Walk with me: The restoration of an Appalachian wilderness. Quebec Run Wild Area is sacred ground. Before the white settlers arrived, Native American tribes stalked these steep hills and cool hollows, riddled by tangled thickets of rhododendron and laurel, in search of game and honor. In the mid-1700's, England and France vied for domination of these gentle mountains, the last barriers to the Ohio River Valley and the fur trade to the west. A few miles to the north of here, an ambush at Jumonville Glen set off the French and Indian War, and more broadly, the Seven Years' War. England and its Colonial allies prevailed and the settlers soon arrived to stake their claims, followed by the iron and glass industries, the railroads, and a devastating onslaught of clearcutting and fires. Nothing was left standing. The soil itself was burned away in the heat of the fires. With no trees or soil to absorb rain, catastrophic flooding ensued. Not far to the north, Johnstown, Pennsylvania was nearly wiped off the map by a terrible flood in 1889. As the sobering consequences of insatiable industrialization settled in, priorities began to change in the early 20th Century. In the 1920s and 1930's, the U.S. Forest Service and state agencies began buying up large tracts of devastated land with the goal of reforesting the mountains and reducing flooding. What you see here is a legacy of that effort, a third-growth forest that has been given a reprieve and a new lease on life. This magnificent tract on the eastern flank of Chestnut Ridge is now forever protected as a designated wild area of the Forbes State Forest system and serves to remind us that good can come after bad, when we are willing to learn from our mistakes.
