Hike #1397; Mapleton to Old Womans Gap

Hike #1397: 3/6/21 Mapleton to Old Womans Gap with Jim Kohan, Professor John DiFiore, Jennifer Tull, Diane Reider, and David Adams

This next hike would be the fourth in our series to hike the entire Standing Stone Trail, a great trail that is part of the Great Eastern Trail from the Mid State Trail in Rothrock State Forest to the Tuscarora Trail in Cowans Gap State Park.

I had only recently jush finsished my entire Juniata Division Pennsylvania Canal series, and posted the "Juniata Finale" a few weeks back, so it almost felt like false advertisement that we were going back and walking across the Juniata River at the start of this hike, but it was of course a different series.
I kind of thought of this one as a coda to that series, just a sort of afterthought, putting it to bed, and moving on seamlessly to the next thing.

I had planned and re-planned how this series was going to go many times. I reworked what was going to be a part of each hike and how it would feed into the next hike, and I kept on changing it.

Then, even after having the plan set, based on what was on the ground, I would end up changing it again.
This one was another that changed a bit as it came together, and the first unexpected thing was the meeting point itself.
I had hoped we would be able to get up to the trail itself by heading through Old Woman's Gap, but it was pretty terrible driving. We ended up having to leave cars a bit further down at a pull off parking instead of trying to get way up there. It didn't matter a whole lot, but it added a bit of mileage onto the end.

Amazingly, Dave managed to get his car up there and then backtracked again.
After a certain distance, the roads through the game lands aren't as bad, but getting to that point is really rough. With a rushing stream next ot the road, taking that chance would not be advisable.
Once we had the cars all settled in, we shuttled in as few as possible to the north to Mapleton, and parked in the community park with the big tree and the trail shelter, where we'd passed through a couple of times before.

We walked the route along Oriskany Road just a bit, past the burned out house, and then over the Juniata River bridge with some views of Jacks Mountain. We then headed into town and beneath the former Pennsylvania Railroad bridge. We were then on new ground.
The trail passes right through the pleasant little community of Mapleton on streets. 
It went up Main Street to a right on Hill Street and headed gradually uphill. 
I was having a rough time right from the start after having injured my foot just about two days prior.

I still pushed ahead strong and tried to stay caught up with Jim and Dave, who are very fast on the uphills. Everyone in this small group this time were very capable of all of the difficulties ahead on it.
Hill Street changed over to being unpaved and climbed more. It then reached a fork where the trail turned left.
We ascended a bit more, into the Scrub Run Gap, and passed a couple of water towers in the woods on the left. The Scrub Run itself was below us to the right with a couple cascades.

We passed a pretty little reservoir on the Scrub Run to the right, and the improved road became unimproved and continued into the deeper woods parallel with Scrub Run.
A little ways further up, we passed what I believe was an old mill site on the creek to the right. Stone work looked like an old mill race.
We entered State Game Lands #71, and the trail, still on an old woods road, crossed Scrub Run on a foot bridge and continued to climb.
We crossed another little branch of the trail just a little further up, and we started coming across a bit of snow accumulation.

We continued on the creek, and the old woods road continued to get rougher. Then, the trail turned to the left as a foot path and began ascending more steeply away from the creek, heading east. There was no more snow again for a little bit.

We ascended a very nice section of stone steps, and passed by some rock outcrops, along which there were some good seasonal views across the gap.
After this last bit of ledges, we climbed some more. I was ahead of the rest of the group. Then, we came to snow, which didn't go away this time. After a certain elevation, everything was still covered.

Near the top, there was a wooden sign pointing right to Three Springs, a village on the trail we'd hit next time, or a spur trail to the left to Windy Vista. Jim and I went for the spur trail.

It actually was a pretty great view, back down over the Scrub Run Gap.

We continued back, and the trail seemed like it kind of went on forever.

We continued on the trail to the south, which was a rocky trail for a bit, but then gave way to a sort of old woods road on a sparsely vegetated mountain top in the game lands.

This led us to a bit of a clearing, and then onto an easy gravel road.

I was thankful for this because it wasn't too hard.

I was also thankful for the snow on the most rocky portion of the terrain, because it provided a soft buffer to the rocks that might otherwise have hurt my injured heel quite a lot more.

It seemed at one point like we were walking straight on toward Silver Mine Knob.

Near a corner in the woods road sections, we were surprised at one point to see a Conservation Officer out there. He seemed just as surprised to see us. We were walking in on a long walk from Mapleton, and with the amount of snow cover up there, people usually try to walk through on it.

This guy was really friendly, and we stopped to chat with him for a while before moving on.

From here, the next bit of woods road was snow covered and unimproved surface, barely any use on it at all. It took us over a bit of a knoll, and then down to Jacks Mountain Road below Silver Mine Knob.

At this point, where it is vehicle accessible with parking, the trail turns left on I guess that continuation of Jacks Mountain Road to skirt a bit of Singers Gap to the left, and skirts the east side of the mountain. After a little while, the trail turns right onto a foot path and climbs rather steeply. On the way up, signs warn that the trail passes through private property.

A short side trip to the right from the top leads to a beautiful vista known as The Throne Room. 

The view is just outstanding. 180 degrees of glory, down the center of Jacks Mountain, east over Singers Gap Reservoir and into the valley there, and west into the Smiths Valley.

The trail continued on the rocky ridge top from here to the south, and the next overlook was one with outcrops looking east, known as the King's Chambers.

There was another 180 degree view mostly in the east direction, and there was fantastic talus slope below us. We didn't stop too long there, and continued on along the trail.
The next prominent piece of geology was another giant talus area known as Hall of the Mountain King.

The walking wasn't easy, but it was absolutely awesome. Fortunately, there wasn't so much snow to make it that much harder to navigate. We made our way over it and continued to the south.

Some of this was on private land, and other sections were within state forest lands in a short swath. We then left that land end entered State Game Lands #99.

The trail was not too terrible up ahead. It continued basically on the middle of the ridge top, and then crossed an access road to Jacks Mountain Fire Tower. It turned to the right and skirted the west and then south side of Butler Knob with some pretty nice views at those angles.

We eventually emerged at quite a fantastic view from Butler Knob to the south. This looked directly down the ridge in the direction that we were heading.
We could see down to some of the woods roads, and then the height of the land out beyond Old Womans Gap where we would be heading down.

When we finally moved on, we soon came by the old Jacks Mountain Fire Tower.
The tower is an old one, built in 1923 and in a sytle different than many of the other towers I'd been up.

The tower sits at 2,320 feet above sea level.
Typically, I would jump right on climbing up one of these towers, especially when the steps looked somewhat reasonable, but my foot was hurting so badly that I decided against scaling it this time.
I'm not sure this tower will last that much longer with its age and the level of disrepair.
Just around the corner from the tower was the old tower keepers residence. It took was in prietty bad shape and was wide open.
We had a look around, and then returned to the trail and began descending Butler Knob on a foot path.
The trail was actually a somewhat rough foot path for a bit, then emerged on the southwest side on a bit of woods road. We crossed over the road to the fire tower from here, and then passed through some young growth woods to the west,
As we walked toward the trail shelter below Butler Knob, there were some oddball signs. One of them pointed out "cat holes" to the left, apparently for taking care of nature's call, and then another sign denoting 1,440 miles to Wall Drug.

I guess this wooden routed sign is just a little joke dispatched on fellow hikers.
It wasn't far before we reached the shelter, which was pretty nice. We took a little break there and took in the scenery for a few moments.
From there, the trail led just a bit through more woods and then emerged onto Jacks Tower Road. We continued walking the wide gravel road to the south and passed over Carouthers Gap Run and ascended a bit beyond.

We continued on down the road just a little bit more, and we came to where the Standing Stone Trail turned hard left onto another big woods road, while we continued straight.

We reached a little height of land and started to descend from Jacks Mountain down into Old Woman's Gap along Old Woman's Brook. We went around a bend and there was an old quarried out area with exposed rock on the left side of the trail.

I don't know if this was a ganister operation like what was in Jacks Narrows, but it could have been. There were some old steps of foundations on the left, other stone or brick foundations, and then a smll building to the right of the brook on the opposite side that might have been used for dynamite or other explosives.

We continued downhill, and the road was insanely icy.
I was was still having a lot of trouble with my ankle, and the others got far ahead of me on this slope. I tried not to fall down on the slippery surface, which got worse as the road went into the more narrow gorge along Old Woman Run.
There were some nice little cascades along the brook to the right as we headed downhill though. It was a really nice way to end the hike.
The spot we parked on the road was near the intersection of Laurel Mountain Road, where there was just barely enough room for all of us to pull our cars off to the sides.

I was glad not only to get this section done, but thankful that I was still able to do it with my injured foot. It was a bit of a concern going in. I'm also glad that the snow wasn't so much that I would have to postpone it to another time.
This has been one of the best Pennsylvania trails we've done, and I much looked forward to each one in the seires.