Beaver Meadows

Walked the Beaver Meadow Loop near Marienville, PA yesterday, a three mile circle that originates over a dam then crosses through decidous, pine and spruce woods, before crossing a boardwalk at the opposite end of the pond and circling back on the opposite side. The local drought has lowered the water level at the far end, and most of the gulleys and smaller streams along the trail are dry. I have not walked this trail since the dog died in 2018, and found it to be a well defined single track for most of it's length, with sections that once were the railroad bed of a narrow guage train used for logging in the late 1800's. The trail is mostly flat with mild inclines and roots as the worst impediment to hiking, although I wondered why it does not more closely follow the pond circumference. Perhaps the dam-built by the WPA in 1936-once flooded a much larger area so the route delberately avoided old bogs. The campground shown on the map was dismantled a decade ago, and the area is not used much in the present day.