Highland Trail, Rickett's Glen State Park, April 2014

After I had trouble hiking the Falls Trail, I took on the Highland Trail at Ricketts Glen. A friend had called the park "Pennsylvania's premier hiking experience" and I soon found out the truth of that. Even without the waterfalls Ricketts Glen would be a wonderful park. And the Highland Trail was a delight. Easy to hike for someone tired from a four hour drive, and scenic enough not to bore someone tired from a four hour drive.

Highlights of the Highland Trail included a pair of stone 'ledges', basically cliffs on the trail. Normally they wouldn't provide much of a view but the trees were not fully leafed and I had some lovely sights of the horizon. And at the trail passes through the Midpoint Crevasse, a large boulder formation. And the whole of the hike I was surrounded by the sight, sound, and smell of an old-growth forest. (Due to the difficulty of lumbering in the area these trees were never cut.) The surface itself is dirt and rock founded flat by decades of boots, and very easy to hike. I wound up hiking four miles on the Highland Trail and another connection trail from the distant parking lot, and my comparative failure on the Falls Trail was forgotten.