Raccoon Creek State Park, PA Backpacking - Part One

In late fall 2009 I had a chance to go backpacking with my sister-in-law, her soon to be husband and my friend W, the former marine. I had been searching around the Internet for some backpacking areas that were closer to me than the Allegheny National Forest and I discovered Raccoon Creek State Park near Hookstown, Pennsylvania.

Raccoon Creek is located about 24 miles west of downtown Pittsburgh, just south of the Ohio River and very near the border of West Virginia. It is a 7500+ acre park that contains Raccoon Lake. The park features both standard drive-in camping facilities and a 19 mile backpacking trail. The backpacking trail has two designated camping areas along it, Sioux and Pioneer, and both feature pit latrines, potable water and three sided "lean-to" sleeping shelters.



I downloaded the map that the park service makes available to the public and studied it. Now, I have quite a bit of experience with maps and I am no stranger to topographical maps, having done some orienteering in Scouts, so when I looked at the map and followed the dashed green line of the backpacking trail I found two things surprising. One the rustic camping areas fore backpackers are both in the northern end of the park and fairly close together. I'm not sure why a 19 mile trail has both camping areas on one side of the park, about 4 miles part. To me this makes hiking the whole trail inconvenient. Possibly the idea is to use one of the rustic sites in the north half one night and the regular campground in the south half the next. The second thing I noticed was for being in a hilly region of the state, this trail looked fairly level. Sure it had one main climb from where it crosses SR18, just northeast of the Ranger's Station, but otherwise it looked like it followed a level ridge. One of these days I'll learn to not trust park service maps.

So the big day finally arrived. I had all the food ready to go (That's my thing, I'm the food prep guy. I will post more about food later. Promise.) and the four of us piled into W's Jeep Cherokee and off we went. From my house Raccoon Creek really isn't hard to get to. It's about a 70 mile drive and even stopping for breakfast on the way, it took less than 2 hours. I have to admit, I will probably be going to Raccoon Creek several more times just because it is so close and convenient.

After a relaxing breakfast at The Bob's and a fairly short drive we found ourselves pulling into Raccoon Creek State Park. If you want to backpack, the Ranger's Station is one of the areas you can leave your vehicle overnight. The station looks like a very nice affair with restrooms and a small visitor center. Of course this being Saturday, it was locked so I cannot vouch personally for the interior. The exterior is quite nice though.

One thing about Raccoon Creek that caused a bit of awkwardness later on is that they charge for use of the camping facilities along the backpacking trail. Now, this is not a horrid thing. I am using their facility, I don't mind paying for it. Besides, the rental is pretty reasonable. The shelters are $20 per night for out of state campers and you can reserve them in advance, or so the theory goes. See, I tried several times to reserve two shelters for this trip. I never could get the online reservation system to work so I called the Raccoon Creek Ranger Station and THEY couldn't get the reservation system to work either. We ended up using the drop-box at the Ranger station. Of course the drop box doesn't let you know if some or all of the shelters are already reserved. Minor detail right?

After settling up with the park for our camping fees we saddled up our gear and looked for the trail. Well... the trail really isn't located conveniently near the Ranger's Station. Oh, it isn't far away, but to access the trail you need to hike down the park drive and east along SR18 to the spot where the Forest Trail crosses the road. I got out my park map and studied it for a minute. We were at the Ranger's Station and the trail was due east, fairly close according to the map. I thought that we should be able to walk along the north side of the creek we parked near and come upon the Forest Trail fairly quickly. W and my future Brother-in-law both agreed with my assessment. My Sister-in-law was not so sure.

Over the objections of the only one in the group with ovaries, and apparently good sense, we struck off cross country to try and intersect the Forest Trail. Again, this was in mid-November so most of the undergrowth had died off. Of course, Multiflora Rose never dies down, it just loses its leaves. We fought our way through several brier patches and scrambled up and down small rises to avoid the stream and marsh. After about twenty minutes two things became clear: Number one, not only is the map scale misleading but the thickness of the forest around us, even sans foliage, made it impossible to see where the trail might be. Number two, that the female among us was right. The latter was a much graver problem than the former.

After hiking perhaps a quarter of a mile and not finding the trail we ended up dropping our packs and W and I set about trying to locate the trail. I trotted up a small rise and thanks to some noisy hikers, I spotted the trail. Due to the thickness of the undergrowth, we changed course and followed a path of least resistance back to the trail. This involved crossing the creek we had been keeping to our right. Once this was done, the way became much easier. Trust me when I say, suck it up and just hike the road to the trail crossing. Had this not been November we all most likely would have been scraping ticks off of ourselves with our sporks.


Finally, on the trail.

For the most part. This really is a nice park. The foot trails are fairly well maintained. As you can see in the above picture, the local Boy Scout Troop has put some time and effort into doing a few projects. Being an Eagle Scout myself, I love seeing the results of Eagle Projects and this very fine bridge was an Eagle Project for a Mr. Joseph Frambach of Troop 248. Thank you Joseph!

Props for a job well done!

Like I said before, this is a nice park, but the park map is deceiving. The first problem is that the map is broken into 50' topographic lines. This makes the map look hilly, but not too bad. Unfortunately there's a bunch of detail missing when the elevation lines are that far apart. I'm afraid the hike was a bit more challenging than I planned. It was probably more challenging than it should have been for my sister-in-law, considering her this was only her second time backpacking.

The trail is laid out well for the most part. I didn't find it too challenging. It certainly was not as difficult as Zaleski had been. The climb from the bridge crossing Service Run is a good one. It gains about 250' in 3/4 of a mile. At the top of this rise is the first camping area for backpackers, the Sioux site. We were heading farther up the trail to Pioneer.

From Sioux the Forest Trail follows a ridge to the north northwest. It eventually crosses this ridge and drops down into the main valley of the park to join with a park road to cross Traverse Creek. After the crossing the trail diverges from the road and goes from a foot path to a bridal trail. The next mile or so to Pioneer is on a path that is pretty chewed up by horses. There is just one more climb out of the valley to get to the camping area.

We had hiked for a couple hours and we were all pretty happy to get into camp. Some more than others. The day was much warmer than we had anticipated, what with it being the middle of November. The Sister-in-law had worn too warm of a base layer and not only was she tired from a hike that was probably more than she was prepared for, she was also overheated.

I'll continue the rest of this review in a second blog post. I did enjoy Raccoon Creek and I am looking forward to going back. Raccoon Creek doesn't fit my ideal for a backpacking location, but it is a nice park and it is perfectly serviceable for a weekend trip.