Photo by D. Sillman
(Click on the following link to listen to an audio version of this blog … Quebec Run Wild Area, part 2
This is the second part of a hike narrative that was originally published in 2008 on my now defunct “Between Stones and Trees” website. I think that it clearly describes the history and some of the human impacts on the forests of Western Pennsylvania. Enjoy this walk in the woods!
Back on the trail: The path is covered with a thick layer of dry, well crushed oak leaves. On the steeper parts of the trail, though, the leaf cover has washed down into discrete, transverse piles leaving long sections of the trail uncovered. There is subtle evidence of other hikers having passed along these trails: footprints in the soft soil, broken branches pushed back into the surrounding foliage, and even some sawn logs cleared out of the trail passage. There is no litter, though, or other human debris. The people who have used this area have done so with great care.
We head down a slope and sassafras and yellow birch become more abundant. Occasionally, a large red maple or oak (often red oaks) stand out against the uniformly sized mass of trees. One of our hiking guides, written back in the early 1980’s, describes this forest as dominated by “pole trees,” but in the past 25 years they have grown past that adolescent tree stage into fairly substantial, foot and foot‐ plus diameter individuals.
Photo by D. Sillman
Going further down the slope we pass (right after I made a comment to Deborah concerning their absence thus far on the trail) two large eastern hemlocks. Twenty or forty more feet further along the trail we pass several more, even larger hemlocks, and then we enter a dense stand that is also tightly packed with rhododendrons. The hemlocks are twelve to fifteen inches in diameter and between thirty and forty feet tall. Down in the very cool, very damp ravine there are also a large number of hemlock seedlings (ranging from four or five inches to three or four feet tall) in the understory. Around the hemlock seedlings are dense growths of clubmoss and low growing blueberry bushes.
We take a water break in the shady ravine, and I look
Club moss. Photo by D. Sillman
closely at the club mosses. The club moss shown in the picture to the left is commonly called ground cedar. Club mosses are the miniaturized descendants of the giant, tree‐like lycophytes that grew here in abundance with giant tree ferns some 340 million years ago. Back then, “Pennsylvania,” riding on the bedrock of the North American tectonic plate, and was oriented ninety degrees clockwise with its present day eastern boundary pointing toward the south. The North American plate straddled the equator and the climate of this “future Pennsylvania” was tropically warm and wet. This “Pennsylvania” part of the North American plate was just above sea level and was densely covered by steamy, swampy forests of the giant lycophytes and tree ferns. As these great plants went through their life cycles, they inevitably senesced and fell into the oxygen‐poor waters of the muddy swamps forming massive deposits of peat. The rising and falling of the land mass and of the level of sea itself alternatively exposed and then sealed away these peat deposits under an accumulation of sediments. Time and the weight of the sediments themselves slowly transformed the organic materials of the peat into the fossilized carbons of coal, petroleum, and natural gas (the “fossil fuels”).
The ancient lycophytes and tree ferns had to contend with both the massive climatic changes that resulted from the drift of the North American plate northward into more temperate climate zones, and also with the evolution of increasingly efficient types of competing plants. The development of plants that could make seeds, and others which had more efficient internal vascular structures, and still others that had leaves (like our present day trees, for example) slowly relegated the lycophytes and ferns into narrower and narrower ecological niches and smaller and smaller ecological spaces. The vastly reduced sizes of the present day club mosses and ferns, and their decidedly less awe‐inspiring masses and morphologies should be thought of, though, as evolutionary “victories” in that they allowed survival of some of the species.
I am laying on my stomach on the damp soil of the trail looking closely at an “n‐gauge” miniature of the ancient Paleozoic swamp forest. A green tiger beetle crawls across the miniature canopy like a replica of a ranging, predaceous dinosaur. Two deer flies land on one of the tops of the club moss and then flit away. In the moist debris under the lycophytes is a teeming community of fantastic mites and collembola, tardigrades and tiny worms. Complex food webs and sudden events of prey capture and narrow survival are going on but in a world too small for the naked eye to perceive. These plants and their supported communities can still inspire awe, but you just have to get very close to see it.
Photo by D. Sillman
Wood thrushes are singing in this lower section of the Miller Trail. Their flute‐like songs echo through the dark, wet forest. Some large rocks, probably great pieces of Pottsville sandstone from the hard capping rock of the Chestnut Ridge, surround the trail standing like tall islands in the dense crush of a sea of hemlocks. Many of these rocks have mosses, papery lichens, ferns, and even one or two tall hemlocks growing on them. The tallest individual plants on the rock islands grow in the middle of the vegetative mass. The plants get shorter and shorter as you move toward the edges. If you stand just right you can see the great bell‐curve of the plant growth profile. Moisture, well conserved in the middle of the vegetative mass sustains plant growth. The drier and drier edges begin to limit it.
Dogwood and witch hazel and increasingly larger and larger numbers of ferns fill up the understory beneath the hemlocks. Mill Run is roaring louder as we get close to the bottom of the ravine. There are two surprisingly large American chestnuts down here. They are thirty feet tall and have diameters of ten to twelve inches. I don’t see any chestnut burrs on the trail, though. There are quite a few acorns and even some hickory nuts on the trail. There are scattered red oaks and a few bitternut hickories mixed in with the hemlocks. Some of these trail sections are very steep (this section of the trail gets a “strenuous” rating in the Sierra Club hiking guide). We climb down a natural stair of exposed rocks and fit our feet into small, often wet and slippery, spaces. I grab onto the trunk of a dogwood growing next to a very steep “down” and shake a small rain storm of water from its umbrella‐shaped crown of leaves.
Red maples are increasingly common in the ravine. Lots of tree seedlings (mostly red maple and hemlock) are mixed in with abundant wild flowers (including wild ginseng, false Solomon’s seal, and twin flower) and club mosses. Rhododendron thickets make it difficult to see the Mill Run stream even though its nearby roar fills the spaces around the trail.
Photo by D. Sillman
Even small changes in the topography of the trail cause noticeable differences in the vegetation. Hillsides facing the north are wetter and rich with hemlocks and rhododendrons. Hillsides with even a slight southern sky exposure are drier and have hickories, black cherry, maples, and varying mixtures of all four of the oaks (black, red, chestnut, and white). Mountain laurel and witch hazel fill in the drier understory. On both slope exposures, there are abundant tree seedlings on the forest floor. At the crest of one of the small hills several pitch pines are growing among the oaks.
Pitch pine is a hardy, fast growing tree that thrives in poor soils and rocky places. It is often a pioneer species after disturbance and may even form pure stands. These trees, though, like most pines, are very sensitive to shading, and the emergence of slower growing, shade tolerant hardwood species (like oaks) over their crowns inevitably leads to their demise. The pitch pines we see here on the Miller Trail look a bit limb‐pruned and lean of needles. The shading of the surrounding oaks is slowly squeezing them out of the ecosystem. In the event, though, of a fire or other site disturbance, their seed reservoirs and also their potential to sprout from roots and stumps could lead to their rapid re‐establishment.
Photo by D. Sillman
We join up with the Mill Run Trail and continue on it south for a short distance until we junction with the Rankin Trail. We turn right on the Rankin Trail and head west following Quebec Run upstream. We rock hop across several small streams that feed into Quebec Run and cross and then re‐cross Quebec Run itself on two wooden bridges built by the Pennsylvania Conservation Corps in 1996 and 1997. In between the bridges we walk past a very straight stream cut whose evenly mounded banks and extreme linearity make it look decidedly like a human‐made structure. Possibly this is one of canals that were dug in the 1800’s to direct the fast flowing water into the water wheels of the site’s various grist mills.
Rhododendron flowers. Photo by D. Sillman
Rhododendron thickets are extensive along this section of the trail and extend well up the cut of Quebec Run. Some of the bushes have a fungus that makes white, bubbling lesions in the leaves. Later on, hiking on the Hess Trail, we cross through a thicket of dead, leafless rhododendron trunks and branches that borders both banks of a small stream. Were these bushes killed by the fungus? Had there been a fire or the invasion of some insect pest? Had a flood killed the plants?
Along the Rankin Trail there are a few, small American beech trees growing among the large numbers of poplars and maples. Isolated patches of skunk cabbage grow in the restricted, wet flats along the stream. We look for pitcher plants and sundews in the marshy areas but do not see any.
We cross Quebec Road. This is one of the eight miles of abandoned country roads that crisscross through the wild area. The roads can be used to shorten hikes or to make creative interconnections between the hiking trails. The road surface is graveled and is well rutted by erosion cuts made by the runoff from the heavy spring rains. It would be easy walking along the road (its breadth, after several miles of walking on the eighteen inch wide paths through the woods, feels more like a great boulevard than a single lane‐plus road), but we choose to stay in the confines of green, wet forest.
Back among the trees, the path follows close above Quebec Run. The stream is loud and crashing over its exposed bed of sandstone boulders and flat slabs of shale. Passing the infrequent breaks in the surrounding rhododendron and mountain laurel, you can feel a spray rising from the waterfalls and cascades. The rocks on the stream side of the trail are covered with mosses. We start to climb steadily up and the path becomes increasingly rocky and irregular.
Photo by D. Sillman
The undergrowth here is dominated by hemlock seedlings, club mosses, Indian cucumber root, and false Solomon’s seal. As we climb yellow poplar, black cherry, yellow birch, red maple, and white oak seedlings replace the hemlocks. Tiny, white violets grow along the edges of the trail and even out into the path itself. Ferns (including bracken fern, hay scented fern, and interrupted fern) grow thickly along the trail side.
We turn north onto Hess Trail and start a long, steady climb up. Red oaks, chestnut oaks, and black oaks become increasingly abundant. Witch hazel is the dominant shrub. The woods gradually open up as the trees become more widely spaced and the taller understory vegetation thins out. Visibility increases from just a few feet to fifty to seventy five yards. The air moves more and more steadily through the woods, and the claustrophobic sense of “greenness” that dominated the ravines begins to fade.
We pass an area in which an old mine shaft is marked on our map. Piles of mine tailings are said to mark the shaft entrance just to the right of the trail. One of our maps refers to this site as the “gold mine” in honor, I am sure, of the local legend of the Confederate Army gold that was allegedly buried here at the end of the Civil War. We are concentrating on our climb up, though, and forget to explore the surroundings for the mine shaft (or the gold!).
Hemlock tree. Photo by D. Sillman
We hike on several well-spaced “ups” and follow curving trails that have been cut into faces of the long, rocky hill sides. The trail is passing through increasingly dry forest that is almost completely dominated by the mixture of oaks. The views down into the passing hollows are beautiful. The deep, wet greens of the ravines and the scent of the flowing water of the streams fill the senses.
Suddenly, we are back at Quebec Road and can see the metallic glint of our car in the parking area.
We climb into the car. We have been hiking for three hours and have covered about four and a half miles. We slowly drive back out on Mud Pike Road straddling and by‐passing the large ruts and puddles. In twenty minutes we are sitting in a small restaurant on Highway 40 drinking iced tea and waiting for our hamburgers and French fries. After lunch, we will go back to the Summit Inn for a soak in the hot tub and a swim in the pool.