Top 5 day hikes in Pennsylvania, from Pine Creek Gorge to Lehigh Gap

The Youghiogheny River makes a hairpin at Ohiopyle, and Ferncliff Peninsula is the tongue of land inside the bend. DCNR says the trail hugs the edge of the peninsula near the water and passes Ohiopyle Falls, Washington's Overlook and Lovers Leap. That's a lot of named things for a loop under two miles.

DCNR puts the peninsula at 100 acres and says its botanical diversity has been recognized for over a century. It was declared a National Natural Landmark in 1973 and a State Park Natural Area in 1992. Old-growth hemlock, wildflowers, plant species of concern, and fossils in the rock.

If 1.7 miles isn't a day, the other trails start from the same town. DCNR lists the Great Gorge Trail at 1.3 miles, Meadow Run at 3.2, and the Baughman Trail at 3.4. That last one is steep and rocky in the agency's own words, and it runs out to a viewpoint DCNR describes as looking over the deepest gorge in Pennsylvania.

Ohiopyle is also the southern terminus of the 70-mile Laurel Highlands Hiking Trail, and 6.3 miles of it lie inside the park. Start up that instead if you want to be tired at the end of the day.

DCNR counts a series of 21 wild free-flowing waterfalls along the Falls Trail, and 22 named falls in the park altogether. The extra one, Adams Falls, is reached from the Evergreen parking lot rather than the loop. The highest is 94-foot Ganoga Falls, in the photograph above.

The full circuit is 7.2 miles if you walk both the upper and lower sections, and DCNR rates it most difficult. There's no summit on it, so the rating is about the surface. You're on stone that water has been running over continuously for a very long time.

The park is 13,193 acres across three counties, and the glens themselves are a National Natural Landmark with old-growth timber standing in them. There's a good view of the old trees from the parking areas on PA 118 if you want to see them without the walk.

Then there's the winter rule, and it's unusually blunt for a state agency: DCNR says the Falls Trail System is closed in winter except for properly equipped ice climbers and hikers. Take that literally. The water keeps running in February, and the ledges it runs over turn to ice.

Blue Mountain above Palmerton sits inside the EPA's Palmerton Zinc Pile Superfund site. Decades of zinc smelting killed the trees on about 4,000 acres of the mountain, in EPA's account, and left a bare gray slope visible for miles.

In 2002 the Lehigh Gap Nature Center bought 756 acres of it and began replanting with native prairie grasses the following year. In 2013 the cleanup's responsible parties added more than 13,000 trees inside fenced enclosures, hybrid American chestnut among them. The tawny field in the photograph is what that looks like two decades on.

The center's trail brochure routes you from the Osprey House up the Prairie Warbler and Woodpecker trails to the Appalachian Trail, right again onto the blue-blazed North Trail to summit the 1,400-foot ridge, then back down by the Charcoal, Prairie Grass and LNE trails. It also warns you to follow the Woodpecker blazes carefully through rocky ground, and not to be pulled onto the white spray-painted game lands trail.

The Woodpecker Trail is maintained by the center, but it sits inside State Game Lands 217. On game lands, anyone who isn't hunting has to wear 250 square inches of fluorescent orange from October 1 to January 31, and again from April 20 to May 31.

You pass an A.T. shelter and a spring on the way around. The shelter is for thru-hikers only. The spring you're welcome to use, with filtration or treatment recommended.