Place

Hickory Run State Park

Also known as: Hickory Run, Hickory Run Boulder Field

A 15,990-acre Pennsylvania state park on the southwestern edge of the Pocono Plateau in Carbon County, established 1945 from CCC-era purchases. The park's signature feature is the Hickory Run Boulder Field — a 16-acre periglacial boulder pavement, designated a National Natural Landmark in 1967, formed during the Wisconsinan glaciation when freeze-thaw cycles cracked surrounding sandstone and meltwater swept the boulders into a dense lobe at the foot of a former lake basin. The park also holds 44 miles of trails, three CCC-built lakes, and substantial hemlock-hardwood forest.

What it is

Hickory Run is the largest state park in the southern Poconos and one of the most-visited in Pennsylvania. The park encompasses a mosaic of:

The Boulder Field — 16 acres of frost-shattered sandstone boulders, mostly 4 to 8 feet across, packed densely enough to walk across; effectively no soil, no plants. National Natural Landmark (1967).
44 miles of hiking trails — through hemlock-hardwood forest, along Hickory Run, Sand Spring Run, and Mud Run
Three lakes — Sand Spring Lake (swimming), Hickory Run Lake, the smaller pond. All built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s.
Hawk Falls — a 25-foot cascade on Hawk Run
Historic CCC infrastructure — pavilions, cabins, stonework from the 1930s federal-employment programs

The Boulder Field

The boulder field is the Pocono region‘s most-photographed geological feature, but its real interest is what it preserves: a periglacial landscape, formed at the edge of (not under) the continental ice sheet. During the Wisconsinan glaciation, the boulder field’s location lay just south of the ice margin, in a permanently frozen tundra zone. Freeze-thaw cycles in the surrounding sandstone bedrock split rock into blocks; meltwater and solifluction (slow downslope flow of water-saturated soil) swept the blocks into the basin where they sit now, packed three feet deep.

Most periglacial boulder fields in the eastern U.S. have been overgrown by forest. Hickory Run’s persists because the boulders are too tightly packed for soil to accumulate. It’s a 20,000-year-old landscape preserved as if frozen in time.

Why it’s listed

Public state parks are the durable substrate-protection layer in any bioregion — they outlast funding cycles, ownership changes, and political shifts in a way that private conservation usually doesn’t. Hickory Run protects 16,000 acres of the Pocono southwestern flank in perpetuity, including substantial mature hemlock forest. The CCC-built infrastructure is itself a piece of national heritage.

Bioregional fit

Hickory Run anchors the Pocono Plateau‘s southwestern corner where the plateau drops toward the Lehigh River gorge. It connects ecologically to the Lehigh Gorge State Park (immediately south) and forms part of the broader protected-land matrix that holds the bioregion’s southern edge.

Sources

PA DCNR Hickory Run State Park public materials
National Natural Landmark Program designation file
Sevon, W.D., The Hickory Run Boulder Field: Pennsylvania Geological Survey (technical description of formation)

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Scientific

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Poconos home of the Hickory Run Boulder Field, a 16-acre periglacial National Natural Landmark

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