Hike #1369; Mountainhome to Mt. Pocono

 

11/1/20 Mountainhome to Mt. Pocono with Pete G. Wilcox, Kellie Kegan, Serious Sean Dougherty, Cindy Browning, Red Sean Reardon, Professor John DiFiore, Cory Salveson, Linda Salveson, Diane Reider, Jeremy ?, Jennifer Tull, Ronnie DiVirgilio, Dr. Michael Krejsa, Professor John DiFiore, and Ann M.

Fieldstone Farm ruins

Fieldstone Farm ruins

This next one would be a sort of annual Pocono thing, and it all kind of started out with a crazy virus miscommunication regarding what was going on.

Fieldstone Farm ruins

Fieldstone Farm ruins

Fieldstone Farm preserve

Fieldstone Farm Preserve

Every year, we try to do a hike in the Poconos around Michele Valerio’s house, for her birthday.

The evolution of this hike would change up a bit over the years, into it being a costume party, and the combined Halloween hike.
I’m getting to the point where I almost feel as if we are having too many traditions. I am of the opinion that too much sense of obligation detracts from us having the best times and living our best lives.

Every year we have hugely popular anniversary hike, March on Musikfest, Holiday NY City, etc. While I love these places, I do not love the idea of having some obligatory thing that has to fit into the schedule during those times. I get extremely excited about certain things I’m doing, and I want to continue with them, and so it starts to feel like a drag when I have too many things going on.
When it comes to the Pocono’s and Michele’s place, I have a ton of new stuff to do, so I never mind doing it. Prior to doing these, I used to always try to make the Halloween costume hike in the Hudson Valley. The whole Sleepy Hollow and Washington Irving stuff all seemed pretty fitting, and even though we still have tons of stuff going on up there, I didn’t want to be bogged down to having to do something there on just that weekend every year. Putting that event together with Michele’s seemed like an obvious choice, because then there would be a party afterwards and everyone has a costume, if they wanted.

This year was different, with pretty much everything. The pandemic craziness swept through and it was far from being “over”. Many people who used to hike with us had given up on it altogether, and some people stopped communicating with me at all, specifically because I was still doing the hikes and being “unsafe”.

I spoke to Michele just before this and asked how she was feeling about all of it. She said she was not yet comfortable having a big group of people over the house, but that she’d still like to hike. I told her I would do a hike very close to her house, but not ending there, and that way she could still attend and be close to home, and maybe we could have some sort of outdoor gathering nearby.
She agreed and seemed happy that this would be happening with those parameters.

 

Then, all of a sudden, an event appeared online for Michele’s birthday party and hike at her house! Apparently Lerch and Scott decided to make an event of it without consulting her, and she didn’t seem too happy about it.
I ended up hearing from a few people that Michele quietly told them not to come by because she didn’t want it to be some big crazy thing. Then I saw there were not one, but two hikes! One Saturday and one Sunday! I couldn’t post one on an opposite day as not to have a conflict of interest, so I just left mine alone.

Still, I ended up getting quite the crows for this one, which was really very surprising. It wasn’t really in an area that many people have ever heard of, and the route was not something that seemed particularly more interesting by the initial posting than anything else I do.
It was in fact a very interesting hike, but it ended up being extremely wet. We ended up making the best of it and had a great time anyway.

Not having the hike actually end at Michele and Scott's place opened the door to do some stuff that I'd wanted to do that didn't work out for the party, but would have a lot of really great stuff on the way.
The main new things I wanted to do, which I had never incorporated into a Metrotrails hike before, were Rattlesnake Falls and the Fieldstone Farm Preserve. They are not so far apart, and could be put together with the old lodge ruins in the Devil's Hole, as well as more of Seven Pines Mountain and a few other things.
The ruins and falls on this hike would make it one of the best Pocono hikes ever, if the rain would only hold out.
We met at the Shop Rite in Mt Pocono, and shuttled with as few cars as we could to the State Game Lands 221 parking area on Pleasant Ridge Road just above the village of Mountainhome.
I had hiked through Mountainhome before, but we did not come down by way of the Rattlesnake Creek, which flows along the road we parked on. We had used some other weird woods road back in 2009.
At the parking area, Serious Sean showed up dressed as Waldo (Where's Waldo) and started the silliness of the day out.
We were able to get stuff we needed at Shop Rite, as we would barely be crossing any roads for the day.
We started by climbing up the abandoned continuation of Pleasant Ridge Road.
The trail was heavily lined with lovely Rhododendrons, and we soon had to cross without a bridge the Rattlesnake Creek.

Old lodge ruins in Devil's Hole

We made our way further uphill, and then as we got close to the top, there was a little side road that went off to the left. I had overshot it the first time, so we had to turn back a bit.
It led downhill to a bit of a clearing, and off to the right is a very steep foot path.

The footpath has a guide rope to hold onto as we descended a bit, and soon we reached the bottom of the ravine and the remarkable Rattlesnake Falls. There were some nice ledges and such to stand on along the way.
This was an out and back bit, and not everyone chose to descend to the falls.
There were two sets, a lower and an upper, but there is really no way of climbing down through the ravine in cold weather, and it is very slippery.
We all climbed back out, and returned to the woods road we had been following.
We continued on the road uphill to just about the border of private land, part of the Pleasant Ridge Hunting Club, and the road turned hard left.
We continued along this, which went from inside State Game Lands 221 to the hunting club and back again. I figure the road is probably a public thing since there's no good access to the game lands it goes back into. We did go near to a side road that I think went to a cabin or something, but we just kept on to the south and got back into game lands again.
Eventually, the wide woods road took us across the Mill Creek.
I'd been to this spot many times before, co leading trips with Rich Pace of the Appalachian Mountain Club.
Rich and I actually scouted for this hike together one day, in not so different weather than we were experiencing this time. We'd concocted a hike that would feature a lot of off trail and rock scrambling that was unlike anything anyone else was putting together.
I kind of look at my own hikes in the same way, although not focused so specifically on those features.

Everyone crossed Mill Creek just upstream of the road crossing where it is narrower, and then we utilized some of Rich Pace's own special route he devised through the Mill Creek gorge.
We went off trail and bushwhacked into the woods, and soon came across the Mill Creek Arch. There is a pile of stones, totally off trail, made into an arch sitting right along the right side of the creek.
We continued past that, and made our way past some amazing springs and through Rhododendrons.

After a while, we started climbing up from the gorge onto Seven Pines Mountain. I watched my phone GPS with aerial images closely to be sure we found the correct way up.

We got toward the top, but I was not finding the woods road I was hoping to find, heavily used by ATVs. Had I not gone far enough? I wasn't totally sure. We continued to bushwhack straight up the ridge, and it seemed like an eternity without coming across the road.
We made our way on through the woods until eventually we came across a woods road, but it wasn't where I was planning to be.
We turned to the left on it, but it seemed like ti was going the wrong way. There was a height of land to our left that I felt rather certain must have been the correct spot, but it wasn't working out that way.

The fog was rolling in fast, and it was beginning to drizzle. We were going the wrong way, and my GPS put us not where I wanted to be. Walking the road a little bit another direction took us further off course.
I felt let down that we couldn't get to the next place I wanted to, which is an outstanding overlook known as Cresco Heights, but if we got there we would not have had a view anyway.
The drizzled turned into steady rain, and no one wanted to even try to get there.

Instead, I studied the GPS based on where I figured would work out, and found another woods road that heads to The Devil's Hole from Seven Pines Mountain.

Everyone that had one used their umbrellas, and it was a pretty wet mess. Still, we were all managing to have a pretty good time.
The Devil's Hole is not a cave or anything, but rather the name of the gorge itself through which the Devil's Hole Creek flows.
We made our way to the creek itself, and then had to cross with no bridge. There is a great waterfall just upstream from this location, but I decided to cut that from the hike because it was getting far too difficult to get to it with all of the rain.
Instead, we'd just follow the creek downstream following the old woods road.

This time, we came to ruins of a chimney along the road, and I spotted a set of stairs going up the mountain across the creek. I'm not sure what it was for, but I don't remember them being so prominent in the past.

I went over and walked some of them, and found a delineated, stone lined trail as well. This must have had something to do with the lodge ruins that are just downstream from this location, but I'm not sure their purpose.

I had not noticed on previous visits to the gorge that I can remember, but this time I noted the location of the old ski slope that existed on the west side of the gorge. We continued down the old road route past a couple of lesser ruin sites, and then reached the ruins of the old lodge building.
This maybe three story structure was rumored to have been a prohibition era speakeasy. Regardless of what it was, the ruin is quite amazing. We always wander through it and often do group shots there, although this time we didn't on this one.
I never remembered noticing previously the remains of an old piano in the wreckage on the floor of the place, amazingly still discernible.
My plan in this area changed once again due to the weather situation.
I originally planned to continue off trail to the west from the Devil's Hole, possibly on the ski slope route some of the way, but with the rain and questionable directions from earlier, I decided instead that we would exit the gorge the way we had always done it on previous hike to the parking lot on Devil's Hole Road.
The trip down from the lodge ruin is pretty tough because the former road switches sides of the creek a couple of times, and to continue on the west side on the slope through Rhododendron is not easy.
We went for it anyway, and most everyone crossed twice. One of the times was using an oddball log and straddling maneuver.

I found that this time, the bushwhack on the west side of the creek was the easiest I'd done. I did walk in the water some, but other visitors to the gorge have beaten down a reasonable path through some of the mess, so it's no longer the challenge that it used to be through there.
Eventually, we got to the woods road that leads rather steeply uphill and to the parking lot.
Once there, I wanted to move on as quickly as possible before anyone official saw our group.

I'm not all that worried, and we were just under the permit number I believe, but just to play it safe.

We walked down Devil's Hole ROad for only a little ways until we got to where Tank Creek passes beneath. Form there, we started heading uphill, off trail along the left side of the creek into the Fieldstone Farm Tank Creek Nature Preserve.
There was a spot with some big rocks in the creek and some pipes sticking out, and a beat up trail to follow.
It wasn't all that long on unofficial trail before we came to the official one along the east side of the preserve.

We continued along that for a while, parallel with the creek, and then skirted a pond that had some beaver work damming it up to be a bit larger. It was a man made pond with some stone and concrete walls holding the water (now muck) back.
We skirted the edge of this and then climbed a bit to the left, where we would have come in if we had bushwhacked over from State Game Lands 221.
At the top of the hill is the awesome old stone ruin of the Fieldstone Farm house.

The abandoned shell of the building, which still retains a lot of its structural form, was built in the 1910s by NY Merchant Carl Tielenius for his daughter.
The home burned in the 1960s, and the shell and property had sat vacant ever since, until it was purchased as part of the preserve.
I had been there before with Jillane, when we went to first explore it, and I figured I would organize a hike to it eventually, but it had been quite a while and I just never got around to it till this.

After spending some time at the ruin and getting a good group photo, we made our way out of there and headed south on what had at one time been the driveway.
This took us back out to Devil's Hole Road, and we walked only a short distance past the houses and then bushwhacked into the woods down to the left, south.
We meandered through these woods until we hit the former Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western Railroad. This was the Lackawanna main line built in the 1850s to the Delaware Water Gap, and then extended through NJ in 1856. It was the subject of the first hike I organized as a group.
I'd already walked this segment before, but I figured it would be cool to get back on it and visit the former site of the Paradise Tunnel again, just to the west.
By this point, we were back on track the way I had been planning to go. The area of Tank Creek, where it passed beneath the Lackawanna, was a major washout back in 1955 I think it was.
We went across this high fill, crossed over Paradise Valley Road on a bridge and then passed the former grade crossing of Phoebe Snow Road. We then started heading around the Paradise Bends.

Fieldstone Preserve

After we got all the way around the first bend and started heading to the south, we came to the point of the Paradise Tunnel.

Mill Creek arch

Mill Creek arch

Paradise Tunnel didn't exist at the very beginning; the railroad originally took a wide sweeping curve around the big outcrop of land known as "The Knob".

It wasn't until 1857 that it was blasted through to create Paradise Tunnel and shortcut the sharp turn on which they'd have to impose slower speed limits and risk derailments.

Tunnel watchmen were on duty at all times in order to make sure no ice fell and blocked the tracks. The etchings of their names along with "Paradise Tunnel Watchmen" is still carved in the rocks at what would have been the west portal of the tunnels.
The ice and rock fall incidents were too much, and so the tunnel was daylighted in 1903 and became an open cut.

The historic images are Detroit Photographic Company images from prior to 1903.

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After the tunnel was no more, the rock fall problems persisted, and so the Paradise Cut was abandoned, and the the railroad was moved one more time, back to its pre-1857 alignment around The Knob, with some upgraded double track and fixing of the curve. 
The other photo of the daylighted tunnel site here is from the Bob Bahrs Collection.

We made our way into Paradise Cut and then out the other side. I set up two then and now compilations this time of the former tunnel site. One of them was on top of where the tunnel had been, so getting the exact same shot was completely impossible because there was nowhere to stand.

Rattlesnake Falls

We made our way out the other side of the cut, and it was still raining a bit. It had stopped for a short while, but with it started back up no one really wanted to take any extra time.
I had intended that some of us might climb up The Knob for the excellent view around the Paradise Bend, but no one was into that at the time either. I once did it with my old buddy Kyle, but hadn't since.
Instead, we just continued on the tracks to the west and north.
When we got to the Rt 611 overpass, we just climbed down from the rail line at the Mt Pocono Station site, and made our way north on the road until we got back to the Shop Rite where we had started.
It really wasn't too much of a let down that the weather wasn't great for this one. We still saw a lot of stuff, and had a really great time. There's so much stuff to see through that area, and it merits many more visits to cover what we didn't this time. I can easily put together many more greatest hits hikes with lots of new stuff added, and hopefully in the future Michele will be able to join us!