Red Run Stream Closeup, Quehanna Wild Area, Pennsylvania
This tiny tributary of Red Run up on the Allegheny Plateau in northwest Pennsylvania is a favorite place of mine. It's always a thrill to climb around the boulders at stream's edge of the narrow canyon that holds this little headwater stream. It's a shady, steep headwaters with a northern hardwood forest of birch and red maple, high up on the Allegheny Plateau. The winters are cold and edgy here, the summers cool and calming. The boulder-strewn slopes are home to black bear, whitetail deer, bobcat, and whatever mountain spirits are willing to accept you. Timber rattlesnakes live here as well, although I've never seen any in this spot. Still, I try to be wary.
Native eastern brook trout still live in these clear, cold waters. Fortunately it's such a small stream that fishermen seldom find it attractive, preferring the excitement of the larger, hatchery reared, non-native trout stocked each spring in the bigger streams below. The put-and-take trout crowd. I used to be one of them, a long time ago. These days I'd rather have a few wild trout than a lot of lazy hatchery drones, doomed to die in streams too warm, too silted, too unshaded, too polluted to call home.
The moss and fern-covered rock that form the streambanks are wet under my hand. It's an interesting sensation: rock so cool and slippery. I try to watch my footing, for a bad fall on hard rock would be trouble, especially when you're alone.
The clear mountain waters gurgle and bounce off rocks, drag by small sand bars, slide through deep pools, tumble over little waterfalls. Tiny waterfalls that you can get your face right up to.
I try to walk softly and slowly, try not to rip the moss and ferns. A reverence returns, deeper and more natural than in any man-made cathedral. Although I've been here many times, I feel like I have not even scratched the surface of this place. I wish I could live here, in a hidden cabin high up on the side of the slope, where not even the bear hunters would find me in November. I would not speak a word, would not tell a soul. I would be an Indian ghost.
All in all, the mountains and streams remain. Forests and other plants come and go relatively quickly, while the rocks and soil set the true pace. The Appalachian Mountains are very, very, old; the oldest on the continent. They wait, they live, they breathe.
When I'm here, there's nowhere else I need to be, nothing else I should be doing. Even so, I wonder: what's around the next bend in the stream, what's even higher up? Curiosity and wanderlust reign as I keep moving. Am I moving too fast to appreciate this place? I hope not.
Think like a mountain, listen to a clear mountain stream. See if you aren't changed for the better.
Photo Location: Quehanna Wild Area, Pennsyvlania.
