Valley Trail, Raccoon Creek

           It's a beautiful season, these last lingering days of November.  I hate to see empty-headed fools rushing from one feel-good holiday to the next, putting up their Christmas decorations the day after Thanksgiving.  This, too, is a chronological place, a landscape in time.  This season, too, is worth savoring.

          It's still fall.  And despite the hunters, it's one of the best times for a hike through wooded hills.  With all the leaves off, there are vistas that are hidden much of the year.  A sunny day in the late November woods is its own distinct kind of pleasure.  So quiet.  So solitary.  So pure.

           The Valley Trail, at Raccoon Creek, starts near PA 18, where it bisects the park into eastern and western halves.  The park road that meanders from its east entrance to this midway point at PA 18 is actually a full five miles long.  But the trek along the Valley Trail is much more direct.  It only takes 35 minutes to hike from the trail's western terminus to within view of the lake.  And it gets prettier the further east you go.

           In places, the views out across the wooded valley and adjoining hills are something more than "pretty," if a little less than "gorgeous."  For me, on this day when I completed the rough draft of my doctoral dissertation, it was a transcendent experience: a perfect journey through a brilliant place of sunlight and shadow, rocks and ravines, bare trees and broad panoramas.

           I heard not a single gunshot, though I did see hunters' cars parked alongside the road, and a solitary hunter having a lonesome picnic in the Roadside East Picnic Area.

          I had gone to the park office to purchase the book Walks, Hikes, and Overnights in Raccoon Creek State Park, by Mark Christy. The publication date is not recent (2003) and it's one of those mathematical books that counts the elevation changes and the mileage from landmark to landmark.  It's not glossy, which is fine, but it also seems to have a clinical approach to hiking, omitting most visual detail and description.  All the same, it's thorough and precise, and it should help me plan my hikes in a way that I haven't really been doing.  I don't love the book the way I loved Hiking the Allegheny National Forest, by Jeff Mitchell.  But Raccoon Creek is my Allegheny National Forest now.  And to the untrained eye, these photos look exactly like the ones I used to take up North.  In fact, I can remember hikes in the ANF that looked surprisingly like today's.  Few there are who even remember who I was before.  And this forest is good enough.  It's not as big, but big enough.  It's not as wild, but wild enough.  It really is good enough.