Being home in Pennsylvania is weird to me. I left Burlington when it was 29 degrees and snowing. When I arrived in Pennsylvania, it was almost 60 degrees. I looked really out of place in my hat and sweatshirt, mostly since I had spent the entire time in my car.
When you move states and go south, it’s certainly a different experience. In Eastern PA, the mountains run into the ground until you get a hilly but mostly flat area. It’s strange looking out my window and not seeing mountains anymore.
But the comforts of Vermont are still there. We have Red and White Oak and old-growth forests and cover our state parks. I drove to French Creek State Park this weekend for my phenology spot here in Pennsylvania. My family and I went on a 3.3 Mile hike during the cold morning to refresh our minds and so I could find my Phenology spot.
Late fall in PA looks about the same as it does anywhere else. Leaves coat the ground, and you really can’t tell the trees from each other just from the bark. But looking in the piles of leaves, I found some familiar faces. Leaves of both Red and White Oaks coated the ground and leaves from the American Beech trees. This forest seemed to be primarily covered in Beech and Red/White Oak trees. These species show that my home forests are Late Successional and old-growth forests, at least at French Creek. There is very little understory, save a few new trees and some ferns in more moist areas.
It was certainly strange to see giant American beech trees. The Centennial Woods in Burlington have American Beech, but not as massive as the ones I saw at French Creek.
I also looked for pieces of land use. I already knew it was a large recreation and hunting area. We even saw hunters going into the woods as we drove out, but I wanted to know what else there was. I saw abandoned furnaces, stone walls that have mostly eroded away, and ditches that we walked in on my hike. The furnaces have an easily explained history. French Creek is very close to Hopewell Furnace, so some furnaces’ appearance in these woods is not uncommon. The stone wall ran alongside the trail. It could have been for livestock grazing or merely a trail marker. Trees like the American Chestnut dominated this forest until the 1700s, when they were cleared to be burned in furnaces to create charcoal. Today, the woods are second growth.1
The last land-use I saw was a large ditch we walked in for about twenty minutes. I noticed that the sharp sides of it were indeed not a sign of erosion only. I don’t think the ditch was from water drainage but rather from old roads used for trail repair.
It was almost difficult to choose a spot for my phenology blog back home. Few Natural areas around my house don’t require a 20-minute drive. I think that’s one of the things I miss most about Burlington. Thankfully, French Creek has a rich history that really helps me tie together Pieces, Patterns, and Processes.
Citations
- French Creek State Park. (2020, January 06). Retrieved December 05, 2020, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Creek_State_Park