Clarion Chapter

This month the Clarion Chapter of the North Country Trail Association decided to hike the Maple Creek area located on the Eastern end of our section of trail.  A group of 12 hikers met on a crisp Sunday morning to head out onto the snow covered trail.  The thermometer at my house had the temperature at 16 degrees when I left my house at 8:45 for the meetup point at Leeper Uni-Mart.  It wasn’t much warmer than that when we started out 45 minutes later at the trail head on Route 66.

This section of trail starts out on a pipeline for about half a mile.  Someone had recently ridden an snow mobile down this pipeline which made breaking the trail easy for the first half mile.  After hiking along the pipeline, the group traveled onward across the hilltop and then into the Maple Creek Valley, heading towards the trail’s first crossing of Maple Creek.

The first crossing of Maple Creek was very beautiful.  The Creek is banked by hemlock trees through this section and their branches were weighted down with the snow that had fallen 36 hours before the hike.

Several hike participants stopped while crossing the bridge over Maple Creek to snap a few pictures of the scenery around the creek.

After crossing Maple Creek for the first time, the group had reached the location where the chapter will be building Clarion County’s second hiking shelter in the spring.  The shelter we are going to build here will be an exact replica of the one that we built this past fall near the Highland Drive trail head.

This past fall, Ed Scurry was doing some preliminary groundwork at the site of the shelter and used the multitude of rocks in this area to construct a fireplace in front of where the shelter will be.  Ed and several other hikers had gone out ahead of the rest of the group and were waiting at the fireplace with a fire already started.  We took a short break at the shelter site, enjoying the warmth of the fire, and took a group picture.  After we had all rested up, we pushed onward.

After about another 3/4 mile, the group crossed maple creek road and headed down into the Maple Creek Valley again toward the trail’s second crossing of Maple Creek.  Below is a picture of Maple Creek as seen from the bridge across the second crossing of the Creek.

After crossing Maple Creek for the second time, the group climbed up out of the Maple Creek Valley and took a short road walk on Jacks Hollow Road.  After this road walk, the trail heads back into Clear Creek State Forest.  This portion of the hike went much quicker being that it is mostly flat compared to the trail earlier in the morning which included hiking into and out of the Maple Creek Valley several times.

With a little over half a mile left in the hike, the hikers were met by two other hikers traveling in the opposite direction.  These hikers  turned out to be my mother and aunt.  They informed us that they had some snacks and hot chocolate ready for us at the parking lot on Forest Drive where our cars waited.  We hiked the remaining 1/2 mile of trail and enjoyed some snacks and hot chocolate before climbing into our cars to end another great day on the North Country Trail in Clarion County.

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