Mystery and Reverie

“Do not (repeat: DO NOT) attempt to cross the creek during periods of high water. This is a significant waterway and the current can be very strong.” So said the Guide to the Quehanna Trail tucked in my backpack. But exactly how high was “high water”? Yes, it was spring, but it hadn’t rained for at least three days. I’d already hiked 34 miles to get to this point; backtracking would require a difficult and lengthy detour up the steep slope and over miles of rocky trail I’d just traversed.

I’d crossed Mosquito Creek before. In 2020, a large fallen Sycamore spanned these rapids, with a waist-high wire cable attached to poles anchored along the trunk, making for a somewhat sturdy bridge and a dry crossing for me and my companions. But in June 2025, that same tree’s remains were pushed tightly against the shore, its railing structure contorted and partially gone due to previous flooding. And this trip, I was alone.

With my boots strung around my neck, my socks left on for better traction inside my Crocs, and my backpack waistbelt released to reduce resistance, I gripped my hiking stick and stepped in. Twenty feet across, deceptive depth and current (as the guidebook warned!) pushed me over. Half-submerged, I levered myself back upright and poled the last few feet to shore. I clambered out of the water and sank down on a flat rock to nurse my feet, and ego.

Streamside and flustered, I considered the options. One of my boots had been submerged and water poured out; the other was simply wet. My high-tech, synthetic-fabric hiking pants would dry quickly in the mid-day sun, but the leather boots wouldn’t fully dry for days. I had 39 more miles to hike, at least six to where I’d camp that night, beginning with “a long and very steep hike out of Mosquito Creek gorge,” as the Guide reminded me. I peeled off my wet socks, applied new Band-Aids and moleskin to a few nascent blisters and, knowing that hiking in damp boots was far from ideal, took the extra pair of socks out of my pack, the interior of which remained dry. The slip was unsettling and would cost me over an hour, but it wasn’t a reason to bail out. The quality most backpackers rely upon most — perseverance — was called for. I was good to go.

The Quehanna Trail (QT) is located in central Pennsylvania, north of I-80 in Moshannon and Elk State Forests. The 73-mile, oval-shaped trail passes through Parker Dam State Park not far from the literal stomping grounds of Pennsylvania’s 1,000-strong herd of elk, in the vicinity of the village of Benezette. It’s roughly the same length as southwestern Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands Hiking Trail, but unlike the popular LHHT — with its shelters, pit toilets, water pumps, firewood and bear poles — the QT offers a “primitive camping” experience. Besides the map and guidebook, state park and some forest road-crossings, a few stone fire rings demarcating previous campsites are the only non-natural amenity campers will find.

I’m an experienced backpacker and an Appalachian Trail 2,000-Miler, having completed that 2,190-mile trail in 2015-2016. But in my nearly seven months on the AT, there were only half a dozen nights when I camped alone, and none of them was sequential — the AT is that popular. In five days and four nights on the Quehanna Trail, I passed not a single hiker. Those 73 miles were the longest I’d ever been alone in the woods.

As much as any hiking trip I’ve taken, this one clarified what is, for me, the particular joy of backpacking: a significant and sustained physical challenge in a scenic, often remote place, with the added novelty of self-reliance and its psychic corollary, solitude. It’s an introvert’s prescription for physical and mental health.

The physical challenge of backpacking can be described simply: You walk all day, for multiple days, carrying your supplies and sleeping along the trail. For me, “all day” typically means 8-10 hours — a workday. On this trip, I averaged 14.6 miles per day, a respectable distance considering some challenging terrain — steep slopes, rocks, blowdowns, stream crossings. My pack weighed about 25-30 pounds, its weight decreasing with the amount of food and fuel consumed.

Most enchanting to me is the surge of endorphins that comes with backpacking’s whole-body exercise. These pleasant sensations of awareness and creativity manifest reliably every morning on the trail, a mini-mania of Good Ideas! Exciting Plans! I call it my “wild thinking.” Try as I might, I cannot summon it at will when I’m at home.

Aside from its physical and psychic benefits, backpacking provides a prime seat for one of life’s wonderful performances, the dawn chorus. Even in this era of fewer songbirds, the birds of the woods continue to announce their seeming appreciation for being alive each morning. Initiated by a single, tentative tweet before dawn, a chorus builds for an hour or so before tapering off, an avian symphony with no conductor. Ovenbirds, towhees, tanagers, vireos, thrushes, robins, cardinals, assorted woodpeckers, wood warblers and more were the birds of the day on the QT. Whip-poor-wills were its crepuscular surprise, their insistent calling seeming to mock my presence. “Whip-poor-WILL! Whip-poor-WILL! Whip-poor-WILL!” can almost sound like “What the hell? What the hell? What the hell?” when you’re alone in the woods and light’s fading.

Each day on the QT presented a surprise of one kind or another. The tiniest fawn I’d ever seen bounded after its mother when my presence on the trail alerted them on my first day. I surprised a fat, glossy beaver on the stream bank at dusk the next day, and watched it make its way upstream beneath the trail bridge where I stood, three feet away. On the third day, a nearly vertical branch beside the trail revealed itself to be a rattlesnake, raised cobra-like, taking in the sun. The abundant mountain laurel was opening its fluted pink cups by the fourth day, promising more blooms for any who would follow me. And on my last day, a big and startled mother turkey tried hard to distract me from her many little poults scattering helter-skelter across the trail by flapping, weaving and clucking off in a different direction.

Backpacking connects you, viscerally, to the earth beneath your feet, and each trip is differentiated by the unique history and ecology of its landscape. The QT traverses both the relatively open, high plateau of central Pennsylvania and the depths of stream valleys, shady with rhododendron, pine, and hemlock. One morning midway through my hike, the trail emerged from the woods to enormous meadows stretching away in both directions. These were fields “managed for browsing by deer and other animals,” my guidebook informed me. I took off my pack, spread out my sleeping pad, and used my pack as a backrest. Off came boots and socks; out came my journal and a snack. With a light breeze and a vista, it was a stellar mid-morning rest spot, all the better for being unexpected and unpopulated. My boots nearly dried in the sunshine, my naked feet thanked me, and I thanked my good fortune to be alive, in that place, on that day.

Much of the trail passes through an area designated as the “Quehanna Wild Area.” But though the woods may, in places, look endless and feel remote, the “wild area” moniker is really a misnomer. In fact, the area exemplifies the cycles of environmental degradation and recovery that have roiled Pennsylvania’s landscape throughout recent human history. The area has been burned and blighted, mined and quarried. The remains of logging railroads and “splash dams” that transported Pennsylvania’s gargantuan timber harvest are still evident. The sites of Civilian Conservation Corps work camps that housed hundreds who planted trees, created lakes and constructed park facilities dot the region, reflecting the determined effort to repair earlier damage. Elk and, recently, fishers have been reintroduced to the area after their earlier extirpation. Preposterous as it sounds today, there were so few white-tailed deer by the early 20th century that they, too, were imported from elsewhere.

The Quehanna Wild Area has its own peculiar story. In short, between 1955 and 2002, the land was used for clandestine nuclear research by multiple private companies; a nuclear reactor built in 1956 on land now encircled by the hiking trail was not demolished until 2009. The ground was remediated to varying degrees, deemed unsafe for all but nature, and left to recover on its own. Peripatetic hikers passing through made for a nearly ideal user group in a landscape that was toxic. In the 1970s, the hiking trail was laid out.

Just outside the southern edge of the designated wild area and state forest is the Quehanna Boot Camp, a minimum-security incarceration program for nonviolent offenders. From my campsite on my third night (after my muffed stream-crossing shortened that day’s hike), I ate dinner to the sound of the inmates’ chanted cadence as they exercised in their yard a mere half-mile away. The irony of siting a bootcamp so close to a backpacking trail was not lost on me.

Though backpackers leave many comforts behind when hiking, there is real joy in the absence of some of urban life’s ubiquitous features: pavement, cars, computers and credit cards (though I carry my Visa in my pack, along with an ID, a twenty-dollar bill, and a turned-off cell phone) and the relentless assault of noise. There’s a whole other world of trails out there, one we have affected and changed, but not created ourselves. Like crossing Mosquito Creek in high water, exploring it can feel a little dicey, but rewarding. After all, when are we ever fully in control? The rewards of perseverance sometimes accrue subtly, like the miles of a long-distance hike.

But oh, the drive home to Pittsburgh is nearly always very sweet!