First Person / Hiking the Baker Trail
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This past summer we went for a 132-mile walk through Western Pennsylvania. In a series of eight-mile, car-to-car hikes, we covered the Baker Trail from its southern starting point near Freeport on the Allegheny River through Armstrong, Indiana, Jefferson, Clarion and Forest counties to its terminus just south of the Allegheny National Forest.
We carried our refillable water bottles, bags of crackers and trail mix, and a set of excellent maps published by the Rachel Carson Trails Conservancy. We encountered deer ticks, barking and snarling dogs, loose pigs, needy sheep and goats, passing trucks, cat brier, poison ivy, ankle twisting rocks, rushing creeks and more uphill stretches than we would have thought logically possible. Sore knees, blistered toes and a dislocated finger were a few items on the downside.
The list for the upside of this experience is much more extensive.
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Walking along at 1 1/2 to 2 miles per hour through the incredible patchwork of habitats that make up Western Pennsylvania, we identified 63 species of trees, 72 species of birds and almost 200 species of "non-tree" plants.
We experienced some of the great woodlands of the commonwealth. We walked through ancient stands of white pine and hemlock and also through extensive areas of young, secondary forest dominated by red maple, red oak, black cherry and white ash.
We saw and felt our agricultural foundations in the vast fields of corn, soybeans and hay. The acres upon acres of these fields take on different mental dimensions when you have to walk through or around them rather than blasting past at 60 mph in a smooth-riding, air-conditioned car.
We came face to face with our energy exploration and harvesting systems. The coal mines and their truck and train transports, the oil wells and the gas drilling sites and the network of pipelines that interconnects them all tied us directly to the fossil fuel wealth that powers our society, that powered the car we used to go out to see them, that powers the computer that I am using to write this. We felt a shared responsibility to use these resources wisely. We also felt the fear that our two most precious natural resources, water and land, are in great danger from the new fossil fuel technologies.
First Published November 13, 2010 12:00 am
