Great winter hiking trails across Pennsylvania
Updated Feb 12, 2021;
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Here are 30 great spots for some cold-weather trekking.
Pennsylvania’s Trail of the Year for 2021, the 38-mile Delaware & Hudson Trail in Lackawanna, Susquehanna and Wayne counties, will appear on many lists of prime trails this year. Tracing the former corridor of the Delaware & Hudson Railway, which primarily carried anthracite coal out of the Lackawanna Valley during the second half of the 19th century, the D&H Trail is open to motorized and non-motorized users, including walkers, bikers, equestrians as well as snowmobilers.
And, in that same vein, the Trail of the Year in 2020 was the 46-mile Ghost Town Trail in Cambria and Indiana counties as Pennsylvania’s Trail of the Year. Launched in 1994 as a 12-mile segment, Ghost Town Trail was the first trail in the state constructed with transportation enhancement funding. An estimated 80,000 users each year enjoy the trail, which was designate
LebTown
(Provided photo)
When Matt and Meghan Reynolds bought land near the Lickdale trailhead of the Swatara Creek, they didn’t know it contained a piece of local history.
The land encompasses the remains of a small segment of the Old Union Canal, a towpath canal that ran through some 82 miles of southeastern Pennsylvania and was a vital commercial link in the 19th century.
“The segment, which we believe is Lock 11, is pretty obvious,” Matt Reynolds said in an email to LebTown.
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“Some of it is buried and some of it is visible,” he said. “It has weathered over the years and is slowly becoming part of the landscape of the forest, so we don’t exactly know what it looked like back then, but there is clear evidence of a man-made structure with aligned and stacked rocks of all sizes.”