December 23, 2012
section miles: 15.4 total miles: 41.2
Rene and I were eager to complete a few more hikes while the weather still permits, and this section of the Horse-shoe Trail fit in nicely on a crisp, sunny Christmas Eve Eve. We were accompanied by our trail mentor, Dean, who lives in the area and has hiked the entire HST. Dean was a wealth of information on the trail and the surrounding area, all of which I promptly forgot once he mentioned that there was a great bakery in town but it closed at 4:00 pm. The rate-distance calculations filled my head immediately and remained stuck there, crowding out all other ambient mental processes (according to Rene, this is no big feat). Dean had to peel off after a few miles, but while he was with us it was like having our own personal guided tour. Thanks, Dean!
We also brought along our neighborhood friend, Tim, for comic relief and to set the pace to something resembling a real hiking experience for a change (just kidding, Tim... great to have you along!). Tim is one of those wirey, terrier-sized guys with way too much energy for their age, but Rene and I were determined to keep up. A few furlongs down the trail we came to French Creek, and Tim casually sauntered across on a conveniently downed tree trunk, never even bothering to take his hands out of his pockets. Rene, naturally, had to give it a try since Tim did it, whereas I employed actual brain waves and opted for the less-likely-to-wind-up-on-youtube, rock-hopping route. She made it a good third of the way across and promptly froze, legs quivering in rather impressive harmonic motion and eyes glued on the log with the water rushing below. An hour later - or so it seemed - she made it safely across and Tim and I collectively exhaled. "Does she always challenge herself like that?", he asked. Um, no. Thankfully.
About five miles into the hike we picked up an odd sound in the distance. At first I thought it was a kennel with a gazillion dogs barking at the top of their lungs, but the noise never ceased, just faded and came back, faded and moved on. Tim, who grew up riding dirt bikes, announced that it was a motorcycle race, and we all agreed that made total sense, largely because none of us has ever found themselves embedded directly in the middle of a fox hunt. Tim scaled a ridge at his springy pace while Rene and I stopped for one reason or another... probably to breathe... and while he was up there a pack of hounds crashed through at a full fox-crazed sprint. "I saw them dogs comin' and I thought I was a goner", Tim would later recount. Not far behind came two beautiful and very pleasant ladies mounted on chestnut horses, perfectly appointed in their riding gear. They explained that two clubs were out hunting, with about fifty dogs in total. They also made sure we understood that they don't hurt the foxes. Call me a genius, but I'm thinking there's probably a connection between the mansions we saw on the last hike and the people we met on this one. And after thirty some miles, we finally met a horse on the HST.
This part of the Horse-shoe Trail is essentially all woodland hiking, with just a few hundred yards of road walking here and there. The trail itself is often wide and well groomed, and along certain sections you can clearly see that you are navigating along an old wagon-road: straight, level and elevated above the surrounding forest floor. The Horse-shoe trail had its origins in the roads that connected the various 18th and early 19th century iron furnaces of this area, and it is on this section where that history comes immediately to the forefront. You'll walk right through the vestiges of the early charcoal industry used to fuel the furnaces (keep your eye on the ground for evidence) and continue on to Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site. We spent a fair amount of time milling about the site, outside buildings, inside buildings, everything open and completely accessible. Surprisingly accessible, actually - there were no workers or rangers or volunteers to be seen anywhere. Granted, it was two days before Christmas, but still, it was sort of like visiting a ghost town, with the occasional disembodied recorded voice thrown in for good measure (who knows, maybe that's just the way it is).
The iron ore in this part of Pennsylvania is the product of a subsurface volcanic intrusion which took place some 170 million years ago, give or take 30 million by my watch. The associated volcanic fluids were rich in dissolved iron, among other things, and where they contacted and dissolved surrounding carbonates (limestone or marble), iron-ores precipitated. But this intrusion had other historical consequences as well. Seams of magma found their way into (or induced) fractures in the Earth's crust, slowly solidifying and creating sills and dikes of finely-crystalline, hard, dark rock known to geologists as diabase. This igneous rock is more resistant to erosion than the surrounding sedimentary strata and as such has a notable influence on the geography of the region, even playing a part in the civil war at Gettysburg, where it crops out in a rocky soldier's hell known as the Devil's Den. Locally the rock was quarried and marketed as "black granite" for use as decorative building stone, and in the 1950's it even found a place in the space program as an industrial surface material for the manufacture of high-precision parts. Keep an eye out for bluish diabase boulders strewn across the landscape for a few miles east of Hopewell Furnace. One interesting characteristic you might notice is a "turtle shell" appearance (see photo) which are shrinkage cracks produced as the rock cooled and solidified.
If time permits, be sure and drop by the historic site of St. Peter's Village, where you can see the remains of a black-granite quarry and related historic buildings, and more importantly, feast at the St. Peter's bakery. And yes, thanks to my constant urging, we made it there with plenty of time to sit and enjoy a good cup of coffee and dessert, but still late enough to go home with freebies as they closed. Perfection, I would say.
Wow, a fox hunt and the Bakery, and Hopewell Furnace, what a great day!!!
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