Hike #1361; Lake Wallenpaupack to Promised Land

Hike #1361; Lake Wallenpaupack to Promised Land

10/4/20 Lake Wallenpaupack to Promised Land with Kirk Rohn, Professor John DiFiore, Robin Deitz, and Diane Reider

In Bruce Lake Natural Area

This next hike would be a point to point around the area of Promised Lane PA. I’d actually planned for a large loop within the park lands, but was surprised so few showed up.

Old roadway, Tanglewood Trail

The last time I’d done a Promised Land hike, we had a huge amount of people show up. It was a loop then, and I figured this would be a really good one to do something similar on.
I came up with a route that was almost entirely just the back woods trails, a little further away from the lake, and much through the surrounding Delaware State Forest instead of the state park trail system we mostly used last time.
When I realized we had so few, I figured it was a better idea to do a point to point hike.

Tanglewood Trail

I could easily save the loop hike and do it another time when there are actually a lot people signed up to go.
This time, I had a plan for something I wanted to do in the past, but never got around to it: connect Lake Wallenpaupack with Promised Land. It made sense to try to do that this time, but I had come unprepared to plan it.
I had left my map at home, and figured I was just going to be using the Promised Land State Park map. In order to do more, I was going to require a Delaware State Forest map.

Tanglewood Trail

I knew kind of what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t tell everything by way of just my Google maps, so I would have to get another state forest map from the main office.
The problem was, most of these offices it seems are closed...but this time we got lucky. There was a lady that showed up soon after we arrived, and she happened to have a Delaware State Forest map for me.
I soon devised the route I would use, which incorporated some of the stuff I’d originally wanted to do around Bruce Lake Natural Area, but then lots of other stuff to the north, and down through the center of the park instead of the extreme perimeter.

Tanglewood Trail

I figured we would use a section of Delaware State Forest north of Interstate 84, a litthe farther to the north adjacent to the Tanglewood Community, on the south shore of Lake Wallenpaupack.
I had wanted to start by walking along some of the shore of the lake, but we simply couldn’t find anywhere to get on it. I settled for the state forest parking at Tanglewood Trail instead, which is an old woods road that asences into the Poconos from Rt 501. I think it was a started but stalled development.

A view just off Tanglewood Trail

The exact route we would take when Tanglewood Trail ended I did not know yet, but we had several options that all looked like they would be interesting at least.

Tanglewood Trail

We started walking up the old road, now Tanglewood Trail, and it was quite steep heading from the main road. It had concrete surfacing at some turns, which led me to believe it was probably intended as a development. All of the surfacing except gravel ended when we got to sort of the crest of the rise. The area opened up a bit, to sort of a young forest.
There was a deer exclosure fence along the left side of the old road, and I noted one of those little opening holes in it where we could go through.

Tanglewood Trail

The opening led to a bit of a view out to the north, but it wasn’t all that great. I couldn’t see Lake Wallenpaupack, just some of the mountains and clouds further out.

A scene on Tanglewood Trail

The road turned right after the fence area, and started heading gradually further uphill. At a sort of clearing, the road split in two directions, where one route stayed a little further down. I figured it would be better to get the uphill out of the way because we’d probably have to do it anyway, and that route looked to be a little clearer.
The road dipped downhill slightly, and then leveled off along yet another deer exclosure fence. The road got to be a bit overgrown, and the weeds were somewhat abrasive.

Cut up

This was the area where the trail basically ended. There was a connection to the other lower route by going along the end of the exclosure fence at the other end, but we had to head west and south.
The route was not looking too good. We headed off the trail, and then weaved to the right a bit down a rather steep grade to an area that had rather obviously been logged in the past couple of years. It was rough to walk through, and lots of briars were everywhere.

Fern meadow

I bullied my way through a mess of some briars, and then got to something that was a bit more reasonable. There appeared to be a double tire track from an ATV, but not used much.

Kleinhan's Creek

This took me basically back to the south again, but there were no other good options of anywhere to go that would not cut us to shreds. My goal at this point was to get us under some kind of a tree canopy where we wouldn’t have to contend with any of that.
I reached a point where the old ATV clearing came close to the tree line to the right. I cut off of it and under those trees, and felt we had a better way to get away from the logged clearing.

Kleinhan's Creek

We headed through these trees to the east for a bit, and then started moving a bit to the south. We then passed through a rather pleasant meadow full of ferns, and back into more dense woods again where we started to descend a bit more steeply.
We could hear the water of Kleinhan’s Creek below, which was my destination.
From here, we could make a decision on which way we would go.
One option was to continue heading to the east and reach Shiny Mountain Road underpass.

Old road remnants along Kleinhan's Creek

Another option would be to get to scenic overlooks off of Rt 84, or somewhere near there, and then just try to dash across traffic. It wasn’t all that busy, so this wasn’t far fetched either.
The other option, which I figured would be the least likely for us to do, was to use whatever culvert carries Kleinhan’s Creek over all four lanes of the highway to get into the state forest land on the other side. I thought it sounded like the most interesting option, but definitely was not counting on doing that.

Kleinhan's Creek

Although we weren’t sure about what we were going to be doing, I decided we would head toward the culvert anyway. It would at least be better to continue near to the highway.

Kleinhan's Creek cascade

We had reached a nice spot on the creek, but above us from here, the Rhododendrons got to be quite thick. I tried walking along the creek, but it was just getting to be too hard to follow. I decided to just get into the creek and start walking upstream that way. The others struggled but continued to push on through.
I kept making my way uphill through the creek, over the slippery rocks, and the Rhododendrons just kept on growing thicker over the way we needed to go. I was concerned the others would go another way.

Rt 84 underpass

Alone, I came out to a small confluence of two branches of this creek, and knew the one straight ahead was going toward 84. It was unfortunately terribly grown over.

Culvert

I tried walking up the side creek a bit, and then climbing around to parallel the main creek toward the highway to the west, but there was just no getting through that. The Rhododendrons were basically impenetrable on that side.
I started hearing voices of the rest of the group; they were on the other side of the main creek, still pushing through. In fact, they were starting to pass me over there. I jumped back in the creek and started fighting my way upstream even more, through even more annoying Rhododendrons.

Culvert

I eventually came out to a good open area where there wasn’t any kind of undergrowth, and waited there for the others to push through the growth.
The emerged, amazingly, from a tangled mess that I would have thought it impossible to get through.
We took a little break, but then continued upstream just a bit more. My google maps was showing that we were literally almost to the underpass I had wanted to see by maybe only a couple of hundred feet.

Between the east and westbound 84

The culvert certainly looked high enough to walk through with ease, and the water flowing off of the end of it was very shallow. It would be pretty easy to walk.

Culvert

Still, there would be no getting through this if anyone wanted to keep their feet completely dry. Unless everyone was willing to do it, we were going to go around.
I was going to go and have a look at it anyway, and so I stepped up carefully as not to fall off of it, and walked inside for a bit.
One side was shallower than the other, and it looked more and more like the right thing to do. After the heavy bushwhack through Rhododendrons, I figured it might just be tougher if we were to try to go any other way because we could get weeds.

Old Greentown Road

Everyone seemed about ready to go for it. I think Diane took her shoes off but the rest of us were able to just walk on through it without too much of a problem.

Yum

We reached the light, and it was the median between the east and westbound lanes of Interstate 84. It was actually pretty deep down below the highway level. The water continued to flow through a concrete sluice in this area, and we just walked on up it until we continued under the eastbound lanes.
Once on the other side we climbed up a slope to the right and paused on a bank to prepare to move on.
It really wasn’t that bad, and after this, the entire remainder of the hike was relaxing.

Egypt Meadow Trail

To the right of the creek, there was a building in view. This was one of many camps that are within the state forest lands that get rented for cheap every year.

Egypt Meadow Trail

We headed to the camp building, and no one was around. We then turned left along the access road to it, and it took us out to the unpaved Old Greentown Road, a beautiful route through the state forest lands.
We turned left here and followed the road for a while. There were several more camps located on the road, and several people staying at them, probably for small game hunting or something. We were greeted warmly along the way, and barely any cars went by us the entire time we were walking the road.

Egypt Meadow Lake

Robin told me about her past family trips out to the Upper Delaware valley above places like Lackawaxen to Barryville, and getting stuck out there because of storms, then not having enough gas and having trees block the way everywhere. I had told her about the incident we had with a tree coming down the previous week, and she was all too familiar!
Somewhere along the Kleinhan’s Creek, the Kleinhan’s Trail breaks off and goes to the south, but I never ended up seeing it. That’ll have to be for a future hike.

Egypt Meadow Lake

We made our way out to Shiny Mountain Road, and crossed directly to continue on Old Greentown. The road became paved at this point, which was disappointing.

Egypt Meadow Pass

This short section had not only pavement, but several more cars, because it connected over to Rt 390 out of the town of Promised Land.
Fortunately, that was over shortly, and we soon reached Rt 390. We had to jog to the left briefly, and then cut to the right to the parking lot for the Bruce Lake Natural Area. There were several cars parked there, but we didn’t end up seeing many people around. We passed another couple soon after getting away from the road, and that was the last for a while.

Egypt Meadow Lake

The first trail was a wide old woods road covered in crushed stone known as Egypt Meadow Trail. It weaved pleasantly around through the woods to the east.

Egypt Meadow Lake

The trail leads out to Egypt Meadow Lake, which I had never been to before and wanted to see. I think it was a natural lake.
There was never really much industry anywhere in this area because the land was so poor. It could not easily be farmed or even cleared for farming. It was nicknamed the “Promised Land” sarcastically by a religious group called “The Shakers” who tried to farm and timber the land.
They gave it a go and failed, and then sold it to other logging interests.

Egypt Meadow Lake

The land had been clear cut multiple times by around 1903, and it was all said to look like a waste land. When the state purchased it, they planted hundreds of thousands of trees.

Egypt Meadow Lake

The Civilian Conservation Corps became very active in the park and forest area and built roads, trails, and the dam on Promised Land Lake, among other things, starting in 1933.
Much of the Egypt Meadow Trail was probably part of an old milling road of some sort.
When we started getting closer to Egypt Meadow Lake, I was going to stay on Egypt Meadow Trail, but noted another side trail, Egypt Meadow Pass, which was a foot path instead of a woods road, and followed along the western shore of the lake.

Egypt Meadow Lake

The trails between these sections of Delaware State Forest and Promised Land State Park are blazed with normal paint blazes, but also have carsonite posts only at intersections.

Egypt Meadow Lake

Each one of these posts has a corresponding number. Below the main number for the post, there are two other numbers with arrows next to them, pointing the direction to the next point on the map. For example, we first passed intersection #56, which ws at Panther Swamp Trail. To the right, it showed that it led to point 57, which was the southern end of Egypt Meadow Pass at Bruce Lake Trail. Just a little past that was #60, for Egypt Meadow Pass, and it led to the right to #59 on the Bruce Lake Trail.

Bruce Lake Trail crossing Egypt Meadow Lake

We turned right on Egypt Meadow Pass, which was quite pleasant. It was kind of hard to follow at one point because we accidentally took some social path closer to the water.

At Egypt Meadow Lake

There were fantastic views of Egypt Meadow Lake and the colors were just starting to get really nice for the Autumn.
However the further we went on the trail, the harder it got to follow. It really got to the point where we were pushing through a lot of light brush.
Still, we pushed on through, and eventually emerged onto Bruce Lake Trail, which appeared to be much wider. This one was a woods road for much of the way. We turned left and followed that for a bit over a knoll, and then down to where it crossed over a narrow spot on the Egypt Meadow Lake.

Egypt Meadow Lake

The spot at the bridge was absolutely beautiful. It looked just too welcoming; I just had to go in and take a dip. I knew I’d feel great to get cleaned off after the bushwhack earlier.

Egypt Meadow Lake

The water was cold, but it was still very therepeudic. I had gotten all cut up too trying to bushwhack earlier, so this was just what the doctor ordered.
John was the only other one that decided to come in with me, and we were both happier for it.
It keeps seeming like every time we think swimming might be done for the year, we’re back in!
We all left Egypt Meadow Lake and continued on Bruce Lake Trail, which was still a woods road, gradually uphill and east from Egypt Meadow Lake.

Egypt Meadow Lake

I was feeling so wonderful, so relaxed, and the section of woods ahead couldn’t have complimented this feeling any better. It was wide and easy for a long while.

Leaving Egypt Meadow Lake

The Bruce Lake Trail through this area seemed to go on forever, and there wasn’t a soul around.
Our next turn was when we got to the Bruce Lake West Branch Trail. Bruce Lake Trail continued straight and goes along the east side of the lake, but like we did with Egypt Meadow Lake, I decided we would do the west side. I wanted to try to save some of the perimeter of the properties for the loop hike I had planned, and that way we’ll be covering all different trails save for a little overlapping here and there when we do.

At Egypt Meadow Lake

That next numbered trail section was 62. The foot path looked pretty good from the start, and we wandered off into the woods on that for a while.

John taking a dip

As the trail started to get a little closer to Bruce Lake, which was very similar to Egypt Meadow Lake, it started growing in a bit more. There was a lot of evidence of beaver activity in this area as well.
We pushed on through on this section for a bit, and had to rely on really the only part being clear was the treadway.
We eventually emerged back on Bruce Lake Trail at the south side of Bruce Lake, after passing some more very stunning scenery along the water body.

Egypt Meadow Lake

Bruce Lake Trail was no longer a woods road at this point. It crossed an inlet footbridge just to the left of where we intersected it and continued as a simple foot path.

Bruce Lake Trail

It remained narrow, but it was good and clearly marked for a good while. Eventually, it started getting a bit grown in, which surprised me, because this is the route that is closest connection from the main state park trail system.
The trail came to a bit of a clearing, and then crossed over a beautiful wetland on a line of rocks before coming back into some more big woods with a heavy understory of Rhododendron.

Bruce Lake

This section was not nearly as bad as the Rhododendron bushwhacking we had done earlier in the day, but it was still kind of annoying to push through.

Bruce Lake Trail

As we were walking, we heard a whistle blow at us, followed by a voice that said “FOREST FIRE SERVICE!”
A portly man came walking out of the thick Rhododendrons toward us, and said he was doing a hike out to Bruce Lake and around somewhere else, and wanted to know how much further it was.
He was missing several teeth, and asked us where all of our beer was. This was rather odd. He then said he had done his fair share of drinking when he was our age. It was just incredibly awkward!

Bruce Lake view

This guy was carrying all sorts of stuff including a radio and such, so he was perfectly fine with his safety gear. It was just not the person we were expecting to meet out there.

Bruce Lake Trail

We continued down Bruce Lake Trail, over a little brook, and reached the Rock Oak Ridge Trail.
I chose a very circuitous route from here to cover some more mileage before the end. We turned right on Rock Oak Ridge Trail, which was a bit rockier than some of the other trails, going up and down a bit, and then it intersected with Brown Trail, which goes out to Bruce Lake Trail at its west side further up. We continued on Rock Oak Ridge Trail until Telephone Trail joined in on the left side. We then turned hard left to join that.

I guess telephone trail might have at one time been a telephone line clearing? I’m not really sure.
We followed Telephone Trail to the next intersection with Whittaker Trail, and turned right.
The stony trail led us slightly downhill, and then intersected with Boundary Trail.
Boundary Trail follows closely along the boundary line between Promised Land State Park and Bruce Lake Natural Area.
We turned right there, and weaved along property corners. The trail had a great surface.

Bruce Lake West Br. Trail

It was almost as if they had come in with dirt and created a more level route for the trail to follow instead of the rocky terrain. It was really quite a nice treadway.

Beaver activity

We came to a four way intersection on Boundary Trail where it crossed Rock Oak Trail further west from where we had turned off of it, and I made a wrong turn.
To the right, the Rock Oak Trail was a nice woods road, so it wasn’t like the rocky trail we had turned off of before. We headed slightly uphill on it, and then came to the trail intersection where we turned off on Telephone Trail before. I checked the numbers on the posts at the intersection, and realized we had gone the wrong way.

Wetland on Bruce Lake Trail

We had to turn back and head the way we came to that four way intersection on the Boundary Trail again. We reached the Boundary Trail, and then correctly turned right.

HAM

The trail weaved through the woods, and we passed the intersection with 1800 Trail on the left. We then continued ahead, toward the main road at Promised Land again, but I spotted another trail going off to the right. We tried to follow it, but it went to private land.
We ended up having to turn left when we got too close to houses, and remained in the woods, back from them just enough.
Eventually, we weaved back down where we were supposed to be and found the Boundary Line Trail again. We followed it east to the road, where Mountain Laurel Trail goes left.

Bruce Lake Trail

I had walked a bit of the Rock Oak Ridge and Telephone Trail in the past, on my first hike to Promised Land State Park. We had connected to this from the east side state forest lands.

Yummo

Our access to these lands was by way of Big Inlet Trail on that occasion, and we traced a little of that route as part of this hike.
From Mountain Laurel Trail, we turned left parallel with the highway. The treadway of the trail pretty much just stayed right along the edge of the highway to the south, past several homes or camp buildings.
We came out across North Shore Road, and then passed through a wide open area where there are all sorts of tall spruce trees and such. we followed that to its end, and then reached a double wide section of parking areas near the beach.

Bruce Lake Trail

We crossed over the parking lots and walked through some picnic grounds. There was a wedding or something going on close to the dam of Promised Land Lake.

Rhododendrons

At this point, the trail was not blazed, but the maps showed that it went through. It changed names from Mt. Laurel Trail to Rhododendron Trail, although I do not recall seeing a single Rhododendron on it.
We paused at the footbridge over the dam to take in the view. It was quite a beautiful spot.
The road parallel with the trail hd a nice stone bridge on it as well, also in view from here.
We continued on Rhododendron Trail uphill a bit and into a nice section of woods behind homes and such in the village of Promised Land.

Mt Laurel Trail

Still not a Rhododendron to be found on this route either. We continued into a meadow area, and then came to a side trail that leads out to the village.

Bubbly tree on Rhododendron Trail

There, we stopped, and I posed the question about whether or not everyone would like to stop for dinner. We were only a short distance from the end, and the trail led to directly across the street from the Promised Land Pub and Eatery.
Only John, Kirk, and I were interested in going, and I was able to tell the others that the trail pretty much went right back to where we were parked, so they headed out.
We followed the trail out to the inn, and were seated relatively quickly for dinner.

The dam

I forget what kind of beer I had, but I know that I had a buffalo burger for something different. It had been quite a long time since I’d had buffalo, and it was great.

Dinner stop

I think Kirk also had something totally weird, and I want to say Ostrich but I know it wasn’t that and it wasn’t anything like that. I just want to say it.
When we were all done, we simply headed back across the road to teh Rhododendron Trail, and turned right.
The trail took us through a pleasant section of meadows, and then into some more woods. Kirk and John went out to the highway as it started to get darker, but I remained on the trail right to where it came out near the intersection of Promised Land Road and Pickerel Point Road.

Rhododendron Trail

We had a pretty good ending to this hike, and were soon on our way. John took Kirk and I back to my car, where I’ll have to try to work out another way of starting one up there.
We can easily milk at least three more hikes out of Promised Land State Park, and even more from the adjacent forest lands up there. I think I’ll have to make plans to be back in the Summer time.

HAM