Hiking the Susquehanna Riverlands (Berwick, PA) — January 2020

5 min readJan 6, 2020

A morning’s trip to the Susquehanna Riverlands during the first snow of the New Year proved to be inspirational: it struck me as a beautiful place to start what might be a fun little project for the next while and, perhaps, through 2020. I would like to chronicle hikes through the many parks and places I’d like to visit over the next year with photos from my iPhone, some written reflections on the walk, and maybe even essays or videos from time to time. I think that this platform is a good starting place for me to mark my own thoughts about the various experiences these hikes might provide, what kinds of thinking they provoked, what I think would be valuable for other people to look for or to consider if they visited the same places and, perhaps in the process, encourage any readers who might stumble across this content with incentive to seek for themselves the same kinds of places that I have come to enjoy. (tldr: Stop the presses! Middle-aged white guy wants to write about his hikes!) If anyone who reads this knows of a good site or app for me to post this kind of writing around hiking, please let me know.

The Susquehanna Riverlands is located just outside of Berwick, PA in Northeast Pennsylvania. It is located across from and is closely connected to the Susquehanna Steam Electric Station (a nuclear reactor that most around here still refer to as the Pennsylvania Power and Light (PPL) plant). I’d encourage anyone who goes here to consider exploring all the trails in the park, including those that connect to two other projects that are meant to connect Susquehanna river towns together: the Susquehanna Warrior Trail and the North Branch Canal Trail. At the site you will find well marked, well maintained, mostly-graveled walking paths around both open wetlands style locales and more densely wooded stretches of terrain.

On my trip in January some of the trails were flooded out, but the maps suggest that there are some good views of the Susquehanna River when weather is nicer/land drier. I saw several heron, a couple of species of eagles, lots of songbirds (blue jays and robins and the like), squirrels, and evidence of nearby deer throughout. There are lots of bird boxes on nearby trees, many benches and trash cans, and the trails that are entirely flat so there is nothing very challenging on any of the paths (this is great for letting you focus on the surroundings).

As I alluded to, the riverlands are owned by an energy company (Talen). Because of this connection, I was repeatedly struck on my hike by the juxtaposition of the beauty of nature after the first snow against the reminders of industrial decay and nuclear power: the whole thing created a kind of post-apocalyptic, post-Cold War, sort of “sublime aesthetic” with lots evidence of nature emerging out of the human decay (think of the world in the Metro or Last of Us series of video games). Rich warm colors of the land contrasted with dim scenes of cold industrial design, the sky alternately gray and blue, the birds chirpy and active against the silent stillness of the new snow. In a news day filled with stories about nuclear programs and impending war, the sometimes surreal landscape made quite the impression. Anyway, I tried to capture some of that with these pictures. I hope you enjoy them and that they encourage you to take the hike yourself!