Cabins in the Woods, Forbes State Forest

This week's trek was one of my best...not in terms of natural beauty discovered, but in terms of plain old discoveries.  And adventure.  I came across a lot of privately owned cabins in the woods, all of them closed for the winter.  The one in this photo fell down a long time ago, but in the same general vicinity there is a small hamlet of hunting camps and summer homes.

 Of course, I would never vandalize or rob from places like this, but there is a certain tinge of adventure that comes of trespassing.  They're closed for the season with the assumption that the roads in to them will be impassable until spring.  (That assumption is antiquated; it was an eerie 64 degrees in the Laurel Highlands.)

This little cottage was my favorite one in the village, with its rustic porch pillars and shuttered windows.  I love a good porch where you can sit and watch the rain, preferably with the smell of wood smoke wafting from the chimney.

The owners of this cottage seemed to have a motion-activated hunting camera installed on the trunk of a nearby tree to get pictures of anyone who ventures here unbidden--like me.  Linn Run State Park must lease out the land that these cabins are built on.  But my goal wasn't to snoop on private property.  It was simply to follow the gated road that runs from the main thoroughfare through the park up to the Quarry Trail, and on to the adjacent Forbes State Forest.  This track is called Rock Run Road, and it becomes Weaver Road.  On my maps, it appeared to be an old dirt road, no longer passable to vehicles.  And boy, was that right!  In places, it's barely passable on foot.

Once past the little gaggle of cabins, the road heads southeast through sinister rocky forests, thick with jaggers.  At the summit of the ridge, this enormous rock city appeared off to the left.  It doesn't look very big in this photo, but it is an immense collection of tall boulders with craggy hollows and gullies in between.  I spent about twenty minutes exploring the place, and it was plenty spooky under gray skies with the climate-change-winds raging through the barren treetops.  It was nice that there was not so much as a speck of spray paint on these rocks, a sign that they're too remote for vandals!

 After wending and climbing and scrambling over fallen trees, the old road comes out on a marshy plateau and seems to run between old farms, long since reclaimed by the forest.  The track runs through some private land and past this little one-room cabin--which is much smaller and simpler than the ones I'd passed at the beginning of the trek.  The family name "Kalp" is painted on the goose's belly above the door.

I pressed my cellphone up against the glass just to get some idea of what the place was like inside.  What I wouldn't give just to have a one-room cabin deep in the forest!  There's not much room in there for anything but a fireplace, a table, a few chairs, and a bed.  But I wouldn't need anything more than that.  Except curtains!  I'd definitely want to close my curtains after it got dark in the forest all around.

I was tempted to turn back, but something called me just a little way further down the track.  A hunch, a nameless desire, a simple longing for more of all the things my Pittsburgh life lacks.  I don't know.  The road turns very soggy and passes through more woods and comes out again into an area of old fields.  What really caught my eye was this old corn crib sitting beside the muddy road...definite proof that this place was once a farm.  The street sign inside the corn crib says McMurray Rd.

 Turn the corner, and there it is.  A two-story cabin sitting on the edge of a pond.  I approached the place with a sense of trepidation, not knowing if it was completely abandoned or currently occupied by angry drunks with AK-47s and pit bulls.

 Much to my delight and surprise, neither thing was true.  This pleasant cabin with its pond and grounds belongs to the state forest service, and an inviting little sign encourages the public to make use of it!

Someone does seem to be making use of the place, unless the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania makes it a point to stock its cabins with oversize bottles of Cuervo.  Also on the mantel were pots for cooking, dishes, and matches. 

Sure, it could use a woman's touch, but I found the cabin incredibly welcoming, with a picnic table, a few chairs, small windows looking out over the nearby pond and into the silent trees.  I could spend a few days in a place like this.  In fact, whoever left the liquor here probably comes on a snowmobile and spends a few hours away from his life (or wife?) in the winter when no one else ventures out this far into the forest.

This is the downstairs room, looking away from the fireplace.  There are two lawnmowers and a snow shovel in the far corner.  The ladder leads up to an unfinished sleeping loft.  It would be spooky to spend a night out here alone.  I would probably bolt the two doors, sit by the fire till dark, drink the Cuervo, and go upstairs to pass out on top of the plywood door to the loft--using my body weight as a lock.  It would just be too spooky trying to sleep near the fire without anything covering the windows.  Any old soul could gawk in at you while you slept...

This is looking out the window at the pond, with the patio in the foreground.  I'm thinking I need to come back to this place and spend some time here.  This whole trek reminded me of a woodland discovery I made years ago, in the wintry Allegheny National Forest.  This was a good hike; I loved discovering all these cabins, especially the last two.  But I gotta say, things like this are a lot more fun when winter is cooperating and everything is snowbound.  Imagine coming across these places in the snow, with no footprints and a real feeling of snowy isolation.