Pennsylvania Hiking Week

By the time my husband Bruce and I learned that our 13-year-old granddaughter Eva was going to spend the summer with us, most of the state park cabins were booked up.  But we were able to snag a few days at Hills Creek State Park between Mansfield and Wellsboro in north central Tioga County.

We had hoped to celebrate Pennsylvania Hiking Week the last nine days in May, when the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources teams up with the Keystone Trails Association and offers nearly 100 organized hikes and walks throughout Pennsylvania in state parks, forests, and other publicly-owned lands. But our cabin wasn’t available until May 31, and we spent most of that day en route, although we did stop at Little Pine State Park to picnic and hike their Lakeshore Trail on our own.

It turned out that no organized hikes had been offered at Hills Creek State Park anyway.  But the park proved to be a jewel of a place lightly occupied by a few campers who know a good park when they see it and aim to keep it that way. The 407-acre park has a 137-acre lake as its focal point, and it was around that lake that we hiked the following day on Lake Side Trail.

Once again we were in the Allegheny Plateaus area, and once again we saw wildflowers and birds that don’t blossom or nest on our Ridge-and-Valley mountaintop. Luckily for us, Eva was as interested in the plants and wildlife as we were so technically our hike was more of a ramble with frequent stops to admire the wildflowers and wild creatures we encountered both on the trail and in the lake.

Underneath the large hemlocks and white pines, we found what I always think of as “northern wildflowers” because they all grew in the conifer forest beside the central Maine lakeshore property we owned from 1966 until 1971 when we moved here — starflower, painted trillium, goldthread, clintonia, Canada mayflower and bunchberry.

Starflower (Trientalis borealis) with its terminal whorl of various sized, shiny, tapering leaves are topped by one to three small, six or seven pointed, white, star-shaped flowers on thin stalks.  Also called “chickweed” and “wintergreen,” starflowers thrive in moist woods and bogs.  Once, after a blowdown in our hollow, I found a starflower that was protected by fallen limbs, but after the limbs rotted, the starflower disappeared.  Every spring I walk the stream banks hunting for another, but so far, I’ve been unsuccessful.  Yet at Hills Creek State Park, we found dozens of them, many with three blossoms.

Goldthread has only one small, white, star-shaped flower.  As Joseph Harned writes in Wildflowers of the Alleghanies, “The beauty of this plant lies in its shining leaves, which partly hide among bog moss or grow in large numbers about the roots of old pine trees in moist woods.”  Those evergreen leaves are divided into three parts and resembles jagged-edged three leaf clovers.  Both its genus name Coptis, which is Greek for “to cut” and its species name trifolia or “three-leaved” describe the leaves.  But its common name refers to its threadlike, bright yellow rhizomes below ground.

I was probably the most thrilled to see clintonia in bloom — the Clintonia borealis, also known as “corn-lily,” “dogberry”, and “blue bead lily.”  This was not the clintonia that grows in our hollow — Clintonia umbellulata — with its umbel of white flowers, but the clintonia of the north woods sporting a cluster of yellowish, bell-shaped flowers.  It was this clintonia that was named for DeWitt Clinton, governor of New York from 1796 until 1828.  Nature writer, Henry David Thoreau, once complained in his journal “What is he to the lovers of flowers in Massachusetts”… Name your canals and railroads after Clinton, if you please, but his name is not associated with flowers.”  Thoreau was wrong.  Clinton may have been a politician, but he was also an enthusiastic naturalist who published books on natural history and science. Both clintonia species have the same two to three broad, shining, basal leaves and their flowers grow on a single, leafless stalk.  But Clintonia borealis produces in mid-August a unique shade of deep blue berries, “like polished lapis-lazuli,” one author says, “Persian blue mixed with a little white,” another maintains, hence, its alternate name “blue-bead lily.”

Bunchberry (Cornus canadensis) or “dwarf cornel” also produces berries in late August, but they are small, compact clusters of scarlet berries that Inuit supposedly relish. Closely related to flowering dogwood, it has four, showy, white bracts that surround a cluster of tiny, greenish flowers elevated on a short stem above a whorl of six yellowish-green leaves.

Beds of Canada mayflower (Maianthemem canadense) reminded me of the thick ground cover this wildflower formed in Maine and here in our small deer exclosure.  Also known as “false lily-of-the-valley,” it, like clintonia, is a member of the Lily family.  Its terminal cluster of small, four-pointed, white flowers blossom on a zigzag stem above two or three, heart-shaped leaves that clasp the stem. It grows from Labrador to Tennessee, and, in late autumn, birds eat its small, round, red or speckled berries.

One flower was new to me, which is always a thrill — herb-Robert (Geranium robertianum), also called “red-shanks” and “dragon’s blood,” because of its reddish stem. I was reminded of our four-year-old granddaughter, Elanor, who loves dragon stories, when I learned about “dragon’s blood.”  How much more child-pleasing that name would be instead of the rather dull “herb-Robert.” Closely related to the more common wild geranium, it has paired small, pink flowers and fernlike leaves.  In Pennsylvania, it likes to grow in moist, wooded, rocky slopes and ravines.

Jack-in-the-pulpit and Indian cucumber root, both common in our hollow, completed our flower list on land, and yellow bullhead-lilies floated on the lake.

As residents of a dry mountaintop, we were especially charmed by the lake residents. Eva stalked the large and small midland painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) basking on logs in a backwater near the water’s edge, but no matter how quietly she moved, they always tumbled into the water before she crept close enough for good photos.  It was a clear, cool day so the turtles were basking.  After spending the cold months hibernating in the mud at the bottom of the lake, midland turtles need a water temperature of 50 degrees to become active.  But feeding and most courting and mating don’t happen until the water temperature reaches 68 degrees.  No doubt, those bullhead lilies provided some of the vegetable food for the turtles.

We also looked at the birds attracted by the water. A pair of mallards accompanied by seven golden ducklings swam near the shore.  Farther out, posing on a snag in the middle of the lake, sat a double-crested cormorant.  An osprey fished overhead, and a great blue heron stood and hunted in the shallows.

We had picked up a brochure — Common Birds of Hills Creek State Park — at the park office and managed to check off 31 species in the fields, forest, and lake.  But we also saw or heard several species not on the list—blue-headed vireo, chestnut-sided warbler, golden-winged warbler, least flycatcher, blackburnian warbler, and veery.  Of those species, only the blue-headed vireo is a common breeder on our mountaintop, although it is far more common in the northern half of the state and prefers a mature deciduous forest with hemlocks mixed in.  So too does the fiery-throated blackburnian warbler.  But it is also partial to white pines.

Both the golden-winged warbler and chestnut-sided warbler prefer overgrown fields and are most abundant in the Allegheny Plateaus region as is the least flycatcher.  But the least flycatcher is a denizen of woodlands with an open understory. All those habitats can be found at Hills Creek State Park.

To finish our hike we followed a few connecting trails, including Tauscher’s Trail, which goes through moist woodlands with a dense understory.  That habitat is ideal for the veery.  It too is a breeder in the northern portion of the state.  And later, we sat outside our cabin and listened to a regular chorus of their spiraling song, another poignant remembrance of our Maine years.

Our butterfly list was not as impressive as the bird list.  Only tiger swallowtails and spring azures flew that cool day.  But Eva spotted a caterpillar on a beech leaf that looked like a bird dropping.  It was one of the first three instars of a spicebush swallowtail butterfly that feeds principally on sassafras and spicebush.  This amazing caterpillar actually changes into a snake mimic through the rest of its instars, and instead of sitting in plain view on top of a leaf as it does during its bird-dropping stages, it forms a leaf shelter by pulling the edges of a leaf over its green and brown body with only its large, black, yellow, and white eyespots and snake-like head showing.  Such a sight is usually enough to deter any hungry bird.

Altogether, that day we hiked five miles and spent the rest of our time exploring other, short trails until it was dark.

The next day, despite lowering skies, we drove to Leonard Harrison State Park.  We were determined to show Eva the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania, even though we knew it was no match for Arizona’s Grand Canyon where we had taken her when she was eleven.  Still, she was impressed by its green beauty and enjoyed the views of the gorge from Overlook Trail.  But suddenly clouds and fog enveloped the gorge, which obscured the view, and a light mist fell.  Still, she desperately wanted to walk the winding Turkey Path down into the gorge.

“Just a little way,” we said, worried not only by the worsening weather and the park brochure warnings that this was a difficult trail, but also by our own ability to climb back up.  We had remembered the trail as rough and steep from our visit years before.  But it had been improved, and when I saw two waterfalls marked on the park map, I couldn’t resist hiking that far, a descent of 550 feet and only 100 feet from the bottom of the gorge.  The waterfalls on Four Mile Run were worth the climb and the real rain held off until we reached the rim of the gorge.

That hike and torrential rains the next couple of days truncated our Hiking Week, but even so, we felt as if we had honored the occasion despite missing the exact dates.  After all, the point of Hiking Week is to get out and hike on a few of Pennsylvania’s many long and short distance trails, and we had certainly done that.

For information about Hiking Week 2010 (Saturday, May 29 – Sunday, June 6), check the DCNR website. They have several guided hikes scheduled in every region of the state.