Pennsylvania Game News - October 2011 - 53

wetland area was alive with singing redwinged blackbirds. Soon we reached a series of calcareous sandstone outcrops probably formed when the workers cut into the mountain to build the railroad. While the bed itself is wide, we could always peer down the steep slopes to the right at forest below. On the left, the mountain also rises, and it is there that the outcrops overhang the trail, some more dramatically than others. Blossoming witch hazel, wild hydrangea shrubs, Hercules’ club and common nightshade covered with red berries hung from the outcrops, and we wondered what other treasures we might find there in spring. On Mother’s Day, columbine, early saxifrage, Canada violets and Solomon’s seal bloomed on the outcrops, and we also saw doll’s eyes or white baneberry plants. Red-berried elder shrubs grew on and next to the outcrops. Banks and banks of rhododendron often lined the trail and grew in thickets below the trail, too. Large and small hemlocks looked healthy, because the hemlock woolly adelgids haven’t reached them. Clumps of paper birch signaled the colder climate atop the Allegheny Front. Probably the most exciting find on our October hike was a porcupine in a tree. Many of the hikers had never seen one before, and it was the subject of the photographers in the group. After four miles in the Game Lands we crossed on to the 2.1 miles managed by volunteers of the Bells Gap Rail Trail, who keep it mowed under the direction of 87-year-old Bud Amrhein. “He’s wonderful. I don’t know what we’d do without him,” Hazel Bilka told me. It was due to Bilka and a group of concerned Bellwood citizens back in the mid-1990s that the rail trail was developed. That group called itself the Bellwood Antis Community Trust and, to promote the area, surveyed the citizens in Bellwood and the surrounding township and asked them what the area needed. Overwhelmingly,
OCTOBER 2011

the citizens wanted more recreational opportunities. After raising money for a feasibility study to develop a Bells Gap Rail Trail, they were able to persuade major landowners, including the Altoona Water Authority and township supervisors, to turn over their properties along the railroad. They then received funding for the work on their 2.1 miles from the Pennsylvania departments of Conservation and Natural Resources and Transportation. On July 8, 2007, the trail, beginning at Root’s Crossing outside Bellwood was officially opened to the public, and later was connected to the Game Lands. A further spur of it down into Bellwood is shared with cars and trucks. “I think it makes the area accessible to those who otherwise wouldn’t go up there,” Bilka says. “I hear from people all the time who tell me how much they like it.” In addition to biking and hiking, Bilka says that cross-country skiing and snowshoeing are popular winter activities on the trail. But I was eager to do a spring hike with Bruce, who hadn’t been on the October hike, and Mother’s Day was ideal. We parked at the top of the mountain in a Game Lands pull-off and were immediately welcomed by singing chestnut-sided warblers, American redstarts and ovenbirds. Then, during our 6-mile hike, we were serenaded by eastern towhees, black-andwhite warblers, dark-eyed-juncos, wood thrushes, common yellowthroats, blackthroated green warblers, blue-headed vireos, scarlet tanagers, worm-eating warblers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, black-throated blue warblers and common ravens. At 2,160 feet in elevation and 1,107 feet above Bellwood at the start of the trail, the trees, shrubs and wildflowers were at least a week behind our mountain at 1,200 feet and even further behind the fully leafed-out trees in Bellwood. Shadbush and red-berried elder bloomed and golden catkins dangling from black birch trees lit
53

Pennsylvania Game News - October 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Pennsylvania Game News - October 2011