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Hiking the Marcellus trail

TIADAGHTON STATE FOREST - The sign on the Mid State Trail in Lycoming County stopped me in my tracks Tuesday morning during a three-day backpacking trip in north central Pennsylvania.

A drilling site is visible through cleared trees along Mid State Trail, which runs 260 miles from the Maryland border into Tioga County. Marcellus Shale drilling appears to be walloping the land on a new scale.
A drilling site is visible through cleared trees along Mid State Trail, which runs 260 miles from the Maryland border into Tioga County. Marcellus Shale drilling appears to be walloping the land on a new scale.Read moreHAROLD BRUBAKER / Staff

TIADAGHTON STATE FOREST - The sign on the Mid State Trail in Lycoming County stopped me in my tracks Tuesday morning during a three-day backpacking trip in north central Pennsylvania.

The posting by the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources said: "Environmentally Sensitive Area. Hiking Only."

Yet just a few hundred yards west of the trail, machines were bulldozing the mountaintop for a natural gas well in Pennsylvania's latest natural-resources bonanza, the Marcellus Shale, which resides more than a mile underground.

In the woods past the sign, where the pinkish-white flowers of the mountain laurel were fading, it sounded like an industrial zone.

On one side, earthmovers, glimpsed through the trees, roared as a dirt pile grew larger. On the other, the din of a drilling rig reached my ears long before its 70-foot-tall spire came into view.

Such are the incongruities generated by the Marcellus Shale natural gas boom in the mountains bordering the Pine Creek gorge and elsewhere in the rugged wilds of Pennsylvania, where hikers, hunters, and other outdoor enthusiasts have long gone for solitude and recreation - plus last week's bonus of all-you-can-eat wild blueberries.

I am one of those hikers. At home in Philadelphia, reading the stories about the rush to develop Marcellus Shale, the prospect of these woods being spoiled had gotten to me. What would it be like on my next hiking trip? So I went looking for the answer.

Later in the day, down by Pine Creek, I mentioned the paradox of the "hiking only" sign amid heavy industry to a forest ranger, who said he was not allowed to be quoted. Laughing ruefully, he said, "Oh man, I better get up there and take that down."

There's no chance he'll stop the drilling.

Pennsylvania has leased 692,004 of the 1.6 million acres of state forest in the Marcellus Shale region to natural gas drillers for $413 million - with hopes of bringing in many millions more in royalties from sales of the gas.

Fears abound that if gas companies drill all of the 6,492 wells projected for state forests, the roads and pipelines needed to service the wells will "ruin the woods," as several Lycoming County residents put it last week.

At the same time, this is a state with a history of aggressive natural-resource extraction. It stretched from animals and fur in colonial days, to lumber, oil and - now in its second boom - natural gas. The first natural gas rush was in the early to mid-1980s.

Many of the state-forest trails hikers use today follow abandoned logging roads and even old railroad beds that went deep into the mountains, such as the one to Eagleton Mine Camp, deserted by 1870, in Clinton County. What's left of that railroad bed now forms part of the Eagleton Mine Camp Trail in Sproul State Forest.

The 20-mile loop in Sproul was the second leg of my trip. As if to drive home the point that gas drilling is not the only natural-resources industry changing the Pennsylvania landscape, part of the trail was closed for logging, forcing hikers onto a power-line corridor. Another section went for two miles along an area that recently had been heavily logged after a gypsy moth infestation.

But Marcellus Shale drilling appears to be walloping the land on a new scale.

Leland Thompson, 25, who lives along Pine Creek in Lycoming County, said he wasn't affected much by the Marcellus rush until this year. It bothers him that there are places he is not allowed to go anymore, such as Ramsey Lookout, where his family traditionally had a New Year's Eve cookout.

"That spot is where they have a 70-foot tower now to drill, so it stinks," Thompson said. "There's other spots, but before too long, they're going to be there, too," said Thompson, sitting at a picnic table outside McConnell's Country Store & Deli, in Waterville, where he works.

Jakob Heck, a 20-year-old who lives in nearby Jersey Shore, Pa., had nothing good to say about the gas boom, even about the jobs some of his buddies from high school have with gas companies.

"They ask you to work so many hours that you don't have any time to spend all the money you're supposedly making. I think it's just ruining the woods," said Heck, who was parked near where the Mid State Trail climbs Houselander Mountain.

The steep trail was laced Monday afternoon with orange and black cables used for seismic testing of the shale. Just past the summit of the flat-topped mountain, the trail ran into a new natural gas pipeline, which cut a swath as wide as Philadelphia's Market Street through the woods.

Any hiker knows the sensation of coming to a corridor where all the trees have been felled to make room for power lines or pipelines. It's simply commerce breaking the isolation and reverie of a long day's walk in the woods.

"Who wants to come and hike across pipelines and well pads? The answer is probably no one," said Curt Ashenfelter, executive director of the Keystone Trails Association in Harrisburg.

The next morning, Tuesday, I came to Ramsey Road, which had been widened to include a pipeline and where I found the "Hikers Only" sign on the far side. At 8:10, a tractor-trailer sped past.

Near the gas-well excavation site, where huge Volvo dump trucks were moving soil, I talked briefly with a pipeline worker.

"You wait, this whole mountain's going to be nothing but roads when they're done," he said, before driving off in his pickup. "These woods'll be gone. It's too bad."

On my way back to the Mid State, I saw a black bear at the trail opening, where I had left the woods a few minutes earlier. My heart jumped. When the animal saw me, it decided not to cross, and bolted back into the forest.