A Walk in the Woods

There is a campsite (which you may see here and here) that my husband and I use above Black Moshannon that is located in Moshannon State Forest. To get there, you leave the main path, walk down an abandoned woods road until it turns into a deer trail, and then cobble together your way from there. Its chief appeal is that it is in the middle of nowhere, and nobody goes there but us.

There is a trick to it, though. While getting in and finding it is hard enough, threading the needle to catch the skinny, nonexistent trail on the OTHER end to get back out is nearly impossible. In fact, we've done it poorly, many times, ending up with long walks bushwhacking through the brambles. (Insert much grexing and grumbling here.)

On this day, we walked all the way in and out from the campsite, we managed to catch the other end of the trail, and we made it out in around a half-hour, which just might be a new world's record. Above is a monochrome shot of the main path that I took as we made our way out and back to the car.

Now, my husband is the Trail Finder and the Walking Dude, so he is usually the one we count on to monitor landforms and guide us in and out of wild places safely. However, on this day, the magic trick was to find the tree blooming with white flowers that stands just below where the trail comes in.

Do you want to guess who located the "blooming white tree" marker and used it to get us back up and out to the trail very quickly? YES, IT WAS ME!!! Ha! (Too bad that tree doesn't bloom in white all year long! But this is one of the gifts of springtime: the blooms that marked our path and guided our way.)

A sidebar: one of the funny moments of our trip was when we spotted a wild turkey walking along this trail. Just one! It walked the trail like it owned it. And I hate to be disparaging, but the wild turkey looked like something out of a child's drawing: a big round circle body atop a pair of spindly, stilt-like legs. Come on, turkey, you need to do better than THAT!  ;-)

The soundtrack song is one I just came across: Horst Jankowski, with A Walk in the Black Forest. (I am told, by the way, that much of central PA resembles the Black Forest. And so it is that in monochrome, this forest is indeed black.)