Hike #1297; Peace Valley/Doylestown Loop

Hike #1297; Peace Valley/Doylestown Loop

2/15/20 Peace Valley/Doylestown Loop with Ken Zaruni, Sue Bennett, Kirk Rohn, Professor John DiFiore, and Shane Blische

Sweet Ass Road

This next one would be a large loop out of the Doylestown PA area, the next in my extensive Neshaminy Watershed series that we’ve been working on for so long.
I could have gone a number of ways with this hike, because at this point we have gotten to the end of the main Neshaminy Creek, and it is only broken off into smaller tributaries.
Heading west would mean going out toward Montgomery County, heading west on the Little Neshaminy would mean the same. I wanted to do something that was a bit more natural for this go around, and so the North Branch was it.

At William E. Neis Park

The last time we were out, we had finally connected with Peace Valley Park, a large Bucks County Park that features Lake Galena and a lot of trails. We had only just scraped the surface of what there is out there, and I knew I could do a more substantial few hikes out of the area.
The perimeter of that park isn’t quite fifteen miles, and so I looked for ways of connecting it with the Doylestown Hike and Bike Trail System, which is also quite extensive. These trails seem to connect to everywhere, but don’t leave the municipality.

The trail system

I suppose that has something to do with funding, and the amount of ratables or something that the smaller adjacent township wouldn’t have.

Bridge on the trail

It’s easy to imagine the extensive trail systems of the town as well as the county park connecting together in some way, but it just hasn’t happened, so it requires a bit of road walking between.
This was where I had to get creative to come up with a way of connecting the two.
I figured on a spot right in Doylestown. At first, I wanted to do a hike that would involve walking right through the center of the town, because I’ve still never done that yet, but I didn’t anticipate a lot of participants for this one, and would rather do that when we’re likely to have more out.

Cook's Run

I found a point in William E. Neis Park. This park is just basically ball fields, except it has some of the town’s paved trail system running right through it. We could at least start and end the hike on that system.
I put together a route that wold give us the perimeter of Peace Valley Park, save for a little piece in the south side of it where we would be cutting north/south from the Doylestown system. I also found a Catholic church grounds that would give us some off road walking between the two. It was looking like it would be a pretty nice route.

Bridge walkway over Cook's Run

I picked up Shane on my way down. It was a bit out of the way, but not by much, so it wasn’t a problem. We then headed over to Doylestown and I took a wrong turn.

In the pines

We ended up driving a road called “Sugar Bottom Road” which Shane said in his family was sometimes jokingly referred to as “Sweet Ass Road”, which is quite hilarious.
We arrived just about on time. I was actually surprised that the group was as small as it was this time. For a hike that is mostly on official trails and in such a popular, pretty setting, one would think more people would show up.
No matter, we ended up getting it done so much faster with a smaller group.
We started out right on the trail system out of the parking lot in William E. Neis Park. The trail took us to a circular paver thing, and went into a couple of directions. We turned to the right, which was parallel with N West Street, which became Limekiln Road.
We crossed the entrance to what I guess was an elementary school, and then went into woods parallel with the road. The trail went across a long boardwalk bridge.

Line of pines

The bridge spanned another Neshaminy tributary known as Cook’s Run. We had explored some of this previously on the last Neshaminy hike. It was the creek where an historic mill used to stand at the confluence.
We crossed over, and the paved trail ended at Hospital Road. We came off of it and walked Limekiln Road over Rt 611 on the bridge, and then turned off of the road to the left a bit to skirt an apartment complex through the grass. There was a bit of a place to walk among some evergreens to the left of the road. When we got to the apartment entrance, we were able to go through some of their landscaping and onto a nice path through another line of pines slightly up hill and parallel with more apartments. This led us back to a sloped hill alongside Limekiln Road, which took us a little ways further without having to walk on the pavement much.

Pine Run

We continued up the road a bit more. This would be the longest road walk section of the entire hike, and thus the worst part of it all.

Catholic obelisk at the church

Soon, we crossed Pine Run, a lovely and more substantial tributary to the Neshaminy Creek.
All of the land around this stream is part of the Bucks County Park system, so I was looking around for ways we might get down and walk along the creek itself, but I was not seeing anything good. It looked like a lot of heavy weeds and not even the slightest fishing path was there.
Just after the bridge, Pine Run Road turns off to the left. It’s a small, lightly traveled road, so I planned on this route. It skirts the county land, and there was only one place that really provided any access, near a sharp bend in the road. Maybe there was a road in at that point at one time. I can’t quite tell. There was no formal path in there, and even though the woods was more sparse, I decided we were not going to go off trail to follow it at this time.

View from the Catholic church lands

I had originally considered following these woods the the back of the next apartment complex down, but I saw some wet lands out in there, and I didn’t want to try to push through that just yet, not this early in the hike.
We continued up Pine Run Road, and soon passed a lovely old stone farm house on the right that was in the process of being rehabilitated. Another old estate was on the left. There was a parcel left on top of the mail box outside, which I thought to be odd since it could be left on the porch or something. Ken said his mail man doesn’t bother to leave things either, even when he’s home, and he gets one of those “sorry we missed you” notices.

Rosary Walk

The road got a bit steeper, with a good spring lined with stones along the edge of it, and made its way up to Ferry Road.
Here, we turned left briefly, and then made a right into the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa property. There was a giant obelisk on the left side, and a driveway that made its way up to several tiers of parking areas. They apparently rented out the lower sections of the lots for storage of tree removal trucks and such, which were all parked there.
The grounds are very extensive and look quite interesting, which is why I chose this route as the start of the hike toward Peace Valley Park.
The site dates back to 1953 when Polish Pauline Monk Father Michael M. Zembrzuski purchased the tract of land to erect a shrine dedicated to the Black Madonna of Częstochowa at Jasna Gora, Poland’s most important religious icon, to reconnect Polish-Americans with their Polish Catholic roots.

Rosary Walk

The place is quite popular and has grown substantially from its roots as a small chapel to a large shrine. Cardinals and Archbishops have visited the site, as well as President Lyndon B. Johnson and his family. Its’s somewhat surprising since Johnston is considered to be the most vulgar President in American history (far worse than Trump by far. The media censored much of what Johnson used to say).
The site grew to include the burying ground, a visitor center, another chapel building, mausoleum, and various statues through the grounds.

Rosary Walk

We made our way to the upper most lot. There was a house off to the right, an old farm house made of stone with a barn or out building of some sort. Maybe a care taker dwelling, maybe something private. Either way, their access is through the church grounds, and this places appeared to have predated the shrine. Maybe that was the first chapel site, I’m not sure.
We reached a grassy knoll along the edge of the upper parking lot that afforded us a view to the southeast back toward Doylestown. Another group of walkers were approaching us through the lot below.

Rosary Path

The group might have been another group of casual walkers. They stayed in the lot, and then continued out and around more of the grounds as if to avoid it it seemed.
Straight ahead of us was the main building, which had a sort of two tiered tower of sorts. I bet it has a great view from it. There, we turned right slightly and reached the Rosary Walk, which was a paver laid pathway with an overhead entrance. We turned right into it, and it paralleled the parking lot for a bit.

Hussar Memorial statue

This path had many different statues on both sides, all depicting the life of Jesus Christ starting from birth. There were also memorial benches all along the way.

Cemetery with odd proportioned Jesus

There was a nativity I think, followed by baptism and several other things, then multiple on the crucifixion including “scouring”, crown on thorns, carrying the cross, and crucifixion. It actually was a bit disturbing in some sense to walk by all of it, but it was very well done overall.
The “Rosary Walk” I think it was called ended at the far end of the parking area, where we could turn right to enter the cemetery section, which was quite expansive. To the right, all of the grave stones were totally identical.

Lake Galena

To the right, in the middle of that grave yard, there was the Polish-Lithuanian Hussar Memorial Statue.
To the left, it was a more typical looking cemetery area except it had an enormous depiction of Jesus on the cross that was incredibly disproportional.
The Jesus was about life size, but the cross was taller than my house. It just made it look very odd.
We turned to the left to head through more of the cemetery, which was tightly packed with stones, but all different kinds unlike the first section of the grounds we saw.

Lake Galena and the trail

Another interesting thing about this site is that it is the Pauline Fathers of this site that arrange the Polish Pilgrimage out to Great Meadows New Jersey.
This has been something rather close to me for many years going back to 2004 when I first started working at Taylor Rental.
The Polish Pilgrimage is a huge event where Polish Catholics all walk, with vehicle escorts, long distance and camp at different spots between the points. They used to rent tents for this event through Taylor Rental, which I would prepare for them.

Lake Galena

We had some of the older tents that we weren’t worried about getting messed up if they had to set up in the mud set aside just for that group every year.
I eventually went to work at Spruce Run in 2011, and the Pilgrimage would pass right through the park area, and they would camp at Voorhees along the way. Also, I lived in Great Meadows for a brief time, and they used to walk right by my home there at the time.

Lake Galena

It’s interesting how so many of these things tend to tie together.
We walked through the cemetery, and there was a guy with a back hoe parked apparently digging some graves. We kept to the left of him toward the mausoleum building.

Old Creek Road, now trail

Where we had first reached the cemetery, there was a large metal fence with sharply pointed tops to it. I commented that we might not be able to go through as I had planned, because we might get “scoured” (I was thinking of the scouring image in the statue on the Rosary Walk) and Ken commented that he didn’t see anything particularly abrasive. I had meant of course to say “skewered”. Fortunately, this was not a problem because this fence did not continue all the way around the entire cemetery.

Creek Road goes into water, trail goes right

We made our way to the west side of the cemetery where a quick step between some Cedar trees led us directly onto Cheese Factory Road, a beautiful and narrow old paved road that leads directly toward the Peace Valley Park.
We turned right down hill on it, and reached Creek Road adjacent to the park. A brief walk right and then left on an informal foot path led into the park and down to the paved trail that encircles the entire lake. We had done a portion of this to the west of here on the previous hike.

Abandoned Creek Road, now trail

Peace Valley Park is a Bucks County Park surrounding Lake Galena, which is a dammed water body on the North Branch of the Neshaminy Creek.
Bucks County dammed the site in 1972 to provide additional water supply to 150,000 people in Bucks and Montgomery Counties, around Doylestown and areas east. Lake Galena supplies water to the North Penn Water Authority and North Wales Water Authority. I believe the lake also helps to provide a degree of flood protection for the very flood prone stream.

Trail follows former Creek Road

Lake Galena takes its name for the former settlement of New Galena, a village that once stood where the lake is today. The settlement was established around 1861.

Wildlife observation blind

Galena is a sort of lead mineral that was mined in the area of New Galena. The town I think was originally called Galena but there was already another post office name in the state, so for a time it was known as “Levin” before locals went to calling it “New Galena”.
Limited amounts of zinc and copper were also mined in the area, but otherwise the main business of the area was of course farming.

Upper Woods Trail

By the 1970s, pretty much all business had died in the area and most of the settlement save for a few homes was gone.
My plan was to follow the entire perimeter of the lake, but also much of the perimeter of the entire park property. There are a few outside trails I chose not to do at this point, but I did want to try to stay as close to the North Branch of the Neshaminy Creek as possible for this one. We turned right on the trail, and soon reached a great open outlook over the lake to the north.

Icicle froze with dead park spoo

We continued through into more woods. There were some private homes on the right side, along Creek Road, but not too many. The trailw as paved and pretty much remained close to the lake side. At some point, we reached a parking area where Creek Road was no longer a driving route. It blocked at the lot, and the trail began to follow the former route of the road ahead. This continued until the road went off into the edge of the lake. There, the trail turned right slightly up hill from it for a time.

North Branch of the Neshaminy

After a bit, the trail headed back down hill and reached the abandoned Creek Road again. There are foot paths through the park to the south of this area we did not include on this hike this time, but it will be the subject of a future one for sure, probably more focused around just doing Peace Valley Park itself rather than as many other connections.
There was an old concrete bridge on the former road, and soon after that a side trail to a wildlife observation blind to watch ducks. Unfortunately there were only geese around.

Upper Woods Trail

Kirk commented on how funny it would be if someone decided to paint some sort of horrible situations on the front of a blind like this one, because it had perfect face shaped head holes in it. I’d never thought of that before, and surprised no one else has. Fortunate no one else has is more like it.
We continued along the paved trail out to North Chapman Road. The paved bike trail route goes to the left on the road, which is closed to traffic at the bridge over the North Branch of the Neshaminy here.

North Branch of the Neshaminy

It was blocked by concrete barriers ahead. I suppose the bridge is deficient or something. We continued sort of straight from here on the unpaved Upper Woods Trail.

Upper Woods Trail

This was quite a nice section. The slack water from the dam made the North Branch of the Neshaminy calm and wide for a time, but it soon became a smaller stream meandering pleasantly through the woods.
Upper Woods Trail and Morning Bird Walk make a loop in this section, and there is no connecting path over the North Branch of the Neshaminy. I knew that the two trails were closed, and I figured that the stream would be small enough that we could rock hop over at some point.

If that wouldn’t work, I figured we would just backtrack and head back to Chapman Road, no harm done.
I knew immediately that the stream would not be something we could cross, but I figured we would do to the far end of the loop anyway. It was just such a nice section.
There were a lot of logs down in many places, some of them quite huge with enormous stumps or root balls. One of them had a discolored icicle hanging from its bottom.

Swamp Road bridge looking shitty

By the time we got to the end of the loop trail, there was an informal trail leading further along the stream.
It wasn’t all that much further from the end of the loop out to the next road crossing up, Swamp Road, and I changed the plan and decided we could try to follow it.
After all, I wanted to try to trace the entire Neshaminy, and Bucks County does own land along it all the way to Swamp Road on both sides.

North Branch of the Neshaminy at Swamp Road

The informal path was pretty good at first. Easy enough to walk, but obviously not manicured like the previous trails we had walked were.

North Branch of the Neshaminy

We had to cros a couple of little tributaries, and then came to a sort of a meadow area that we were able to wander across rather easily. The area was flood plain, and thus rather wet, but fortunately there was a good enough amount of ice from the nice before that we could just walk right over most of it. I commented to Ken that this hike really worked out in our favor overall, because if it had been unseasonably warm like in previous weeks, a good amount of this hike would have been an awful mud pit.

An informal crossing

The informal path was gone after the meadow area. There was sometimes a deer run we could follow, but this required a lot of improvising. I got ahead a bit, and heard a horrible crush of breaking ice. Ken had gone through some of it at some point there.
There was a high fence off to the right and a line of low evergreens, part of the Four Seasons Golf Center. We continued in the woods parallel with this until the briars got impenetrable, and we headed a little closer to the center property.

A Neshaminy tributary

I weaved around a bit and soon found my way up the embankment to Swamp Road.
This was a hugely busy road. Cars were coming non stop. We had to stay off on the shoulder on this too narrow and too busy road.
We crossed over the North Branch of the Neshaminy on the road bridge, which was in rather deplorable shape. The upstream side of the bridge had lots of exposed rebar. Nt only exposed, but suspended with no concrete even around it any more. Hopefully the substructure is not as bad as the railing.

North Branch of the Neshaminy

On the other side, there was a slight ramp down toward the stream, formerly a road access of some sort but completely overgrown. I thought to go a little up Swamp Road/Rt 313 to get to the DWR Recycling Center and maybe access more land from there, but then I decided to just go into the woods from the ramp and we would make our way through.
There were a lot o briars at first, but we managed to push on through to the edge of the creek.

North Branch of the Neshaminy

There was a good deer trail for a bit of the way, and the woods was not all that overgrown. There was far less undergrowth here than what we had just gone through.

Fallen Tree Trail

There were a couple of little tributaries we had to hop across and come inland from the main creek a bit, but it was not too hard. Soon, we came out on the first official trail on this side.

Swamp Trail

This last trail in the upper end of the preserve was called Far Out Loop. It was a wide foot path in a former meadow area with nearby evergreen grove. We turned left on it and headed back toward the creek. There were several other trail intersections, but trying to follow where they actually are or are supposed to be is quite hard. There are occasional colored blazes on the trees, but Bucks County doesn’t really do a good job with their trail maintenance. This would actually be far better than what was to come.

Upper end of Lake Galena

We made our way to another trail called Hawk Walk. This took us over closer to the creek again. There was a guy standing alone out near the ceek with a camera who was probably not too happy to see any other hikers showing up so far out.

Log along Habitat Trail

Soon, to the left was Fallen Tree Trail. It looked to just be a little spur walk. There were two fallen trees out on this flood plain along the creek, but didn’t seem like much to merit an entire trail out to it.
This was supposed to be a through route, but there was no bridge over a small tributary to the Neshaminy that flowed in at this point. We could have backtracked, but it was a pretty spot along the creek. There were small cliffs on the other side, above which the Upper Woods Trail passed from earlier.

Habitat Trail

Where the tributary hit the main creek, there was a lot of fallen wood and such, and most of the group began crossing over here. I went back up stream just a bit and jumped over the thing there. Shane jumped across between the two sites.
Once on the other side, there was a beautiful spot along the creek with a flat stony bottom. We took some time out here to look for native American sinkers. I tried to describe to John what they would look like, but I did not find any. We instead skipped some stones.

Barns ready to come down at Peace Valley

The trail soon reached a very nice foot bridge over yet another Neshaminy tributary, and then reached the intersection with Swamp Trail. We turned left here, and the route was much more prominent.
We remained close to the creek, which soon started to show the slack water backing up from Lake Galena again.
There was a side trail to the left when the main trail seemed to go right, but I decided we would follow the less prominent one for a bit.

Barns ready to come down

The poor marking of these trails makes it hard to tell which way you’re supposed to go anyway out here.
The route we followed was not the official trail....any more...but it used to be. When we got to another little tributary crossing, the either broken or dismantled remains of a former foot bridge laid on the far side of the bank we needed to get to. There was a dead Ash I think it was across the bridge site, as well as some of the remaining wood still in the water from the bridge, so we just crossed on that.

Old barns

Just beyond the other side of the bridge site, we reached Habitat Trail. This one remained for a time pretty close to the shore of the lake, and then turned slightly to the north over another little foot bridge.
Habitat Trail took us back out to Chapman Road, the same road with the closed off bridge we had reached before along the paved trail route. We were now just on the other side of the road bridge. There was a trail that used to go off to the left, but there was a lot of orange fencing blocking it of.

Peace Valley Nature Center

There was an old house type of building, and a very large old barn on the opposite side of the road from us. To the right, Chapman Road was closed yet again beyond the bridge.

Collapsed barns

Orange mesh fences were in place, and directed bicycles and walkers to go through an opening to a parking lot to the right. Behind the blocked road ahead were a couple of large track machines with demolition claws on them.
I didn’t realize what that would be for until Kirk pointed out that those were basically building destroyers, and he figured they were there to demolish the old barns at Peace Valley Nature Center. Upon closer inspection, the barns were badly collapsed and his assessment was probably spot on.

Peace Valley Nature Center

The barn was a large angled structure with a couple of different sections. Freom several angles it looked like the building was fine, but others showed just how bad it was.

Old barns

The very center, where the two angles of the barn come together, was completely collapsed in the middle. It certainly could be salvaged for the right amount of money and dedication, but Bucks County clearly does not want to do that. I would suspect that demolition is probably already underway as of this writing. I was glad to have the opportunity to see it before the entire area is cleared. It will look much more open when it’s gone.

Peace Valley Nature Center

We took a little break in the parking area because there was a portajohn. We didn’t realize that the adjacent Peace Valley Nature Center, with good facilities, was open.

Native American collection at Peace Valley Nature Center

We walked toward the Nature Center, and checked out a bit more of the barn, which had more caution tape around it and looked even worse at this angle.

Shane's Anoconda

At this point I could see why the road was closed going by the structure. It was badly in danger of collapsing into the road.
I was kind of surprised to see that the Nature Center was totally open. We went in, and found a woman working the desk there who gave us new maps and such. I was glad to get that, because the maps in kiosks and that I had found on line did not show nearly all of the trails shown at the ones available there.
Shane found a giant plush Anaconda in the corner area.
This place has got to be outstanding for kids. They have all sorts of stuff they can play around with, and even a little puppet show display thing.
It was pretty brutally cold out for this hike, so the very warm inside of the Nature Center was a welcome break. I was pretty much fine with my light black coat I chose for the day, but whenver we stopped it was cold.

Peep show?

The Peace Valley Nature Center is clearly geared toward bird watching and children’s programs, but there are plenty of other interesting things there as well.

Me!

It reminded me of a smaller scale Trailside Nature Center in the Watchung Mountains of New Jersey.
They had quite a nice display of Native American artifacts in a case, and John and I looked it over to see if we could find any of the sinkers I was referring to when we were looking along the Neshaminy. He pointed out one that was close to what I was looking for, which surprisingly had been found in Belvidere NJ as per the display notes.
There was a spotting scope looking out one of the windows in there, with a sign that read “adults only” as if it were some kind of peep show.
I’m not a coffee drinker (wish they had hot chocolate or french vanilla cappuccino), but most of the group enjoyed the fact that they had complimentary coffee there for visitors.

Peace Valley Nature Center

The displays and decorations in this place were really quite impressive.
I chatted with the lady behind the desk, who told me she had been volunteering at the site for 11 years.
She didn’t know much about what was going on around the site with regard to the old barns. She said that they had been planning to tear them down for years and have more parking, but it had been like that for a long time with no action. She said since the machines were out there, maybe something is finally going to happen.

POSSUM PUPPET!

We told her where we were planning to go, and she told us how she recommends going up to the paved path because the other ones are so hard (nothing out there is really hard).

POSSUM!

While chatting, Shane came out of the gift shop with a really cool Opossum puppet. I was almost ready to get it, but it was over $50, and I couldn’t really be spending that on such a small thing. They seem to be about the same price online, and I thought to get one for Jillane, but I’m not totally sure if she’d really love it, especially since our real ones are so much cuter.
I asked the lady if we could exit the Nature Center and get directly onto the trails from there, since most of them appear to be shut off from the main parking area beyond. She said we could, and we headed out of the place and into an open area with a view to Lake Galena.
The trail that goes right from the Nature Center is called the Mini Loop, and it connected just a bit to the west to the Lake Walk. I planned to follow this along the shore for as far as we could, and the map showed that it connected wit the paved Hike and Bike Trail a little further on.

Peace Valley Nature Center

The trail had some nice little bits of board walk and was pleasant heading into the wooded setting to the west for a time, but it got less manicured as we continued.

Peace Valley Park

It remained pretty nice through the upland away from the lake for a bit, and then returned to the edge of the water with a wonderful outlook and a couple of benches. Then, the trail turned back inland a bit, and came to a grassy area where it was questionable which way we should be going. I think around the time that a trail called Deer Path went to the right, the trail closest to the waterfront became pretty bad.
We made a wrong turn to the left at some point where the trail was indistinct. Ken was getting way ahead of me, and I’m not sure where the others ended up.

Lake Walk

After a short bit, I realized that the crappy route was incorrect, and I backtracked to find the right one again. Only Sue followed me to the correct trail which moved more inland.

A pretty spot on Lake Walk

Soon, we came to an intersection with Maple Leaf Trail and West Woods Trail. I couldn’t quite make sense of where we were at this point.

Indistinct Maple Leaf Trail

Trails still had occasional blazes, and what we followed had a few blue paint ones, but otherwise only the intersections had some rough routed signs.
To make matters worse, no one had been maintaining any of this in what seemed like years. There were large trees down on the trail we took to the left frequently. The first big one had wood stacked up so that we could climb up and through the fallen tree. Beyond that, it was just a mess that we had to keep stepping over constantly.

Fallen trees

I hooted out and could hear Kirk and Shane out behind us a bit. They must have backtracked and gotten on the official trail as well.
What we were following certainly was a trail at one time, because we could see past chain saw work, and blazes shifted from blue to white eventually, but no one had been looking after it for a long while.
Eventually, it was just a mess and we would occasionally see where a trail used to be. To the right, New Galena Road was above us, and we could see a few people walking the hike and bike trail just barely below it.

Historic marker

Soon, I saw Ken walking on the trail above us. We didn’t remain on the crappy path that much longer then and a sort of informal path connected us up to the paved one.
The others soon had caught up behind Sue and I, and we were all out on the paved trail heading to the west again.

Da group

The trail soon opened up into the Uphill Parking Area, whiere we had finished the last hike in the Neshaminy series. This is the one that does not get gated after dark.

Along the lake

As we moved ahead, there was a historic marker about the mining of Galena at the lake site, and pointed out where exactly the main mine pit used to be.
There were a lot of people walking along this section of the trail. We were pretty much never out of sight of anyone.
We had a pleasant walk doubling back on what we had done on the previous trip, through a line of trees, and then past the Sailor’s Point section where the boat launches are. We had a lot of un-obscured views through the entire stretch.

Checking out a dock

There is another loop trail after Sailor’s Point I’ll probably use on one of the future hikes out through this area. We checked out a couple of of docks out onto the water ahead.

Along the lake

We eventually reached the west side of the lake, where the paved trail makes its way out across the main dam. There is another trail that goes down below the dam, but I didn’t feel like going down and back up again at this point, and my shoes were giving me a lot of trouble.
Ken had pointed out back on the last section of unpaved trail that the sole of my right shoe started pulling off in the back a bit. I was rather surprised by this, because this was the first time I had ever gone hiking in these shoes before.

Peace Valley Park at Sailor's Point

I had bought them a few weeks before at Family Thrift for something like four dollars, which seemed like a great deal. I figured I would get at least a few hikes out of them, and I could wear them as dress shoes with some of my brown suites.
I had accidentally worn very uncomfortable boots home from work the day before, and so I had left the sneakers I’d intended to wear at work. I didn’t want to wear them hiking, and couldn’t find other good ones in the car, so I put those ones on at the start thinking nothing of it.

Lake Galena view

They just kept getting worse going through the mucky sections, and even though they were wet, I figured I had better get my duct tape out and try to save them before I have trouble.

Lake Galena

The duct tape was holding on alright as long as I stayed on the pavement, because the surface of this one was not at all abrasive.
We got across the dam, with some great views out along the lake, and then continued to follow the trail along the south side, heading east.
We passed through the first parking area, and then after a line of trees turned to the right, up hill through a field, to reach Old Iron Hill Road. This was the route we used to reach the lake on the previous hike. We headed up it with some lovely old stone farm houses along the way.

Lake Galena

We reached the crest of the hill, and then started descending on the other side. We reached Ferry Road, where there was a crosswalk and a confusing “no pedestrians” sign.

Across the dam

I keep finding that these things are happening all over the place, where there are obvious crossing areas and yet signs saying pedestrians are not allowed.
We crossed over Ferry Road, and the paved Doylestown Area Hike and Bike Trail system started up immediately on the other side again.
The trail continued straight down hill along the east side of Old Ironhill Road. We could see the Pine Valley Covered Bridge just up ahead in a very short distance.

Lake Galena from the dam

The Pine Valley Covered Bridge is also sometimes known as the Iron Hill Covered Bridge. It is an 81 foot long Town Truss bridge built in 1842 by David Sutton.

Pine Valley Covered Bridge

Ken and I were up front at this point, and we waited for the group to catch up to us at the covered bridge. The trail turned left at this point into Pine Valley Park.

Pine Valley Covered Bridge

The trail went across the Pine Run on its own foot bridge, but Shane walked ahead to go through the covered bridge, then cut off into the park on the other side.
There was a nice high seat table in a peninsula on the creek for viewing the bridge I went to check out.
We continued on the trail from here, which went from a little playground area through a section of woods, and then out to some soccar fields situated in a surprisingly remote area from the rest of the park.

Pine Run Reservoir

The trail passed through a bit of woods, and then reached the dam for the Pine Run Reservoir, a 39 acre water body owned by Bucks County Sewage and Water Authority.

Pine Run Park section

The trail weaved up hill and then followed the height of the land on the south side of the reservoir. We passed another guy walking through on this bit.
There was a nice little view of the body of water, but this little pond was more like a glorified retention pond, not the scenic type of thing like Lake Galena.
The trail came out to Iron Hill Road at a dead end section. The road used to clearly go through ahead before this body of water was created as well. I think the route was originally a bit to the east.

The trail at Pine Run Reservoir

We walked down the road for just a short distance. Kirk pointed out some sort of historic marker out in a field where it said no trespassing, and joked “DON’T PUT THE TRAIL PAST THAT SIGN!” and similarly, don’t move the sign to along the trail.

Another Lake Galena view

It is amazing how common sense seems to escape people when it comes to developing these places.
The trail started back up again very shortly on the left side of Iron Hill Road. It stayed just into the trees parallel with Iron Hill Road heading south, and then turned hard left when the road turned.
The road became Sandy Ridge Road at the corner, and I considered originally going straight on that, which has parallel trail, but I changed the hike at this point to include some other stuff and an approach to the end another way.

Lake Galena view

We turned to the right on a continuation of Ironhill Road, which still had paved path along it, and continued down hill to Shady Retreat Road where a paved trail continued to the left.

Lake Galena view

We crossed Cook’s Run on the road just before the left turn.
The section was pretty close to some of the houses on the left side of the road, and there was a trailer park on the right side. A little further down, I was impressed with how the trail weaved around the trees along the road rather than cut them down to make room.
Cook’s Run started appearing closely to the left, and soon after we crossed it on a foot bridge attached to the edge of the road bridge. Just ahead, Burpee Road went right.

Lake Galena view

I had considered going straight here, and we walked ahead a little bit to see if the paved trail turned off anywhere, but it ended and turned into a regular sidewalk, so we decided to backtrack to Burpee Lane.
The trail crossed Cook’s Run just after the intersection on a parallel foot bridge.
Just after, the trail crossed Burpee Road and then went into a town house development of some sort. It then got to be a super narrow paved path separated from the street by a large line of trees.

Save the trees

Kirk was surprised we were walking through this place, because this was a spot he bought something from a girl that was overly freaked out by him. He had told us this story on a hike weeks ago, how she was afraid to meet with him and then acted overly freaked out, and now we were walking through that very development. I laughed and said that maybe she would see us walking through and just be more freaked out.

Save the trees

The narrow path sort of ended near the end of the development. I was not expecting to find this section at all; my intention was to follow a path along the rear of the development.

Getting narrow...

This turned out to be convenient enoug, so we did this instead, but I’ll probably try the other route on the next Neshaminy series hike where we pass through Doylestown.
We came back out to Burpee Road and then reached the edge of Rt 202. The trail started back off on the other side again, but we had to cross a crosswalk over the highway and an on ramp from Rt 611 first. We had no trouble crossing 202, but had some cars flying at us like crazy on the 611 exit lane!

The Catholic Shrine visible beyond Pine Run Reservoir

The trail weaved away from 202, then back close to it to cross Rt 611 on it’s road bridge.

Happy crossing

My shoes were getting really bad again. When we finished the Pine Run Reservoir stretch, they were starting to slide apart more. The center of the sole was coming apart and ready to break in half, and the section of it now attached to the front of my shoe was starting to come off. If I let it get worse, I would have a miserable remainder of the hike.
I had stopped and re-aligned the sole again, and then duct taped the front of it back on once more. Even then, it started to shift a bit more again.

Covered bridge view

The shoes were not going to last me much longer. It was crazy that the left one was for the most part perfectly fine, but that the right one had gotten so bad.
I had to adjuct it several more times near this final stretch of the hike.
The trail gained a bit of elevation parallel with Rt 202 for this last bit, and when we got to Progress Drive just ahead, we crossed over 202 at the crosswalk. We then turned right to follow 202 to the east parallel with a lot of medical buildings of sorts.

Above 202

We soon passed Lenape Middle School, and a paved narrow path skirted the hill above it. We followed this, which weaved around to the west and then crossed the access road, and passed the tennis courts.
We were back in William E. Neis Park, and could have just cut across direct at the courts, but we followed the path out and around except Shane and John I think took the shortcut. We came right back to the circular thing in the trail where we had first turned west at the beginning of the hike.

William E. Neis Park

It was only 3 PM, and we had done I think it was 16.7 miles, which is quite fantastic time.
I wasn’t particularly hungry, though I considered stopping to get food somewhere with Kirk. I decided instead to start heading home and stopped by Wawa with Shane on the way. Kirk ended up sending me amazing looking burger photos that made me regret that slightly, but I did spend some of the remaining daylight time doing some then and now photo compilation set ups around my home town before it got dark.

Doylestown trail system

We’ve really done a ton of stuff on the Neshaminy at this point, and it really is starting to wind down now. There are not many bits of the tributaries we have to cover. A little bit more of the West Branch, maybe some back road walking on North Branch or Mill Creek, and one more full trip on the Little Neshaminy.
This map shows the public open space in Bucks County, and will help me to plan future trips on the open spaces in this watershed: https://bucksgis.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=7ae1b1aac46a44f6b48e1a71a4154f7b

HAM