We started our day with a place we have been before. Across from Denton Run State Park there is a small rest and picnic area. It is next door to the Lumber Museum. We’ve stopped at this rest area before and commented on how nice the stream looked. With the AGT we now know it’s called Commissioner Run. The museum granted permission for a cache to be placed in the woods so we started our day with a one-mile loop through an interpretive trail and along Commissioner Run.
After a re-find of a cache that has been converted to an AGT cache, we headed for the Susquehannock Trail System. We first found the AGT cache very near an impressive vista. After that we headed in the opposite direction for an older cache that had been recommended to us the evening before. We had a great time walking to the cache which had its first log book. As always we stopped to search the log book and found Eric Sherwood and his parent’s log from finding the cache in June 2002. They were caching at the time as team Sherwood Forest. It made sense that Eric and his parents had found this cache together since the family owns a place in Tioga near Pine Creek. Still it was a surprise and brought back memories of our friend.
A common theme for the week was butterflies, lots of them. As we would drive dirt roads, there would be dozens of them on the ground. At times as we drove down a road dozens of them would swirl around the truck. It was an amazing site. As the week progressed, we saw more and more milk weed in bloom. As we walked by stands of milk weed there would sometimes be five to six butterflies on a plant.
State Parks were also a common site for the week. Today included visits to Denton Run, Lymon Lake, Cherry Spring, and Ole Bull State Parks. They were all different and worth a visit. Denton Hill is a ski area with trails and really nice cabins. Lymon Lake has been reborn with the replacement of its failing dam. It now boasts a new zig-zag dam. The area near the lake is pretty standard state park fair, but there were a couple of non-AGT caches past the lake that took us to a wonderful spot for a vista of the lake and the surrounding area. We left the overlook and headed to a trail with small rock formations and a small stream with a series of nice cascades. Our last stop at this overlooked place was to hike into a large rock formation for a cache.
Cherry Spring State Park exists solely to provide a night sky for viewing stars. It is a very strange looking state park. The camp sites are arranged to one side of a row of three observatories. They are in a flat grassy area. The attraction is to literally camp at a place where you can see the stars. The moon was bright or we would have been here after dark. Maybe on a return trip. Ole Bull State Park offers a nice stream to cross and a an overlook of the valley. The overlook has the remains of a castle that was started but never completed by one of the founders of the area.
Our last stop of the day and our place of refuge for the night was Wellsboro. After a long day of hiking, we walked around this peaceful town and stopped for a bit to in the village green to enjoy Wynken, Blynken, and Nod. If you’ve never been to Wellsboro and the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania, you should go. Do it in the warm weather so you too can visit Wynken, Blynken, and Nod on a quiet summer night. :-)
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