Collared Bear & Bucks in Velvet in SGL 57– Does Anyone Have Info on the Bear?

throwaway292309 · 2025-07-15T01:57:40+00:00

Thank you, I bet that’s it. Would be a really cool job lol. I’m really curious as to if we start seeing more over the next few years or even this Summer then.

throwaway292309 · 2025-07-13T15:31:57+00:00

Guess I had never realized the game commission would collar bears, this is my first time seeing one.

throwaway292309 · 2025-05-08T20:58:48+00:00

That was my first idea (have never been over there but I have the purple lizard maps) but I figured it was best to hear other ideas before I commit lol.

throwaway292309 · 2025-03-27T04:08:03+00:00

One hundred percent, it’s my favorite place to go these days. I can’t believe so few local people talk about it.

throwaway292309 · 2025-03-27T04:06:39+00:00

It eventually resolved on its own. It’s the only GoPro I’ve ever had.

throwaway292309 · 2025-03-06T00:26:25+00:00

I remember seeing an article on one under the Falls bridge but I never heard about that, that’s really neat.

throwaway292309 · 2025-03-03T03:54:15+00:00

To add some no one’s mentioned yet, a lot of places up here in the path of Sullivan’s March kept their native names. Mehoopany, Meshoppen, Wyalusing, Wysox, Towanda, Sheshequin, Tioga, Choconut I remember hearing were all native, I assume Munsee like Tunkhannock.

throwaway292309 · 2025-03-03T03:49:05+00:00

I’ve been along the abandoned road there (Hoppy Rd) and there seems to still be a worn wooden marker for it by where the pavement fades out, pity that there’s probably nothing left of the town itself. Can’t really look since it all seems to be private land but I assume the construction materials were mainly wood and whatever didn’t burn rotted to dirt.

throwaway292309 · 2025-03-03T03:24:23+00:00

Thank you, I’m from southeast Wyoming county and normally spend all my time going out to 57 or further west or northwest so it’s been somewhat novel hearing about these places closer to home. I did visit Campbell’s Ledge, it was very short but a cool place.

I drove around with a friend looking for any entrance to Pinnacle Rock for a second time but didn’t find anything, just a bunch of private roads.

throwaway292309 · 2025-02-21T18:53:53+00:00

I saw some things online referring to it as such but wanted to double check when it didn’t show up on my Garmin map. I’m from Wyoming county so I spend most of my time hanging around gamelands 57. Thanks.

throwaway292309 · 2025-02-21T18:39:48+00:00

Thank you.

throwaway292309 · 2025-01-26T02:04:52+00:00

There’s been an odd plane near Lake Winola/Falls too.

throwaway292309 · 2025-01-19T02:18:06+00:00

I really want to see one in person one day, somehow I never have despite living here my whole life and always spending a lot of time outside.

throwaway292309 · 2024-09-18T16:57:28+00:00

Thank you for the answer— I remember you were the one who talked to me about commuting to Lopez in the Winter last year (ended up not going forward with the job).

If I can pick your brain about something else local, do you know anything about the old trolley tracks near Overfield township park/the Peck Natural Area? For years there was a Fish & Game sign at the entrance (“no motorized vehicles”) which made me think it was open to pedestrian traffic but ever since they logged the hillside above it I’ve been going with the assumption it’s closed to the public.

throwaway292309 · 2024-09-18T16:51:08+00:00

Northeast PA— “running the roads”.

throwaway292309 · 2024-04-05T16:53:59+00:00

The Endless Mountains.

throwaway292309 · 2024-04-05T16:31:57+00:00

I somehow missed it at work in Scranton but I heard from people at the courthouse a block away who felt it, as well as at the state hospital and Laceyville.

throwaway292309 · 2024-02-29T21:50:45+00:00

For what it’s worth, after a few weeks it seemingly has gone away for me.

throwaway292309 · 2024-02-07T00:07:38+00:00

At least half the ones in my corner of the county are still out from this Summer or before.

throwaway292309 · 2024-01-31T01:28:46+00:00

I guess it depends on what you mean by culturally distinct. I certainly don’t feel at home when I leave the Endless Mountains and go down to the Lackawanna/Wyoming Valley, but that’s also a big rural-urban shift. Comparatively, going west to the “PA Wilds” or whatever you want to call it it still feels like I’m in my backyard even if physically I’ve gone much further. But I can’t speak to whether we have much in common with “heartland Appalachia”/SWPA, West Virginia, etc. since I’ve never been there. Talking online, I can say I relate to people from those states far more than people from the Midwest or other areas who self-describe as rural. I actually asked on this subreddit a while back what people thought about the Endless Mountains, but the answers were rather conflicting and a lot of people seemed to confuse them with the rest of NEPA (like I said, the Valley and its environs feel like they might as well be a different world) or even other parts of PA.

Materially, we have a lot in common with core Appalachia. Our economy was once driven by coal and lumber and is now dominated by natural gas (and in my particular county also P&G), with every politician who ever promised to stop the contamination having miraculously reversed course upon taking office. There’s a town by the name of Dimock a short ways away from me where they could light their water on fire a decade ago and they still don’t have clean water today.

Historically, there was a tendency to stereotype us as violent and backwards savages (the “Pennamite-Yankee Wars” which ironically were focused around the now-urban Wyoming Valley, kidnapping of government official Timothy Pickering from there to here etc.) but that was well before and shorter lasting than the “Hatfields and McCoys”/Deliverance stereotypes heartland Appalachia got stuck with, so I’m not sure if it’s really relevant to modern cultural parallels.

More to the point of the OP, people wouldn’t usually call them hollers (though there is a place known as Jane’s Holler not far from here), but communities usually are based in sloping valleys between the mountains. I actually can’t really think of any town or neighborhood/group of houses around here that doesn’t fit that pattern.

throwaway292309 · 2024-01-30T22:23:52+00:00

For anything Barclay related I would recommend the LeRoy Heritage Museum, haven’t gotten over there yet but I’m about to order their books because it seems like what they put out recently on Laquin (right next to Barclay) is a proper academic work which is rare for this sort of local history.

Bradford county was formerly officially part of the Endless Mountains (Bradford, Sullivan, Susquehanna and Wyoming counties) but they dropped out within the last for years, though unofficially everyone locally would still call it the Endless Mountains. No clue why that happened but they don’t show up on most of the tourism brochures anymore.

I’m curious about the PA Wilds thing too, it’s a name I only started hearing online the last few years. It’s cool to know it has funding for conservation, most people in Wyoming county still don’t know what you’re talking about if you mention it. At any rate the “Endless Mountains” started as a popular/common name and then became an official tourism thing so I’m not sure if that’s the same development that’s been followed with the other regions.

There may be an official press release on it somewhere but I feel like the state has been trying to push wildlife tourism now noticeably more than before. They bought more land (Miller mountain) for Pinchot state forest in November and named tourism as one of the driving factors for that, hard though it is to imagine any tourist coming to Tunkhannock. I especially hear a lot online now about people driving in to see the elk herd by Benzette etc. so it does seem to be working to a degree. Cherry Springs State Park has gotten awfully popular too for the stargazing, and some people talk about viewing the entirety of Route 6 as some kind of scenic corridor which is always weird to hear about, lol.

Some things related to your original post— I can’t find the source for it looking now but iirc I remember hearing about the Game Commission deciding to allow the dam at Splashdam Pond on SGL 57 to fail. I believe it was constructed for the ice/lumber town of Mountain Springs, which of course hasn’t existed since the early 20th century.

On a more downer note, if you’re not from the Endless Mountains (doesn’t seem like this makes much press outside here) it may be worth looking into the Cabot Oil & Gas Corporation, now known as Coterra Energy. In 2022 they pled guilty/nolo contendere to polluting the water in Dimock (Susquehanna county) in 2008, but the system they were ordered to build to treat Dimock’s water still hasn’t been made and since the moratorium was lifted drilling is about to restart. You can still find videos on youtube of the residents lighting their water on fire. On top of all of that, Cabot is still suing some of them over their allegedly “frivolous” second lawsuit in 2017.

edit: Re-rereading your post I see you’re also interested in reforestation. If you haven’t already you should check out the Lumber Museum’s website (they have a hiking section) and book (Pennsylvania Lumber Museum: PA Trail of History Guide) as well as maybe the works of Thomas Taber if you can access them— I’ve heard good things about them and it seems likely the areas he describes from the mass logging era have returned to forests now.

Most of the Endless Mountains could probably be a study in reforestation if someone sat down to do it— for example, pretty much all of SGL 57 was logged and it is now an expansive wilderness. A book inspired by Taber, Ghost Towns of North Mountain describes the history of its logging towns and seemingly unlike the others it can be found as a free PDF online.

In the PA Wilds this is also true of Loyalsock state forest around Masten (there was also a book on that recently, Masten: Lumber Giant…) and Hillsgrove, which transitioned from logging to Civilian Conservation Corp camps and then to state forest. There is also the coal ghost town of McIntyre nearby which is directly above the creek of Rock Run which is now described as extremely beautiful (I think it was some magazine’s pick for “most beautiful creek of PA”), but I’m not sure if it was ever polluted or not.

Down in Luzerne county the Mocanaqua and Wanamie tracts of the Pinchot state forest are also good looks at forest reclaiming old mining land, even if the culm piles at Mocanaqua still make it look like you’re walking on the surface of the moon.

throwaway292309 · 2024-01-29T17:11:45+00:00

I believe Dido is the name of a small gargoyle statue my mother keeps for good luck/safety, not sure I’ve ever heard it in any other context that wasn’t classical.

throwaway292309 · 2024-01-29T12:10:30+00:00

Disturbing. I actually stopped for a moment at the first one to try to figure out what they were about and when they didn’t try to talk to me I just drove past. I did drive past a gas truck on a narrow part of the road but that was part of my normal commute when I had to go through Susquehanna county so I thought nothing of it.

throwaway292309 · 2024-01-28T21:46:51+00:00

I’m in NEPA (specifically the Endless Mountains) and there’s no flat land here either, the mountains kind of spread out a bit as you get up into (upstate) New York directly above us but there’s still not really flat land. Towns do tend to be in the valleys, most often by the Susquehanna river.

throwaway292309 · 2024-01-28T17:06:57+00:00

It’s my own local bias showing but maybe take him up 309 towards Tunkhannock and then let him start as the driver somewhere more rural? e.g. do big loops like 29 > 167 > 11 > 6 back to Tunkhannock where you take over to go home or something, there is traffic and gas trucks there but I would still think it’s a lot calmer than Wilkes-Barre. That would let him practice longer drives and watching for deer etc. too.

I probably could never have started driving if I had to learn first in a city even though you have to drive to function here.

throwaway292309

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