Into the Ice Age
February, 2000

It was a year ago that I first heard of the place. I had asked Tim Cain, Scoutmaster of the Knox troop, if he knew of any trails that would be both interesting and not too challenging for the beginners in our troop. He thought about it for a minute and then said, "Have you done the Minister Creek Loop?" Then, when I said we had not, he went on to describe this as an easy 8-miler that had some interesting scenery --- mostly big rocks and rushing torrents. That sounded OK, if unexceptional, and so I jotted the name and directions down and thought that we might do it sometime.

Last weekend the troop had its annual winter campout. This year we camped in and around a hunting cabin 6 miles west of Sheffield. Such cabins dot the landscape of Forest County which, I am told, has but 5000 permanent residents but about 10,000 small cabins that are used weekends in the summer and during hunting season. I always enjoy the signboards in front of these rustic retreats ¾ Camp Ricochet, Camp TwoFer, Camp Big Dog, Camp Addition, Camp Nut-N-Fancy ¾ and spend my idle driving moments trying to reason out the logic behind the names.

In planning for our campout I had asked around about good hikes in the vicinity, and Buck Heeter, our most experienced hand as such things, immediately said, "Minister Creek. Do the Minister Creek Trail. It has some big rocks and good views." There it was again, "Minister Creek" and "big rocks." Like I had never seen a big rock before! Still, it was just five miles from our camp, and the weather was going to be unseasonable warm, so why not.

I put it to the boys at last Wednesday's meeting and they were very unimpressed at the prospect of seeing some big rocks, and so the hike might have fallen through, except that Steve Shreffler, Assistant Scoutmaster of the troop, was very interested in going. Also, I really did need to start my training for our Rocky Mountain adventure at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico later this year, so, OK, we would take a little hike and see the big rocks.

On the second day of the campout, we gave a call for everyone who wanted to go on an eight-mile hike and look for arrowheads on the Minister Creek Trail. Five Scouts volunteered. Pete Hufnagel and Mike Freenock went for the exercise since they, like me, were in training for Philmont. Steve (Little Steve) Douthit went because he was buddies with Mike and also because the prospect of a walk in the woods appealed to him. Ryan Wolbert and Zach Botzer went for the arrowhead hunting, and perhaps because the older Scouts already mentioned were involved. Steve (Big Steve) Shreffler and I went mostly because a tramp in the woods is our idea of fun.

We arrived at the Minister Creek Loop jump-off point at 11:30 a.m. on Saturday. Where the trail wasn't a sheet of ice, it was slush, pools of frigid water or an inch of mud over hard-frozen ground. Anticipating the mud, I had worn my old, leaky boots because I didn't want to dirty up my new Philmont boots quite yet. This decision made for interesting hiking, as I had to constantly detour around wet patches that would quickly have had me walking in wet footwear. Soon our crew started up the nasty trail. A cold sun lit the steep snow-covered hillside. The forest here was of beech and oak, but was leafless and lifeless. We heard no rustle of leaves --- no sound of bird or beast, only the tumble of Minister Creek somewhere down in the valley to our right.

After about 20 minutes we came to a fork in the trail. This was decorated with a beat up sign that pointed to features in either direction; all of them still miles away. It would have taken but five minutes to reach this fork on a summer day, and as we rested briefly, I had some doubts that we could do the whole eight miles under these conditions and get back in daylight. Still, it was early yet and who knew what interesting thing might be around the next bend in the trail.

The old sign had a patch of wood let into it, perhaps to repair a bullet hole left by some inexpert hunter. The patch was rectangular and intrigued me a bit because it was merely pushed into the wood and friction alone seemed to be holding it in place. I pried it out to see if perhaps there was a treasure map or some other interesting thing behind it --- nothing, just a little round cavity. I tore a scrap of paper from a larger sheet and wrote, "So you are nosey too! HH 1884" with a ballpoint pen, inserted this note in the cavity, and replaced the wooden patch. That should give some inquisitive soul a story to tell some day, though Little Steve claimed that the "1884" will fool no one as ball-point pens had not been invented then.

We forked right and went skidding down the hillside toward a picturesque bridge that would take us across the stream. There, in the creek bottom, winter still held sway. The ground was covered with snow that showed no sign of melting, the temperature was twenty degrees colder than on the hillside we had just traversed, and the stream was half-covered with ice. I marveled at the change, but not nearly so much as when we started up the opposite hillside. Suddenly the snow and mud were gone, and we walked a very pleasant trail covered with beech leaves. Looking across the valley, you could see the snow and ice we had come though, and we discussed the reasons for this profound change for a long time.

It may just have been that we were now on a west-facing slope that caught a lot more sun, but I never was really convinced of that. In any event, we had walked from an abnormally warm and messy winter's day, into full winter, and now into early spring. My feet were still dry, the trail rose before us, and my mood lightened as we walked along.

Zach Botzer and Ryan Wolbert came on the hike in hopes of finding arrowheads among the big rocks that we expected to see later in the day. I figured that the early Indians would surely have taken advantage of any such rocks for temporary shelter on a rainy day, and that they might have left a broken arrowhead or two behind. Would these have all been picked up by now? I did not know, but as we walked I started watching the trail closely for arrowheads, fossils and odd stones that Zach and Ryan could take home as trophies of the walk. Right away, I noticed a pebble of milky quartz on the trail. High, high above the steam bed, this seemed very out of place and I picked it up. Zach came over and I asked him how he liked my arrowhead. He snorted at the thought, and I dropped the pebble and we trekked on. Now though, I noticed that these white pebbles were quite common on the path, and I pointed this out to Big Steve. He and I talked about this little mystery, but could not make much of it. Surely the park service does not cover trails such as this with white pebbles? But then, where do the pebbles come from?

We had fallen a little behind the five Scouts, and when I saw them ahead, perched on a large boulder, I picked up another of the white pebbles. As we walked up to them, I held it up and said, "Look! I found another of those arrowheads."

Little Steve took a look at the pebble and replied, "If that is an arrowhead, here is a whole bunch of them." Then he stood up and pointed to the amazing rock that he had been sitting on. It was a conglomerate the size of a large doghouse. Cemented into a limestone matrix were thousands upon thousands of white quartz pebbles like the one I held in my hand. I was impressed and ran my hand over the lumpy exterior of the rock as I tried to conceive of what its interior must be like, and how such an object could come to exist. I asked the Scouts to explain the origins of the rock. They observed that it was a sedimentary rock that had a whole bunch of pebble cemented into it. I took that fact as a starting point and told a tale of long ago…

 

Once upon a time in the uplands of a long ago land that has long since eroded away to nothing, a gigantic vein of quartz was exposed to the elements. Over the course of years, the quartz vein broke away in bits. Spring freshets carried these into nearby streams. The steams had hard beds and gradually the jagged quartz pieces were rolled down to the sea by the action of the moving water. They bumped against one another and, slowly, their sharp edges were worn smooth and they became white pebbles. This sea is also no more, but it was shallow and full of small marine life that, when it died, sank to the bottom and made a thick ooze. Periodically, a heavy rain would wash the quartz pebbles from the rivers and streams and deposit these into the ooze, where they sank and were covered up. This happened for many, many, many years until the layer of pebble filled ooze was very thick and then this gradually changed to stone. The ooze became limestone, and the pebbles remained as they were.

 

Interesting theory, but how to prove it. On examining the rock closely, I was excited to notice that the pebbles were laid down in bands, just as you might expect if their deposition was due to some periodic event such as spring floods. I'll never know if my story was true, but it must be close to the truth. Certainly the boulder answered the question of where the white pebbles on the path were coming from; they were eroding out of boulders such as this one!

"Why do you think there is only one boulder like this?" I asked.

"There are more," replied Pete. "Look there, and there and there."

The hillside was dotted with such boulders. Some were the size of a wheelbarrow, while others were the size of a large truck. Curiously the boulders seemed to get larger the farther up the hill I looked. Now why would that be?

We continued up the trail and out of the boulder zone. As I went I thought about the Ice Age and its effect on our part of the world. Here, the valleys of every stream and river are steep and deep and littered with large chucks of rock. I have been told, and I find it very probable, that our valleys were dug by the glaciers of 18,000 years ago that covered much of northwestern Pennsylvania. The huge rocks were carried from elsewhere by the ice sheets and then slowly dropped when the big melt began. There they sit to this day, sometimes singly and sometimes in interesting heaps; sometimes at the tops of hills and sometimes in the very beds of small mountain streams that curl around and seem powerless to erode them away. They are of interest to the young as natural jungle gyms, but since they are so common, older natives get used to their presence and hardly take notice of what would, anywhere else, be a remarkable terrain feature.

The trail swung around the head of a small tributary of Minister Creek and then returned to snake northward. And, here they were again, those same pebble-laden boulders, but in ever increasing size. Finally, looking up the hill, we saw a solid fractured and tumbled face of rock. With eagerness, we scrambled off the trail and up the hillside to investigate. I told Ryan and Zach that this was a good place to find real arrowheads, and to look under rocky overhangs that would provide shelter in bad weather. I pointed out a likely cubbyhole to Ryan, and after a few minutes of investigation, he cried out, "I found one!"

He brought it over and held it up and sure enough, it was the hilt half of an arrowhead. The older Scouts were more bent on investigating the nooks and crannies of the rock face, but Ryan and Zach were energized by the find and now set to searching in earnest.

The Woodland Indians are said to have arrived in this part of the world between 5 and 10 thousand years ago. No history of those times remains, but the wildlife must have been much more plentiful and varied than it is today. Some say that mammoths roamed this part of the world, though others scoff at the idea. What is for sure is that there were Indians; their arrowheads are found everywhere about the countryside. I had a friend, years ago, who owned a strawberry farm. Every spring he would plow his fields in preparation for planting. Next he would wait for a rain and then walk the furrows to pick up dozens of arrowheads that lay shining on the surface of his fields. Most were broken, but many were not. Some of them were of black flint. Some were made from red jasper, and some were of white chert. None of these rocks occur anywhere that I know of in our vicinity, and perhaps his wild tale of a battle between warring tribes in his strawberry field long ago has some truth in it. Certainly, on the earliest maps of our region, our largest local river was called not the Clarion as it its today, but was named by the French missionaries that drew the maps, Riviere au Fiel --- the River of Hate. Some old sources speculate that our little river was once the disputed boundary between two now forgotten Indian nations, and that this is the genesis of the old name.

 

Ten minutes later, Zach and I scrambled up a steep slant of scree and found ourselves in a nice little nook where a rock the size of a mansion had settled and cracked. Here he found his arrowhead, near the remains of a fire made in recent times. The fissured ceiling of the shelter provided a natural chimney. On one side the roof was flat, and here primitive drawings could be seen. There was a potbellied man holding a primitive bow. There, too, was a fish, some sort of deer, and what looked to me like a tomato man. The other guys thought this latter bit of art looked more like a mask of some sort. None of us believed these drawings to have been made by the old-time Indians, mostly because when you touched the charcoal of the drawings, your finger came away dirty. So, though it may be truthful to say they were made sometime during the last 1000 years, it is far more truthful, I believe, to say they were made during the last five.

Why this urge to leave a mark?

Behind the tumbled rock, I found the source of the pebble boulders that were strewn about the river valley below. Here was the mother of the immense rocks; the piece of cheese that the glaciers nibbled to produce the boulders below; a ledge so massive and so high that the ice could not eat it entirely away even after thousands of years of trying. Here was something I had never seen before, a cliff such as was the source of all the rocks that have been familiar to me all my life. It was so satisfying to see the massive stone wall, eroded but unbroken by the massive ice sheets of yore. Why did this one survive when I know of no other? My bet is that the quartz pebbles imbedded in the rock just proved too tough for the glaciers to wear away with any speed, and that the cliff of rock was simply able to outlast the mile of ice that once lay on top of and ground away at it.

I walked away from the place satisfied that I had seen something rare and special on this little jaunt through the woods.

We followed the trail down the hillside toward Minister Creek, passing through a region of springs that required some ingenuity to cross dry-shod. Mike Freenock, Little Steve and Pete found long poles that they used as staffs for balance in these wet places. Little Steve's was so massive that he started using it as a pole to vault over the wet and muddy streams. In the end, he got so good at it that I would stop and watch him do his stuff before following with fancy steps on boulders and slippery logs. One of the springs was amazing in its volume. It was just like a small stream bursting from a large hole in the ground, and one felt that this high on the hillside there must be some underground lake that fed it.

By 3 o'clock we had arrived at Triple Fork Camp, a delightful area where a number of steams converge to become Minister Creek. The air was full of the sounds of busy water, and the ice and snow of winter were back. Come summer, this will be a great place to camp.

We rested and had what little lunch we had brought with us. I had come away unprepared. Four chocolate chip cookies don't make much of a lunch when you have been exerting yourself. Mike was kind enough to give me a Slim Jim, and as I ate it, Little Steve read the list of ingredients from its wrapper. The list began with the words: "Contains mechanically extracted beef… " and went down hill from there. I finally told him to stop. But, no, he must read the entire witch's brew of animal parts and chemicals that I was consuming. The worst of it really was the "mechanically extracted beef" part. I had these unreasonable mental pictures of men killing a cow, then attaching some machine to pull out the Slim Jims before continuing with the more normal rendering of the carcass.

Lunch over, we crossed the creek and headed back toward our starting point. I had forgotten the hard slog of the first half-hour, but here it was again --- slush, mud and pools of very cold water. I had always to watch my feet on account of my leaky boots. Little Steve, though, had rubber boots and waded merrily though every wet obstacle.

After about 15 minutes, I saw a young couple and a dog coming down the trail toward us. The dog was a collie/lab and wore a doggy backpack.

"Brandy, brandy," I moaned as we met.

"Wrong kind of dog," the man replied.

"So, what's in the dog's backpack then?"

"His food and water."

"He's very self sufficient, isn't he?"

"Yeah, but he still won't fix it himself."

We continued. My socks were getting a little wet, but the coolness of the water on my feet was not unwelcome. We came to a pack sitting on a bridge, untended. Another couple of hundred yards of uphill slogging and here came an extended family of hikers --- a couple of men, a woman and a teenaged girl. The older of the men was using a pair of fancy walking sticks that let him navigate the treacherous terrain more easily.

"Was that your pack back there?" asked Big Steve.

"Yeah. Have you seen a boy in a white tee-shirt?"

"Maybe. I did see someone walking along the creek a ways back who wore a white shirt of some sort. I only got a glimpse though and don't know if it was a boy or a man."

"Hmm, that might be Brian. Was he in front of the man and woman with a dog?"

"Yeah, he was about ten minutes ahead of them."

Maybe I was getting giddy from the climb, because then I piped up, "You know this seems like one of those situations that happens during the last twenty minutes of an Alfred Hitchcock film. The son has gotten hold of the secret plans and is being pursued by the evil couple with the vicious dog. Meanwhile, the family of the boy desperately races to the rescue. All we really need here is some good background music!" Nobody thought my comment the least bit funny except me --- typical.

We slogged on. The sun was sinking and though there were no complaints from the Scouts, Ryan did begin asking how far we still had to go.

Finally, at the top of the last hill, we came upon one more magnificent outcrop of the pebbled conglomerate. It was the best so far, but it was covered with ice and showed signs of being heavily trafficked --- easy to believe, since it was only a mile of so from the parking area.

We were tired and so decided not to explore. The trail led up, around, under and though the massive rock formations. At times it seemed we were in some ruined city in search of treasure, and I found myself expecting a massive round boulder to come crashing down the path toward us like in an Indiana Jones movie. The caves, cracks and crannies begged out for further exploration, but ice was everywhere and the day was fading.

We completed the hike by following a series of switchbacks that gradually led us to the parking area. Little Steve and Ryan tried to shortcut one of these, but it turned out to be the last and they soon found themselves floundering through a trackless wood covered with snow. We called and waited for them to rejoin, and then skittered down the last of the hills toward our starting point. I skidded on some ice and flung my arms wide to catch my balance. My Scout hat went flying and I threw a hand out to catch it, succeeding only in batting it back up into the air ¾ "Good throw," said Big Steve. I made another grab at it as it fell again and this time managed to hang on. "Good catch!" said my cheering section. Then I stepped into a puddle and soaked my left foot. Ahh, well, I was close to comfort now.

So ended the best little hike I have ever been on. The Steves, Ryan, Mike, Pete and Zach were the best of company. I saw many an interesting sight and had many an interesting small adventure, and now I have written it all down so that I will always be able to relive the day.

Next time someone asks me where there is a good hike to be had, I too will reply, "Do the Minister Creek Loop, there are big rocks there!"