Four Friends In The Forest - Cabin Trip 2019 - Friday

@summerstime, @henksi, and @docroulston atop The Rock.

A Hike and long drive up all made well worth it, once we reach the destination. An extremely naturesque and somewhat isolated scene we have become familiar with over the past decade plus of visiting this location on Planet Earth.

Every year there seems to be minor changes to the area.. be it erosion of the footpath or something like a downed tree being jammed into the waterfall crevasse we use to bathe and jump in from the rock. This year happened to be a tree in the way, but we wouldn't know until we reached the Rock on that Friday afternoon.

@docroulston clearly excited to have returned to this quite Hidden Valley cabin.

We arrived Thursday evening as the Sun was setting. We all work, some attend classes on top of that, and some of us have children (me), but we all managed to squeeze the weekend out for a full cabin experience this year. A lot of guys drop out each time we plan, as expected with this kind of trip.. not everyone enjoys the cabin nature experience. Some people just prefer the pampering of a nice cozy beach house with all the amenities. But the true cabin lovers remain committed.

The cabin is a basic shelter with running water, a water heater (rarely used by us), and lots of beds with a roof over ours heads. There is electricity throughout the valley, although regularly cuts out due to downed trees on the steep slopes of the mountainside pulling down the wires that run alongside the road, so there is also the conveniences of the modern world with a fridge and even a separate beer fridge from the 60's.

Artifact from the 60's Beer Fridge

Four separate USGS quadrant maps used to create this large map of the Glacial Highland Plataea section of Pennsylvania that the valley town of Laquin is situated in.

The Loft

Oh how many times now have I slept on one of these seven mattresses.. over the course of 12 years now. And how many different people did the same.. there were times we had the entire cabin filled with people in beds and on the couches... not this year however as the body count was quite low.

@summerstime is the partial owner of the cabin, in a joint ownership kind of deal with his other family members, who often come up and hunt the area since PA Game Lands 12 is literally 100 yards in any direction.

And as is tradition, the man @summerstime, makes the phone call to his Father, to ensure that we have arrived safely to the cabin. There have been many occasions where the trip up was not so smooth as it was this time. Unpleasant weather can ruin the roads and bridges into the valley of Laquin, rendering vehicle travel impossible.

There has never been cell service in this location up until this year when I acquired signal on the bridge into the valley, so the only form of communication was this hard lined phone.

So we celebrate our safe travels.

And stoke the flames to the fire to keep us warm through the night. We were fortunate to have very cool temperatures that weekend and thus could enjoy and indoor fire comfortably. Some years we've been up the temps were so high, any fire was completely unbearable, but this year we had lows in the 50's and perhaps even high 40's that Thursday night.

By the morning, absolutely nothing remained of the wood we piled on to keep it burning through the wee hours.

And with a quick tune of the guitar for a little morning music wake up, a bite to eat of eggs, sausage and pancakes and we were out the door making our way to The Rock.

It's a relatively short hike to the destination from the cabin, majority on a hunting road until we divert off onto the foot trail that leads up beside The Little Schrader Creek up to and beyond The Rock.

The ghost town of Laquin is now home to several mountain loving, nature type people who clearly wanted to escape suburbia. Because they are completely surrounded by forest and meadow.

Power lines, and neighbors garden's pepper the hidden valley. Signs of human activity have picked up here in Laquin these past few years.

The bridge that over looks the Schrader Creek into the Hidden Valley has had its foundation washed away several times now due to intense downpours and incredible amounts of flow down this mountain creek.

Many times we had built rock dams down in the water, before this most recent washout, there were shallows and flats of stones we could hang out on and have a beer by the water but not much of the banks remain.

Newly Shipped In Bridge

Wild Mountain Strawberry

On the side of the Game trail so could have been brought from somewhere..

Great day to be making our way into the mountain woods.

It had rained a whole lot the Thursday car ride up and the previous week was pretty soggy as well.. so I expected to see flowing streams.. but these rock faces were gushing with runoff, and created pools beneath that tadpoles began their lives in, all for us to witness walking by.

It was interesting to see different, isolated pools of water, had tadpoles at different stages of life.

After about a mile walk on the game trail we divert off onto the foot path that follows The Little Schrader Creek up to The Rock.

Reading about the history of this place, Laquin, about the CCC camp in the 1930's that followed the actual logging town that existed here prior for about three decades, I imagine this trail must have existed and has been traversed for all this time since. There are clearly areas where the rock face looks man-made into a road of some sort, and I had pondered that in the past, and more recently have concluded that indeed some rock walls are man-made on this trail..

I mean... this little pathway sure does remind me of being man-made... dug out to form this nice path following the mountain stream.

Perhaps a quarter mile hike upstream and we have arrived at surely one of the most pleasant locations on Planet Earth. A grotto in the mountain host to perhaps hundreds of thousands of individuals like us in the past, looking for the same kind of entertainment... pure nature, with a beer and bro.

Good idea to drop a line in the pool before we start making too much noise and alert the natural spawned mountain trout.

Nice catch, @henski. Beautifully speckled mountain trout. We were not aware of how to distinguish sex of the fish, until after we returned and could use the internet again.

If you've read this far, thanks for keeping along. What follows are shots from around The Rock, and of how we enjoy our time spent out in nature. Even a nice camera like the Canon Mirrorless M50 camera I used to shoot these still doesn't quite do full justice to present the beauty of nature and more so geologic nature.

The straight line fractures of the massive bed rocks, and the hundred layer stratified, sedimentary rocks of the Mississippian Era are what do it for me. Its easy to take a few quick photos and spend the rest of the day inspecting the rocks and enjoying the sound of the water crashing below.

Four Friends In The Forest.

An excellent way to change up the usual and spend a Friday.

Till next time, I am thankful for a safe trip as always.

I pray to Heavenly Father.