< more recent | 1-6 June 2018 | older >
6 June 2018: Finished the drive to Butler, PA, and did a bit of exploring around town where everyone is getting ready for this weekend’s Bantam Jeep Heritage Festival. Great to see the town of Butler all decked out for the occasion. Saw a few other Jeeps and festival goers in the area, then stopped in at the Butler Brew Works to taste some of their Bantam Jeep-specific beers, before heading to The Brick House for a fabulous dinner …
5 June 2018: Really appreciating the calm gentle landscapes that define the area around the lake at Bald Eagle State Park. There is a nice network of short and easy hiking trails that can be combined for longer loops with lots of different birds and woodland animals to be spotted along the way …
4 June 2018: Taking a couple of days to enjoy the quiet calm of Bald Eagle State Park, a pretty spot nestled between two mountain ridges, and staying at The Nature Inn, an “eco-lodge” that encourages visitors to get out on the trail and get to know the birds and trees specific to the region …
3 June 2018: Spent the day with the team from Off Road Consulting on a group run at Famous Reading Outdoors checking out some different trails and enjoying the varied terrain this new property near St. Clair, PA has to offer …
2 June 2018: Stopped for an afternoon of wheeling fun at Rausch Creek Offroad Park in Tremont, PA, where the weather turned out to be excellent despite all the predictions of rain. There was still plenty of mud on the trails though …
2 June 2018: Taking a time-out at Hickory Run State Park in the western foothills of the Pocono Mountains. Had to make a visit to the “Boulder Field,” a very unusual remnant of the Ice Age. The vast expanse of giant round boulders in a clearing in the middle of the forest is a great place to explore on foot …
1 June 2018: Getting a headstart on the fun at the Bantam Jeep Heritage Festival with a little roadtrip, and making sure that some of those roads are dirt. Great to be able to make the journey on the slow road with some fun stops along the way…
THIS MONTH:
Participating in the Jeep Invasion and the 8th annual Bantam Jeep Heritage Festival, June 8-10, in Butler, PA. The Bantam Jeep Heritage Festival is a tribute event to the original jeep, the history behind it, the people who created it, and its birthplace, Butler Pennsylvania. The event provides Jeep enthusiasts with on and off-road experiences that embrace the vehicle’s past and the lifestyle it now fosters. The family-friendly event is held at Coopers Lake Campground, about an hour north of Pittsburgh, PA every year with on-site off-road trails, a Jeep “playground” obstacle course, Jeep History exhibit, huge vendor area with 150+ companies and more…
COMING UP SOON:
Headed back to Paris to connect with friends and favorite places and lay some groundwork for upcoming projects…
Heading to DC Dirt Camp for a chance to learn how to ride the trails on two-wheels in July. DC Dirt Camp is a Dirt Bike School sponsored by the Motorcycle Safety Foundation offering training at two locations outside Washington, DC, to prepare riders to hit the trails on small displacement, off-road bikes, as well as larger street-legal, dual sport and adventure bikes…
Participating in the Ladies Offroad Convention in Salt Lake City, Utah, 2-5 August 2018. The Ladies Offroad Convention is an action-packed, interactive 4-day weekend educating, motivating, and guiding for ladies involved in all aspects of the offroad world. Presented by Charlene Bower and the Ladies Offroad Network, the event creates a space to learn more about offroad activities and share experiences with like-minded women from around the country…
Trail Guiding at the 10th annual Topless for Tatas Charity Wheeling event at Rausch Creek off-road park 11-13 August. TFT brings together off-roaders from all over to raise awareness about Breast Cancer and raise funds for the American Cancer Society. The annual event raises over $30,000 for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation each year …
PENNSYLVANIA COAL COUNTRY
The Coal Region is a historically important coal-mining area in Northeastern Pennsylvania in the central Ridge-and-valley Appalachian Mountains, comprising Lackawanna, Luzerne, Columbia, Carbon, Schuylkill, Northumberland, and the extreme northeast corner of Dauphin counties. The discovery of anthracite coal was first made near the Schuylkill–Northampton line in the vicinity of Summit Hill by a hunter in 1791 and the first mine was established in 1775. The anthracite mining industry loomed over the region until its decline in the 1950s. The Knox Mine Disaster in 1959 served as the death knell for deep mining which faded away in the mid 1960s; almost all current anthracite mining is done via strip mining. Tours of underground mines can be taken in Ashland, Scranton, and Lansford, each of them also having museums dedicated to the mining industry. Also evident are patch towns, small villages affiliated with a particular mine. These towns were owned by the mining company. Though no longer company owned, many hamlets survive; one of them, the Eckley Miners’ Village, is a museum and preserved historical town owned and administered by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, which seeks to restore patch towns to their original state.
ABOUT HICKORY RUN
Hickory Run is a 15,990-acre state park spread across the Pocono Mountains in Carbon County, Pennsylvania. With 44 miles of hiking trails, there are a variety of experiences available, but the park’s most notable feature is the huge boulder field located in the northeast corner. The boulder field can be reached via a graded dirt road or by hiking the 3.5-mile Boulder Field Trail from the trailhead on SR 534. The field comprises about 720,000 square feet (16.5 acres) in area and the top of the boulder layer is virtually level with the approaching path. The largest of its kind in the Appalachian region, the Boulder Field consists of a gently sloping expanse of boulders occupying the axis of a small valley. It is surrounded by a coniferous forest with stony loam soils. The Boulders are between three and thirty feet in diameter and are hard, gray-red, medium-grained sandstone and conglomeratic sandstone from the Catskill Formation which forms the adjacent ridgelines. There are two widely accepted theories about the formation of the boulder field. One theory suggests that boulder-size blocks are generated from the fracturing of an upslope bedrock outcrop by alternating freeze and thaw. As boulders accumulate at the base of the rock slope, periglacial ice-catalyzed heaving and sliding transports them downslope during cold climatic periods to form boulder fields. The second theory says that boulder fields are formed by the exhumation of corestones initially formed underground by the action of spheroidal weathering on jointed bedrock. Later, the weathered rock, which is called saprolite, is progressively removed by erosion from around the corestones to expose them as isolated boulders. In time, these boulders are altered and redistributed by the accumulation of unconsolidated soil and sediment; freeze and thaw; and perhaps by periglacial action or glaciation during cold periods to form boulder fields. The presence of glacial erratics south of the area of the Hickory Run boulder field indicate that this area has been covered by an ice sheet at least once. The most extensive ice sheet to cover the area containing this boulder field occurred prior to 900,000.
Nesconset | Paris | Shamokin | Butler
MORE NOTES FROM THE ROAD:
May – Wheelers Overland
16-30 April – New York
4-15 April – Sudan
29 March – 3 April – Egypt
22-28 March – Paris
16-21 March – Paris
1-15 March – New York
February – Coal Country
January – Vegas to Glamis Roadtrip
December – East Coast Roadtrip
16-30 November – Paris
1-15 November – Florida
October – Rausch Creek
18-30 September – Kyrgyzstan
1-17 September – Rebelle U
15-31 August – Arizona
8-14 August – TFT9
1-7 August – Serbia
July – NY and Serbia
June – NY and Paris
May – Wheelers Overland
22-30 April – Algeria
15-21 April – Algeria
8-14 April – Algeria
Archive
REFLECTIONS
A quick overview of impressions from a stop in Cairo during our recent scouting mission in Egypt and Sudan … [read]
SPECIAL REPORT
A look into south-eastern Algeria on the border with Libya and Niger: overlanding with the Tuareg in one of the most remote corners of the Sahara … [read]
SPECIAL REPORT
Detailed series on a solo scouting journey into some of the remotest backcountry around Moab. The six day 450-mile off-pavement trip into the Maze district of the Canyonlands National Park offers insight into the challenges of expedition planning… [read]
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