Summer is my least favorite time to be in the forest. It's really too bad. I wait for summer all year. When a dreary winter stretches out all the way through May--as it did this year--I long for summer. I yearn for it like a lover.
But then when it gets here, it brings mosquitoes, and biting flies, and poison ivy. It brings overgrown trails and all that goddamn light. Endless, merciless, all-invading light. They've been promising us rain since last Saturday, but all we get is this blinding, glaring, soul-destroying sunlight. The grass is already starting to turn brown.
My thought today was to get onto the Forest Trail where it crosses PA 18 and head west until the trail crosses over Traverse Creek--pictured above. From there, I wanted to bushwhack along the creek until I came to the place (far from any path) where Little Service Run flows into it. It looked like a great trek on the map: a place to myself, at the confluence of two streams, deep in the forest.
But now that summer is well underway, the stream banks are so overgrown that bushwhacking was out of the question. I'll have to try it again sometime in the late fall or winter. Down here in the southern part of the state, all this searingly hot light penetrates to the floor of these patchy forests. Unlike the forests just forty miles north of here, these southerly woods lack a dense, rich canopy to keep the forest floor dark; all kinds of undergrowth springs up. I just want a place away from the light.
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