Hiking Ricketts Glen State Park (Benton, PA) — February 2020

4 min readFeb 15, 2020

Grand View Trail and Old Beaver Dam Rd. Trail

Ricketts Glen is a park that I’ve been to many times over the years, but always to spend time at its best known attractions: the Falls Trail, which offers some stunning views of a couple of dozen waterfalls including the 94 foot high Ganoga Falls (this trail is absolutely some of the best hiking at any PA state park), and Lake Jean, which offers options for plenty of warm-weather water activities. I hadn’t, until this trip, ventured into many other areas of the park.

The realtively short 1.9 mile Grand View Trail and the linked 4 mile Old Beaver Dam Rd. Trail can be easily combined to create a longer hike that brings you up and down the side of Red Rock Mountain, passing by streams, some large rocks, some nicely forested areas, and — if you are lucky — some glimpses of wildlife such as the pheasant hen at the top of this essay, which greeted me near the place where the trails link.

The main attraction on the Grand View trail is a fire tower that looks over the surrounding valleys, but unfortunately the building is closed to hikers (there’s a locked fence and “keep out” signage surrounding it). The tower reminded me a little of the one in the 2016 video game Firewatch which, as an aside, is well worth playing through for anyone who enjoys hiking through the wilderness! Unfortunately, from the ground around the tower, the views of the surrounding countryside are mostly obscured by surrounding trees. So, while you can catch some glimpses of the “grand view” promised by the trail’s name, there’s no wide open vista to enjoy.

The more interesting part of the hike is the back half, which features some narrow trails, plenty of mossy rocks, and traversal through some peaceful hollows. I also found some soggy spots on the trail near its end, though most of these could be easily walked around or would pose no great difficulty for good hiking boots. Otherwise, the trail offers a fairly moderate to low level of difficulty for hiking and sneakers would probably suffice.

By contrast, the Old Beaver Dam Rd. Trail (which I visited separately on the morning after a snowfall) offers some more difficult sections, including some late uphill climbs. This looped trail cuts across several of the waterways that feed into the falls system and both the trail itself and the signage pointing the way to connecting trails are well marked and maintained.

There’s not a whole lot to say about this trail, other than that it brings you through a variety of environments along the way. It offers a healthy mix of flat stretches along with uphill and downhill sections, and it keeps things interesting from start to finish. There were a few soggy areas, but by in large the trail was well maintained and very easy to hike in a few inches of snow with just standard hiking shoes. Despite the nice weather, I didn’t encounter any other hikers on either trail on either day, so it seems that they are only lightly used during the winter months.

The best pictures I took on this trail were those that emphasized how the late morning sunlight and the crisp blue sky mingled with the melting snow and the lengthening shadows I increasingly encountered as I moved through the hike. The resulting imagery offered a lot of contrast between vibrant green colors, reddish browns and shiny grays, and the bluish white snow