Pine Creek Gorge

Pine Creek Gorge is the canyon the glaciers dug — the 45-mile 'Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania' that Pleistocene ice carved when it dammed the old creek and forced the water to cut a new path south. At its deepest the gorge drops 1,500 feet; at the twin state parks on the rim — Leonard Harrison on the east, Colton Point on the west — it drops 800 feet across a 4,000-foot span of Appalachian plateau.

For most of its human history the gorge was a highway and then a timber yard. American Indians walked the Pine Creek Path along its floor; then the loggers came for the white pine that shipbuilders called the best mast timber in the world — trees six feet through and 150 feet tall, a hundred thousand board feet to the acre. Every spring the logs rafted down to Williamsport, the lumber capital of the world in the 1880s. The railroad followed the rafts — seven million tons of freight a year by 1896 — and when the timber was gone, the gorge was left nearly bare, a landscape of stumps and fire scars.

The forest came back. The state bought the cut-over land, the CCC built Colton Point's overlooks in the 1930s, and in 1968 twelve miles of the canyon became a National Natural Landmark. The Pine Creek Trail now rides the old rail bed past the same water that floated the rafts. The file keeps the gorge: the glaciers, the lumber era, and the canyon that grew its wilderness back.

Pine Creek Gorge is the archive's canyon file — Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon, the lumber capital's stump field, and the forest that returned.