was drenched to the bone
Been out ice fishing, too much repetition
Makes a man want to leave the only home he's known"

Dateline: Slate Run, Pennsylvania - January 16, 2009. The temperature here this evening at 2000 hrs. was a balmy -7 F. It will continue to drop overnight and in the morning the thermometer will be reading a slightly chilly -17 F at 0800 hrs. From Blackwell to Jersey Shore, Pine Creek was one big steaming, frozen Popsicle with the exception of small spots of open water where the current was fast enough to prevent total freezing. The air temperature a short ways up the road at Blackwell will be -23 F . The water in Pine Creek is actually warmer than the air, hence the steaming. I couldn't have picked a better time to revisit some of my old skiing haunts up in the Black Forest of north central Pennsylvania.

The Gas Line Ridge: The sun has now warmed things up to a toasty -2 F. The Gas Line Ridge Trail (elevation- 2,100') is located in the Black Forest region of the Tiadaghton State Forest and runs west to east for about 4 miles from the Winter Sports Parking Area off of PA 44 to it's terminus high above Pine Creek. It's a very easy ski and provides a number of scenic vistas into the middle Pine Creek Valley. It also leads to the remote cabin of former Pa. Bureau of Forestry legend, Bob Webber but we'll save that story for later. The trail sign in the above photo marks the spot where the Black Forest Trail leaves the ridgeline and descends into the hollows of Little Slate Run. My ski's are Trak's Backcountry model, metal edged, 6' 6" long and 4" wide at the tips tapered down to 3" under the heels. They obviously can support an obscene amount of weight and can cut through any type of snow conditions.

Looking south into the Pine Creek Valley from the Gas Line Ridge. The snow gods were kind to me. Trail conditions were excellente' for kicking & gliding with 8"-10" inches of fresh light & dry powder on top of an icy base.

Those double orange blazes on the right mark a sharp turn in the Black Forest Trail. This one will take us to the always enjoyable canyon vista which looks out over the mouth of Naval Run. Deer trax in the snow were everywhere. Surprisingly, there was not another Ridgerunner or Flatlander in sight.

I was the first person to ski back here since the latest snowfall so I had to break trail the whole way in. It was pretty easy though since the snow was so light and fluffy. It was almost like breaking drifts through that Frog's Fanny stuff -even a big fat out of shape doofus could do it.

Once you reach this spot the ground just falls away into the Naval Run drainage in the foreground. That's the Pine Creek Gorge in the background. This one of the three or four best views on the Black Forest Trail.

Looking south down the Pine Creek Valley towards the village of Cammal. Cammal once bustled with lumbering activity and was rivaled only by Slate Run. Now there is only one general store, a Bed & Breakfast, a bar and a restaurant and the post office closed back in 2002.

Camera Equpment: Canon 40D SLR with a Canon EF17-40, 4.0, L series lens mounted on a Manfrotto backpacking tripod. Exposure settings chosen by the gods at Canon. Lithium-Ion battery packs were kept warm when not in use by storing them in my underwear. No filters were used in the making of these photos.

Try doing this without a tripod & automatic timer when your on a solo ski tour. Go ahead, I dare you! Shortly after this shot was taken I lost my footing and slid 2,000 vertical feet down into the Naval Run drainage. Took me the rest of the day to climb back out, put a fresh battery in the camera and file this trip report. It had been a few years since my last ski tour in the Bridger and Gallatin Mountains outside of Bozeman, Montana and I put on mucho weight since then. I wasn't even sure if my old equipment would hold up under the additional stress of all that newly added tonnage, and I knew I was taking a chance of going solo in such extreme conditions, but everything held together perfectly. Not even a sticky binding or broken ski pole, although my water bottles were frozen solid towards the end of the day and the plastic waist buckle on my backpack snapped due to the cold. I could live with those minor mishaps. A real testament to modern day engineering.

Home Sweet Home
This abandoned jeep trail on top of the Gas Line Ridge is closed to motorized vehicles but eventually leads to a private inholding of about 10 acres and a cabin with the best backyard view in Pennsylvania. This is the home of the legendary Bob Webber and his wife Dottie. Their home is a tiny one story cabin without telephone, electricity or running water, although it does have a piano, where they've lived for the past 35 years. Bob originally worked as a logger before going to work for the then Pa. Bureau of Forestry for 24 years before retiring in 1988. His wife Dottie is the niece of Philip Tome, one of the original homesteaders in Slate Run and the author of "Pioneer Life: Thirty Years a Hunter". Whether they know it or not, thousands of hikers, hunters, fishermen and skiers owe Bob a debt of gratitude. A man of incredible fitness and stamina, Bob along with fellow forestry employee John Eastlake marked, cleared and maintains the 42 mile Black Forest Trail along with the network of other hiking and ski trails in the region. At the cabin they consume a lot of deer, turkey, grouse and native trout -the wild ones, not those pathetic, scrawny stocked ones. They have an ample garden and a nearby spring. Once a week in the winter Bob will drive his jeep down to Wolfe's General Store in Slate Run to stock up on produce and pick up the mail but if the snow is too deep he will snowshoe 3 miles down the mountain with his woven ash trappers basket. Bob's post retirement hobbies include building early American log homes, timber rattlesnake ecology (seriously) and maintaining the weather station on top of the mountain for the National Weather Service. Yep, there's nothing phony about Bob and Dottie and they're obviously the last of their kind. I'm not sure of their exact age but they have to be in their 70's & 80's by now. For some reason, I did not feel the need to intrude on their privacy this day so I did not visit the cabin. I'm regretting that now.


"Acadian Driftwood
Gypsy tailwind
They call my home the land of snow
Canadian cold front movin' in
What a way to ride
Ah, what a way to go"

The Hotel Manor was recently rebuilt after a fire destroyed the original back in May of 2004. The original building, before it was remodeled back in the 1950's, was once called Manor Hunt and it's history stretched back to the lumbering era. It was built on the site of Jacob Tomb's original homestead at the mouth of Slate Run.

Around the village of Bluestone. You could audibly hear the ice shifting and cracking on this -17 F morning. One definitely needed "blue stones" to be out here snapping pix on a morning like this.

I've skied all over the East, and parts of the West, and I don't mind saying that the Tiadaghton State Forest ski trails were way ahead of their time when they were first built back in the early 1970's -largely due to the efforts of Bob Webber and John Eastlake.

The following day I skied two separate trails that lie in close proximity to each other, the George and Ruth Will ski trails. Cloud cover moved in shortly before noon and while the skiing was some of the best I've ever experienced, the lighting went flat and totally sucked for doing the clickity-click thing. Once again, the whole area was just lousy with deer trax.

The Ruth Will Ski Trail is a relatively short and easy one at only 2.9 miles but don't let that fool you. In that short distance it takes you past a historic fire tower lookout and it's cabin, beautiful vistas into the headwaters of Young Woman's Creek and then right through the middle of a very impressive stand of mature white birch with a dense understory of rhododendron thickets. As if that weren't enough it also takes one right by the historic old Tidewater Petroleum Pumping Station long ago abandoned on the upper reaches of the Baldwin Branch.

The George Will Trail runs a mostly flat 5.6 miles through mixed hardwoods on top of the Tiadaghton plateau. It was named after one of the early forest rangers. George was skiing the forest as early as 1914 and his wife Ruth "manned" the local fire tower for 30 years.

The Old Pumping Station
The first time I saw this place located way up on the Baldwin Branch I thought it was one of RBF's old stillhouse/ciderhouses making good use of the local branch water. Turns out this old stone building dates back to 1894 or '95 (even predates old RBF himself, but not by much) and housed pumps that were used to cool the old Tidewater Petroleum pipeline which was the first successful long distance pipeline in the world. The pumps were powered by a steam engine and coal to fire it was transported on the Cammal & Black Forest narrow gauge railroad. When the railroad shut down a gas well was drilled at Slate Run and another small pipeline was run up to power the steam engine. The Tidewater pipeline is tiny by todays standards and now contains fiber optic communication cables. You can still see parts of it exposed in road cuts along the side of the Coudy Pike to the north of here.

The climb out of the Baldwin and back up to the fire tower on PA 44 through the hemlocks, pines and rhododendrons as a light snow started to fall was one of the most satisfying -albeit too short- ski climbs I've ever done.

Despite the frigid arctic temperatures that descended on the region just in time for my trip I found the whole experience to be uniquely beautiful, exhilarating and serene (once I was away from the din of the snowmobiles). I never really felt the cold all that much except for the end of the day when I felt my fingertips stinging as I was packing up my gear. The whole thing with the below zero temperatures sort of reminded me of the time King Kong got hit by lightning.......it only made me stronger. The hot shower that was waiting for me back at the Hotel Manor never felt so good.

"Everlasting summer filled with ill-content
This government had us walking in chains
This ain't my turf, this ain't my season
Can't think of one good reason to remain"

Posted by Wade Rivers at 12:09 PM 15 comments

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