The Poconos, on foot

Begin with the place. The Poconos — a 2,400-square-mile glaciated section of the Allegheny Plateau in northeastern Pennsylvania, lifted to 1,500–2,200 feet above the surrounding lowlands. The last continental ice sheet stalled here. When it pulled back, it left kettle bogs, glacial lakes, and a flora that belongs further north — tamarack, Atlantic white cedar, sundew, pitcher plant, sphagnum hummocks. The bioregion holds a piece of southern Canada at the latitude of Philadelphia. The walk that follows is what visiting that piece feels like.

↓ begins with

Drive to the Tannersville Cranberry Bog visitor entrance. Step onto the 700-foot boardwalk and walk out into 10,000 years of accumulated sphagnum. The Nature Conservancy manages this place; the boardwalk is the only safe access. Look for tamarack at the bog's edges, leatherleaf in the open mat, sundew and pitcher plant near your feet, and Atlantic white cedar where the substrate turns from bog to fen. National Natural Landmark since 1974. This single site is the bioregion's clearest answer to the question 'what is the Poconos?' — a piece of subarctic ecology held in suspension by the plateau's cold air.

↓ is managed by

Tannersville's tour access is operated by the Pocono Heritage Land Trust, the bioregion's southern-half land trust since 1985. Their office in Henryville is fifteen minutes east. Stop in if it's a weekday; they're the kind of small, sustained institution the directory's substrate ratings depend on. Forty years of conservation easements, preserve management, tour leadership for places like Tannersville. The bog isn't safe to walk on without escort — and the institution providing the escort is the institution that has earned the bioregion's trust to do it.

↓ partners with

Drive south to the Brodhead Creek. Park anywhere along Henryville's stretch and walk down to the water. This is the cradle of American fly fishing — Theodore Gordon worked these waters in the 1890s, adapting English dry-fly techniques to American freestone streams. Wild brook trout still hold here. The Brodhead Watershed Association, founded 1989, is the watchdog: 30+ citizen-science monitoring sites, riparian-buffer restoration, hellbender stewardship with PA Fish & Boat. A wild-trout stream is an integrating signal for everything upstream — temperature, sediment, oxygen, base flow. The Brodhead's remaining wild trout means the substrate is, for now, intact.

↓ is monitored by

Drive west to Long Pond. Pocono Organics sits on 260 acres next to Pocono Raceway — one of the largest Regenerative Organic Certified farms in the northeast. Founded 2017 by Ashley Walsh; Rodale Institute is the agronomic research partner. The café and market are open year-round. Eat lunch here. The farm is the bioregion's working test of whether the highest-tier regenerative certification can succeed on Pocono Plateau soil — short season, acidic soil, stony till. So far, it can.

↓ is partnered with

Drive south into Hickory Run State Park. Walk the half-mile trail to the Boulder Field. Step out onto sixteen acres of frost-shattered sandstone boulders, packed three feet deep, with no soil and almost no plants. The boulder field is *periglacial* — formed at the edge of the continental ice sheet, in tundra that ran south of the glacier itself. Freeze-thaw cycles cracked the bedrock; meltwater swept the blocks into this basin. National Natural Landmark since 1967. Most periglacial boulder fields have grown over by forest. This one persists because the boulders are too tightly packed for soil to accumulate. Stand on it and you are standing on a 20,000-year-old surface unchanged since the Pleistocene.

↓ lies adjacent to

Drive northwest to Ricketts Glen. Walk the Falls Trail — 7.2 miles past 21 named waterfalls along Kitchen Creek. The trail descends 1,000 feet from the plateau into Ganoga Glen and Glen Leigh, then climbs back. The forest you walk through includes *old-growth eastern hemlock* — some trees 500+ years old. They survived the 19th-century logging boom because the gorges were too steep to log economically. Now they're surviving the hemlock woolly adelgid because PA DCNR is treating the highest-value individual trees with systemic insecticide. The Glens Natural Area is one of the last full instances of the bioregion's native forest type still standing. Walk slowly. This is the reference.

↓ anchors

Drive east to the Delaware Water Gap. Park at Resort Point Overlook on the Pennsylvania side. Walk to the rim and look across the 1,300-foot gap where the Delaware River cut through Kittatinny Ridge. Mount Tammany on the New Jersey side; Mount Minsi on the Pennsylvania side; the longest undammed river east of the Mississippi between them. The 70,000-acre National Recreation Area exists because of the failed Tocks Island Dam — a federal mega-project that condemned 600 farms, never got built, and left the cleared land to become the park. The bioregion's eastern boundary is held by federal trust. Stand at the rim; the river works exactly the way it has for the last several million years.

↓ is held by

End with the people whose ground this is. *Pocono* is Lenape — variously translated as 'a stream between two mountains,' or 'a place between two mountains.' The Lenape lived here for over 10,000 years before colonization; the bioregion's place names, the trails the highways follow, the fishing weirs in the rivers, the medicinal plants noted by every European naturalist who walked the plateau — Lenape inheritance, learned from people, mostly unattributed in the records that followed. The Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania (state-recognized 2009) is the present-day continuity. The directory commits to the Lenape continuity layer being part of the Pocono entries as that work is verified through institutional contacts. The walk closes with a debt the directory acknowledges and intends to honor.