Quehanna Wild Area Backpack, Mid-November, Day 2

I awoke in the midst of a pine forest, sat up and stretched in my sleeping bag, and peered out through the front window of my tent. A yellow glow along the edge of the sky - the start of sunrise! Don't want to miss it! I grabbed a few things including my camera, and leaped out of my tent. Quickly, I laced up my boots and headed for our favorite rock, where I watched the sun rise through the tamaracks, sending its first golden beams down into the Valley of the Elk.

The overnight low amid the pines had been about 26 degrees F (about -3 C), with temps a few degrees lower than that out under the open sky. The pines had protected our tents from the frost, but there was frost everywhere else, and the rising sun set it all a-sparkle. The open fields of Quehanna are covered in poison ivy (in fact, I sometimes entertain this horrible fantasy of catching my foot in it and tripping, and falling face-first into the poison ivy with my full-frame pack on, which wouldn't be good, no, not good at all) and all of that sparkled too.

My hands chilly, I headed back to our campsite, where my husband was starting to stir. Soon he was out and about, and had his boots on, and we were up and enjoying what was left of the coffee (no longer piping hot like the night before, but still nicely warm and steaming in the morning sun). Ahhh. Nothing like coffee to make a place feel civilized.

We tidied up our campsite a bit, and I started packing a few things away. Some mornings, I like to lollygag in my tent, playing "house" just like I did as a little girl, but usually only when there are hours and hours to spare. That was not the case on this day, as we had plans to get home by mid-afternoon, before the home-game Penn State football traffic let out. Nothing like sharing the local roads with 100,000 of your closest friends, all in a great big hurry to get somewhere else . . .

We spent some quality time sitting on the rock in the morning sun, warming up and watching the valley for signs of elk, but all was quiet, no elk today. We talked about walking down to the coyote bone pile that we discovered back in the spring, but decided there just wouldn't be time for any sort of lengthy hike. We still had our walk back out to save our energy for, too. So in the end, we agreed to go back to camp and pack everything up, then head down to the creek for a half-hour to enjoy a creekside view of the valley before packing out.

In what was practically record time, we were all packed up and ready to roll. We left our backpacks in the pines and took just our chairs and a few things along, and walked down the hill to the water, which was sparkling and shining in what was by then the mid-day sun. You can lose track of time in such situations, and we nearly did. It felt like we'd been there just a few minutes, when I checked my watch only to discover it was already past the 12:30 cut-off we had agreed upon as our departure time. So up the hill we scrambled, strapped on our packs ("and now we enter the stooped position of the backpacker," one of us always says to the other, as we bow beneath the weight of the pack - although indeed it was quite a bit lighter than the day before!), and hiked out of the back-country, reluctantly leaving the wilderness behind.

We wasted little time on the hike out, but I did take a few minutes to stop by the shallow water impoundment and snap a few pictures of its reflections of blue sky and trees. (You last saw this place back in September, when we visited Quehanna during what turns out to have been our first, last, and only car-camp trip of the fall.) Its surface had been mostly frozen the day before, but you can see that just a bit of ice is left at the bottom right corner of the picture.

I noticed the sandy bottom along the shallow shore, and reflected again (as I often do) on Thoreau and his words. For surely the man had something poetic or pithy to say about pretty much any scene or situation in life . . .

"Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains."

And so with a sense of time slipping away, we set a good pace once again. In minutes, we were back at the car, where we loaded our packs and gear into the back seat, changed out of our muddy boots and back into shoes, grabbed a cold drink from the cooler, settled into our seats (ah, such comfort and luxury, to ride the miles instead of walking them!) and departed the Quehanna Wild Area for home, back to our regularly scheduled lives.

A song to accompany this photo . . . I was remembering, as I stood looking at the shallow water impoundment in the Quehanna Wild Area, how often we've visited this place together in the past 25-plus years; how well we know the area, how much we love it here. Indeed, one of the first events I remember attending with my husband was a "no nukes" rally to "save the Quehanna Wild Area" back in the late 1980s; a bumper sticker to that effect still graces our cooler, where we placed it at the time. In some ways, the Quehanna Wild Area feels almost like a second home to us. We've spent many happy days hiking here; and plenty of nights too throughout these past many years, both car-camping and backpacking. So the song to accompany this photo is a lovely little tune by Dwight Yoakum - about the things we love and think we know well - called The Back of Your Hand.

Interested readers can catch up on our first day's adventures here.