Quehanna Wild Area: Come for a Walk With Me!

When we last left our intrepid campers, they were falling asleep in their tents under a nearly full moon, serenaded by a strange lullaby: the bugling of the wild elk in the Quehanna Wild Area. I woke up during the night and peered into the distance, where I could see the moon setting among the trees. It was quiet and peaceful. A nice place to sleep.

We awoke in the morning to birdsong, and shortly after that, I heard a voice: "Are you up?" It was my husband. "Did you hear the coyotes during the night?" No, I hadn't on this trip, though I often have when we've camped here before. Just another of Quehanna's sweet, wild serenades.

One of the really great things about car camping is that you don't have to go through that whole carry-it-all-in/carry-it-all-out thing. This leaves time for other things, like day hiking. So our first order of the day was to get up and go through our morning rituals, eat some yogurt and snack bars, air out the gear, bag it up, put it in the car, and decide what our next adventure might be!

It is my husband's proclivity to be the last one to put his tent up at night and the first one to take it down in the morning. As he started going about this task, I heard some not so pretty words of exclamation, followed by: "HEY, THAT LITTLE BIRD POOPED ON MY TENT!" Followed by: "EW! And it went through onto my sleeping bag!"

Yes, the little bird who was unhappy with our being there, who flapped at my husband's head and tried to chase him away from the tree the night before, had utilized some of its only weaponry to communicate its displeasure. "I guess it didn't like me getting out of my tent to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night," my husband said, as he cleaned the bird poo off his gear.

The Quehanna Wild Area has an interesting history. Per Wikipedia, in the 1950s, the Curtiss-Wright corporation purchased land in Quehanna "for the development of nuclear-powered jet engines and to conduct research in nucleonics, metallurgy, ultrasonics, electronics, chemicals and plastics."

Among the structures they built were two test cells with bunkers for jet engine trials. The sites were later shut down to use, but you can still access the bunkers from the Quehanna Highway. We decided to hike to the north bunker, which is the longer walk. (The south bunker is not far away, is a shorter walk, and is not quite as interesting.)

So that is just what we did. We parked the car along the Quehanna Highway at a gated road that leads back to the north bunker. We took our chairs and daysacks and some more ham and cheese sandwiches that would be our lunch, and hiked back the pathway that you see above, before spending the rest of the morning hanging out near the bunker.

Now, you may be wondering exactly what a bunker looks like. It's a small and unassuming dark building surrounded by trees and pavement. You used to be able to enter the bunker through a door on the side, but that door was soldered shut in the past few years. So you cannot go inside anymore.

For those who are curious, you may see a shot of the bunker in the extra photos from a Quehanna posting from a few years ago. I took a pretty cool photo of the golden fall foliage from inside the bunker back in 2015 ("Doorway Into Autumn"), so it was still open and accessible at that time.

We hung out and ate our sandwiches, then hiked back to the car. We decided there was time for one more short hike before heading home. We thought we'd stop by Benton's Market in Karthaus for chili on the way, for we were starving. (What do campers and backpackers obsess about? I will tell you the answer: FOOD!)

So we drove to the spot where my husband once jogged with the elk, and that's where we had our last hike of the weekend, before heading home. No, we did not ever actually SEE any elk, and in daytime, you don't usually hear them. But we know they hang out there; we have seen them.

And then we were packed up and heading home. Sadly, when we got to the market in Karthaus, it was closed. And I suddenly had a memory of having done this before: driving there for chili late on a Sunday afternoon, finding out to our shock that they closed at 2 pm.

So let this be a warning to you all: if you want chili at Benton's on a Sunday, best get there before 2 pm! But then we decided to stop at the McDonald's in Milesburg for a pair of delectable fish sandwiches with extra tartar sauce, and I'm not sure I've ever had a better fish sandwich in my whole life! (So this was a trip bookended by McDonald's: Big Macs on the way there, fish sandwiches on the way back!)

Now, you may think our story ends here. And the camping-out part of it does. But I have one more adventure to tell you about. And yes, once again, it involves monarch caterpillars! As soon as we got home, I ran over to the hedge to see how our "J-boys" were doing. We had spotted the monarch caterpillars hanging in the J position the morning before (see the extra photos area of yesterday's posting for a photo).

And what did I see? One pretty green chrysalis, and one caterpillar, looking just awful. It skin looked bad, it looked limp. "We have one chrysalis," I said to my husband, "but I don't think that other caterpillar is going to make it. He looks BAD!" But boy, was I wrong!

Just at that moment, the monarch caterpillar's skin SPLIT WIDE OPEN and the caterpillar started to shed its stripey outfit. I have to admit that I HAVE NEVER SEEN SUCH A THING BEFORE AND IT WAS BOTH TERRIBLE AND AWESOME! I had to wonder if it hurt at all. The whole process took about 20 minutes, and in the end, a rather lumpy, green chrysalis was left. (By the following morning, it looked completely smooth and normal.)

How strange that we arrived home just in time to watch the show. I am so grateful, and also glad I had the camera in my hands, though during the part where the caterpillar was near the end of the skin-shedding process, it was wiggling back and forth so hard and so fast that I couldn't capture a single photo. I have about nine bad, blurry shots to prove it. But you may see one of the photos I did get in the extras.

I think that you can tell from my story that we had a pretty awesome first weekend of autumn. We got to camp out. We got to watch the sunset, and the nearly full moon show, with corona. We heard the bugling of elk. My husband heard the coyotes. And we got home in time to witness part of the grand show of monarch transformation. Yowza! A good weekend indeed.

Now, you may be wondering what the song should be to go with all of this. I like the looks of that road in the photo above. No matter where it starts, or where it ends up, it sure looks like a country road to me. And that is where you can often find me, if you go looking.

The soundtrack song is an all-star cover of a John Denver hit. It features just about everybody who is anybody in the world of country music today. And best of all, it ends with Dolly Parton, which you just can't beat. They're calling it Forever Country, but the tune is surprisingly wonderful mash-up of Take Me Home, Country Roads. Enjoy!