On the horizon, the mountain ridges lie peacefully side by side, evenly spaced, like waves in the ocean that haven’t yet swelled to curling. I stand atop one just like them—Tussey Mountain—and cannot locate a town, a building, a road, or any other sign of human construction in my view. I like it this way.
The knife-edge ridge of Tussey Mountain is very narrow and serrated. Giant slabs of protruding rock march down its back like dragon scales. The Mid State Trail (MST) weaves through and over these massive chunks of sandstone, making it quite fun to negotiate if you take your time. Since trees cannot grow on these surfaces, this is where you find the best views, and they are plentiful.
An Endangered Trail
When completed (probably later this year), this 320-mile wilderness footpath will stretch from near the town of Everett, near Pennsylvania’s border with Maryland, all the way to Tioga, at the edge of New York State. Currently, the MST makes it as far north as the Middlebury/Wellsboro junction in northern Pennsylvania, with only about 10 to 15 miles remaining.
Tom Thwaites, a retired physics professor at Penn State University, founded the MST in 1969 when he was faculty adviser to the Penn State Outing Club’s hiking division. He set out to build a trail that intersected the state, after he found the wreckage of an old trail system cutting through the state forests that dated back to the early part of the 20th century. Students pitched in to help him construct the MST, using those old trails as a starting point. Until his retirement from Penn State in 1989, he and the students kept the project going, with assistance from a Keystone Trails Association Trail Care Project, but the volunteer effort started losing momentum and they completed only about two-thirds of the work.
“The idealism of the students kind of evaporated in the ’80s,” Thwaites says. “They had tunnel vision and thought more of their careers and their futures.”
The Mid State trail. Photo by Cindy Ross.
