New England, 2022

Post #2: Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, August 7 to 11

As some of you may know, we are not “campers”. Yes, we own and travel in a fifth wheel “camper”, but we are really more travelers and explorers. We use our trailer as a home base to set up in a spot and branch out to see the surrounding area.

White Haven, PA is just such a place. Specifically, Hickory Run State Park, located in the beautiful Pocono Mountains of the east central part of the state. The campground is quite open and the spaces at least twice as far apart as where we stayed in the last two KOA campgrounds. Our space is backed up against a line of trees with a large field across from us.

We started our exploration of the area on Monday, August 8 by driving to the east to the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area. This valley, which obviously contains the Delaware River, separates Pennsylvania from New Jersey and New York. We first went to the only open visitor center in the park; the Park Headquarters. Here we got our park maps (and Debbie’s NPS passport stamps) and directions from the rangers there to some of the best hikes, concentrating on seeing some of the many waterfalls in the areas while on our hikes. We started with the “tallest waterfall in PA” which was located on the very short Raymondskill Falls trail. While it was a really nice waterfall at the end of the loop trail, the recent near-drought conditions of this area did limit the amount of water flowing over it. We followed that with a hike to Dingmans Falls, then another short hike on the Hornsbeck Creek trail, which ended at yet another nice waterfall.

On Tuesday, we drove nearly an hour north to Scranton, PA and visited the Steamtown National Historic Site. This was a really large NPS site dedicated to steam trains. It was built from an old railroad roundhouse that surrounded a train turntable. The exhibits there were very impressive with not only a park movie, but many smaller video locations covering all of the aspects of the steam train industry. While there, we took a couple of ranger guided tours, one of which was in the shop where all of the machining work for the train engines is done. We actually toured that area while the workers were on their lunch break.

From Steamtown NHS, we drove a short way to the west to Ricketts Glen State Park. Debbie had heard that there was a hike there that was known for having a large number of waterfalls. The Falls Trail was a loop trail with about 1,053 feet of drop down into a canyon and back up again. Over the course of this hike, which was about 4-1/2 miles, we saw seventeen of the over 20 water falls within the park. They ranged from 11 feet to 94 feet in height. Again, while all were flowing and worth the hike, the water levels were down in this area as well due to the lack of rain this summer.

On Wednesday, we loaded our bicycles up into the back of the truck and headed just a few miles up the road to the adjacent Lehigh Gorge State Park. Debbie had seen some videos of a nice multi-use trail that stretched from just outside New Haven, down along the Lehigh River to Jim Thorpe, PA. While the trail was really nice and pretty level, having once been a railroad bed, there was a slight overall decline on the way to Jim Thorpe. We started about noon, and it took us almost three hours to travel the 23 miles of the trail. Once again, there were a couple of waterfalls alongside the trail and the views of the rapids and cascades along the river were pretty nice. Once we reached Jim Thorpe, we sat in a park next to the old train station where tourists can take a train ride along the very trail that we had just come down. There we ate our picnic lunch before beginning the 23-mile trip back up the river trail. The town was very historic looking, much like Ouray, CO, and “fun fact” was the home to Asa Packer, the founder of Lehigh University. We made a more aggressive return trip, covering the 23 miles in just 2-1/2 hours. On the way down, we rarely used the motors of our e-bikes, but on that generally uphill return trip we did put the e-bikes through their paces. If you think that the “e” in e-bike stands for “easy”, you’d be sadly mistaken. We returned back to our trailer quite a bit sorer than we had left it earlier in the day.