Quebec Run Wild Area
Pennsylvania
May 1999
The Quebec Run Wild Area is on the eastern slope of Chestnut Ridge in southwestern Pennsylvania. In order to retain the wild and natural character of the land, the area permits no development of a permanent nature. How wild it is however, we are about to discover.
The forest is made up of sugar maple, red maple, yellow poplar, oak, an embarrassing amount of rhododendron thickets, mountain laurel, hemlock, pine, dogwood and sweet smelling sassafras. The creeks are stocked with native trout. Boulders abound, making for some hand-over-hand climbing fun. Folks backpack, hunt and fish here. And other stuff too, apparently.
A group of us are hiking the Rankin Trail paralleling Quebec Run itself. There are no prettier places. We appreciate the quiet, soft footfall on the pine needles covering the trail. We silently move up the tree-lined path, eddies in nearby Quebec Run making small gurgles, boulders left over from the Paleozoic and Proterozoic periods on the southern side of the trail.
There are eight of us. Reina, one of our long-time hikers, begins to giggle. Reina is older in years than any of the rest of us and is one of the strongest hikers I’ve ever known. She’s not a big woman but she is a thick, strong force melded of German stock. Don’t mess with Reina. She may not stop laughing.
On this hike, laugh she does. “Reina, what the heck is up with you? What’s so funny?”
“Oh, nothing. Just a memory.” Yes, her giggling has become full-on laughing.
“Oh yeah? What memory?”
“I once had a good time on these rocks,” she explains, shedding no light on what a “good time” might have been.
“These rocks are good for climbing but there’s nothing particularly funny about that. Is there?”
“We weren’t climbing.” And now she is full bore, red-faced guffawing.
“We, Reina?”
“If you climb up this way,” she explained, “there is a route that can get you just out of sight of the trail. I was on a first date…”
And that is all she would say.
“Reina, you are safe with us. What happens on the trail stays on the trail. So c’mon, what happened? You seem to be implying that there was some sort of hanky panky.
“And who’s ‘we’?”
Now Reina became wistful, and resolute. There were to be no sordid stories for us today. As we did, you can use your imagination.
