Backpacking in the Quehanna Wild Area

It had been billed as "the last backpack of the season," and so my husband and I hiked into the Quehanna Wild Area on Thursday afternoon. We spent a beautiful, sun-filled day in the wilderness, and a relatively quiet night in our tents on a hill overlooking the Valley of the Elk.

I say relatively quiet because the silence was interrupted several times by animal noises. We heard the occasional howl of a coyote and the breathy squeal of elk; no actual bugles, just squeals. Sometime in the night, I awoke to snorting close by, which I guessed to be white-tailed deer. I think they were testing to see what we were and whether they could walk through, and immediately named them the Midnight Snort Testers. I shone my flashlight in their general direction and the snorting stopped.

Around four in the morning, there was a major skirmish between the elk and coyote contingents. I'm not sure who won, or if winning was even possible, but it was noisy enough that both my husband and I took the opportunity to get up and out of our tents for a quick, chilly bathroom break.

It was cold overnight, but then it clouded over sometime in the night, and it wasn't as chilly in the morning. There was no frost show or mist show, unlike my other two backpack trips to Quehanna this fall. So I actually got to sleep in a little; mostly, in the quiet of the early morning, I lay in my tent, looking up at the trees.

One of the first things I do in the mornings is to put on my pants and boots and jacket, and walk out to a rock overlooking the valley, and as I did that, I discovered my husband's porkpie hat lying out in the field. My husband wasn't sure how it got there, though he did mention hearing a porcupine in a nearby tree overnight. So perhaps the porcupine took off wearing my husband's porkpie hat. (It isn't probably the truth, but I like to think of it like that, so I will.)

The day was overcast and the sun never really seemed to arrive, but the golden tamaracks on the hill were bright as beacons, even in diffuse light. By about noon, we were packed up and heading back out to our car, for we had quite a few things to do on the way home.

The photo above is a shot of my husband with his backpack on, on our walk back to the car. The foliage show in Quehanna was at peak last weekend, and you got to see some of that in last week's blip. At this point, after some rainy and windy days, quite a few of the trees have already lost their leaves. However, there are still some lovely stands of color here and there, including along the path we walked out on . . . and then we headed home.

The soundtrack song has to be a tune about going home: REO Speedwagon, with Find Your Own Way Home.