The first hunters walked through Hazleton before anyone lived there.
They were native Americans, who hunted, fished and trapped to survive.
Next, the people who settled Hazleton 200 years ago widened paths that the natives cut.
They built turnpikes to haul lumber and railroads to carry coal.
For them, hunting, fishing and trapping evolved from a means to stay alive to a pastime as Penn’s Woods changed into Penn’s Fields.
Through timbering, much of the state was deforested by the turn of the previous century.
Indiscriminate hunting and trapping thinned the mammals and birds.
Fish and insects died when mine tunnels and mine runoff polluted creeks around Hazleton.
Streets, factories and homes covered land that had been forest and farms, although people still escaped to natural areas.
Social clubs and churches held summer picnics at groves outside of Hazleton.
Miners picked berries and mushrooms to help with expenses during slowdowns such as the coal strike of 1902, but since then families have kept filling baskets as a way to enjoy the outdoors.
Despite the dangers, children swam in strip mine pits, tobogganed down culm banks on car hoods and built forts on coal land.
Hunters and anglers traveled to where they could find game and fish and even joined clubs with others who shared those pastimes.
Traditional activities such as hunting, hiking, fishing and camping retain a following in the Hazleton area, but activities such as mountain bicycling, cross-country skiing, birding, kayaking and geocaching are growing in popularity.
When people go outdoors, they spend money on gear, food, gasoline and lodging, all of which helps the economy.
Population growth and construction had been signs of a booming economy, from Hazleton’s settlement in 1807 through the 1950s when hurricanes flooded deep mines.
In the half-century since then, Hazleton residents displayed their appreciation for natural land, clean water and fresh air.
Mining rules adopted in the 1970s required companies to restore land after extracting coal.
Federal funds paid for the reclaiming of dangerous highwalls and pits left from historic mining.
In the 1980s, Hazleton area residents protested against plans of Stablex, which wanted to stabilize nuclear wastes, and an incinerator that would have burned petroleum from contaminated soil.
Bald eagles, wild turkeys and other wildlife have returned to the region in greater numbers
The discovery of rare orchids and cranberries in a bog led to a nature preserve within an industrial park in Valmont and marks a trend in preserving land for posterity.
On the Monday after Thanksgiving, Hazleton and much of Pennsylvania observe another holiday: the start of deer season.
Schools close and hunters take vacation from work in a tradition that goes back for generations.
Eugene Moisey, 63, of Kline Township said when he was in school, boys began preparing in September.
“Everybody started talking about deer hunting and the big deer they saw and were going to get,” Moisey said.
When the season started, hunters who bagged a buck tied it to their cars and drove around town to show off.
Other hunters hung their deer on front porches.
Bigger families displayed more deer for anyone driving from Hazleton through Jeanesville to see.
“Tresckow looked like a meat locker,” Moisey said.
Robert Skulsky of Hazleton still displays a deer that his father, Theodore, shot in 1939. The deer antlers had 12 or 13 points — a few are small so he isn’t sure if an official scorer would count them — and won a prize as the biggest deer at a taxidermist’s shop that season. As a reward, the taxidermist made a mount of the deer’s head for free and gave Skulsky’s father a Woolrich hunting suit.
Skulsky, himself, has been hunting in the same place since high school. He’s 71 now and said the scrub oak and heath barrens at his hunting spot haven’t changed much over the years.
Within a mile or two of his spot, coal companies have reclaimed land and made homes for more wildlife.
His grandfather, Andrew Skulsky, began hunting seasons by hiking 17 miles or catching a ride from his home in Jeanesville to the Broad Mountain in Packer Township, Carbon County.
For a week during deer season, his grandfather camped on the state game lands and hunted atop the mountain.
If his grandfather or other hunters got a deer, a milk truck driver transported the carcass to Hazleton, but the hunters still had to hike home.
Other hunters made camp in cabins owned by families or hunting clubs. Some hunters spent the season at the Hotel Mittendorf in Wyalusing.
Hunters and target shooters practiced their aim at the Hazleton Archery Club for more than half a century. The club started in 1954 and moved a decade later to 26 acres on the Woodside Road in Foster and Butler Townships where members built a clubhouse. They also maintain an outdoor range with three-dimensional targets that archers can shoot while walking through the forested trail.
On the Honeyhole Road in Drums, Rudolph Hoda remembers hitching a horse to a wagon to give hunters a ride into camps west of his family’s farm while he was growing up.
The Tamarack Hunting Club and the West Riley Mountaineers are two of the camps that he remembers.
One camp used trolley car as a clubhouse and another a Quonset hut. There were cabins and summer homes, too, until the state seized the farm to create the Nescopeck State Park.
“It was a shame they took it,” said Hoda, who wishes his family still owned the property.
Paul Stubbs, 85, of Upper Leigh grew up in White Haven where he started trapping as a 7-year-old.
Each morning before school, he checked his traps.
“It’s a good sport for youngsters. It keeps you more or less in fairly good shape,” Stubbs said.
When he was 8, Stubbs said he lucked out by trapping two minks.
Sears and Roebuck paid $37 for one pelt and $42 for the other mink.
His father then earned $40 a week for working in a factory so Stubbs sensed a career opportunity.
By trapping, he supplemented his family’s income. Selling furs and working in the summer at the White Haven Sanitarium enabled him to buy a car: a Model A Ford that he purchased used for $35. He was one of two students in his high school who owned a car, which he needed to check his ever-growing trap lines.
As a young man, after serving his country in Korea, Stubbs spent seven seasons as a trapper in Maine. Each September, he hiked 28 miles from town to his camp. He walked back to civilization a few times each winter if he needed supplies. The trip took a day, and he had to wear snowshoes.
Later he also sold trapping lures as a business.
As a boy, Stubbs remembers receiving $4 for a skunk pelt.
The pelts went to France and became artist’s brushes in those days.
Demand was lighter for raccoon. Foxes fetched a state bounty plus about $1.25 on the market.
Later, he saw the market invert. By the 1980s or 1990s, he was selling fox furs for $75 and raccoons for $40.
Stubbs thinks the higher prices, not just people’s attitudes toward trapping, helped drive fur coats and hats out of fashion.
Like prices, the populations of wildlife have fluctuated during his lifetime.
Muskrats, worth $2.50 to $3.50, were plentiful when he as a boy.
“At one time, every creek I can remember, the tiniest trickle, would have a muskrat,” Stubbs said.
Now he rarely sees muskrats.
Weasels are scarce, too.
Likewise, the ruffed grouse, the Pennsylvania state bird, is hard to find in the Commonwealth.
While he was in high school, Stubbs said grouse flew up so often that he could fire a box of shells in a day of hunting.
On the other hand, bald eagles, which he used to see while tending the Francis E. Walter Dam, his last job before retiring, have returned to the Hazleton area. They’ve been spotted in Drums and Sugarloaf and along the Susquehanna River. The birds nest in 50 of 67 counties, and the game commission took them off the state’s list of threatened species in 2014.
A forest mammal called fisher, which is in the weasel family, died out in Pennsylvania, but the game commission re-introduced the species. Their numbers and the numbers of bobcats are high enough that the game commission permits limited trapping of those two species now.
In 2016, the commission also will let trappers take river otters for the first time in 63 years. Trapping only will occur where otters are most numerous, in the state’s northeast corner. But the boundaries of the new trapping zones include the Nescopeck State Park.
For nearly a century, the Game Commission has used revenues from hunting licenses to buy land, which is set aside for hunting but also open to non-hunters for hiking and watching wildlife.
Wild turkey are more common now than a generation ago in Pennsylvania, and the Game Commission said Pennsylvania has more bears now than when European colonists arrived.
Opportunities for casting along small streams for wild brook trout, the kind of fishing that Ray Youngblood enjoys, are increasing even though anglers aren’t necessarily taking them.
“That’s old hat. People used to ply those waters with those real wary fish,” said Youngblood, 75, who lives in Hazleton and helped start the Western Pocono Chapter of Trout Unlimited 42 years ago. “Today, it’s all big water.”
When trout season opens each year, anglers gravitate to lakes and streams stocked with trout from hatcheries.
It’s standing room only along the shores of Lake Irena, an artificial lake that has remained popular at Hazle Township Community Park since it opened for fishing in 1962.
The Little Schuylkill River north of Tamaqua and the Lehigh River between White Haven and Jim Thorpe draw people fishing for trout in spring and fall. That’s when the water remains 68 degrees or colder, the temperatures that trout require.
To keep trout alive longer and maintain the Lehigh River’s levels into the summer, the Army Corps of Engineers releases water from the Francis E. Walter Dam. The Corps sets the schedule for releasing water to balance the interests of the anglers against those of kayakers and rafters who enjoy running rapids when the river flows fast and deep.
For years, anglers and the Corps have considered building a new tower with different discharge points at the Francis E. Walter Dam. That would allow the operators to release colder water from the bottom of the dam later in the summer to preserve trout longer.
Fish living in big waters like the Lehigh have more access to food and more hiding places so they feel secure compared with wild trout that survive in smaller streams.
“Small-stream fish are predators all the time. They have their eyes open,” Youngblood said.
Small streams contain small fish. An 8-inch wild trout feels like a trophy to Youngblood, but their wariness adds a challenge to anglers who pursue them.
The Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission became more aware of streams containing wild trout after obtaining grants to hire biologists and colleges to take surveys for the wily fish.
In 2015, the commission designated 211 more stretches of water as wild trout streams, including five sections of the Little Schuylkill River in Schuylkill County and Luzerne County’s Coal Creek in Plymouth.
Dreck’s Creek below the reservoir near Hazleton and Still Creek above the reservoir of the same name north of McAdoo also support wild trout, Youngblood said, citing a mailing he recently received from Trout Unlimited.
When Youngblood, who grew up in Wilkes-Barre Township, moved to Hazleton he thought mines would have killed all the streams. He didn’t expect to find many who shared his interest in fishing.
He said he was wrong on both counts.
Faded issues of the “Pennsylvania Angler” attest to the success of earlier anglers from Hazleton.
Charles Mozer of Hazleton landed a brown trout that was 26 inches long and weighed six pounds while fishing in the Lehigh River, the magazine reported in July 1932.
The same issue said a husband and wife, Mr. and Mrs. J. Washko of North Laurel Street in Hazleton caught two brown trout that weighed a combined 7 pounds, 2 ounces in Bear Creek.
Historically, Hazleton residents fished for trout along Quakake Creek in Hudsondale, Hayes Creek near Freeland and the Nescopeck Creek.
Those creeks continue to yield trout, despite the perils that mining poses.
On the Quakake Creek, a mine outfall deadened a section of water, but trout still thrive from the source to Route 93.
The public, however, hasn’t been able to fish there since about the 1970s, said Youngblood, who joined the Ochre Mill fishing club 30 years ago to gain access to the stream. Ochre Mill’s founder, Niles Grover was an air squadron commander in World War II who later flew cargo planes. He tended a grass runway on his property, which he also maintained for hunting and fishing.
Hayes Creek starts north of Freeland amid an interchange of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and fast food restaurants, yet still supports wild trout.
Youngblood owns a report from 1904 by the Department of Fisheries, the forerunner of the Fish and Boat Commission, that praises a state fish warden, Hugh Malloy of Freeland, who fished Hayes Creek, as completely fearless.
The report recounts an incident in which Malloy told a friend to open his creel basket or else he would come in the stream after him. Finding four undersized fish in the basket, Malloy fined his friend $40.
A notice from the Standard-Speaker’s 110 years ago column published on May 27, 2014 also mentioned Malloy.
He caught a 22-inch trout in Hayes Creek and gave it to Gov. Samuel Pennypacker.
“Incredibly, there are still fish like that in the creek. I’ve seen them,” Youngblood said.
The Nescopeck Creek in Drums remains a popular fishing spot. The commission stocks trout in the Nescopeck and in Lake Frances at the nearby Nescopeck State Park.
Mine water from the Jeddo Tunnel, however, kills all life in the Nescopeck at the confluence with the Little Nescopeck Creek.
“The Jeddo Tunnel in 1894 was completed. I always wondered what the farmers throughout Sugarloaf and Conyngham felt the morning they woke up and found they couldn’t use the water any more to water their livestock,” Youngblood said.
The Jeddo Tunnel drains mines from throughout the Hazleton Area.
More than 120 years after its construction, the tunnel still discharges about 37,000 gallons of water per minute, the largest source of mine water in Pennsylvania.
The water is more acidic than tomato juice and contains iron and manganese.
Peter Haentjens, who studied what to do with the tunnel as executive director of Eastern Middle Anthracite Region Recovery Inc., said the amount of water involved makes a treatment plant prohibitively expensive.
Diverting water before it reaches the tunnel isn’t feasible either because 75 percent of the flow enters as groundwater.
“Probably the most practical plan is to raise the alkalinity. Drop the metals out. The stream will come back to the life,” said Haentjens, who has proposed the tunnel as a source of hydroelectric and geothermal power.
Waiting for nature to purify the tunnel water might take 100 years, he said.
An easier problem to solve exists along the Catawissa Creek.
A flood damaged a limestone treatment system on the Catawissa at Audenried, but “it won’t be hard to get that up and running,” Haentjens said.
The Catawissa Creek Restoration Association already treated water in Eagle Rock Resort so Lake Choctaw supports fish.
Water quality improved elsewhere.
While the Lehigh River has become a destination for trout fishing, a professor who studied the water a century ago wrote: “At Slatington, there appears to be as little fish in the river and other forms of life also are scarce,” Youngblood said while quoting from one of the reports in his collection.
The Lackawanna River, once considered a sewer, has become such a good fishery that Trout Unlimited held its national convention along its banks in Scranton in 2015.
The state’s premier bass fishery, the Susquehanna River, has problems.
While growing up, Youngblood fished for smallmouth bass in the Susquehanna near Vosburg, Wyoming County. His family saved money from picking blueberries to rent a cabin at a camp where the owner kept 1,000-pound boats for customers.
The northern stretches of the Susquehanna remain good enough for bass fishing that fishing guides still operate there.
In the western and southern reaches of the river, however, young bass have been dying off at high rates for a decade. Male bass show female traits, and the executive director of the fish commission was in a boat when his friend caught a cancerous bass. The commission and environmental agencies from Pennsylvania and other states in the Susquehanna’s watershed are devising remedies for the problem. Scientists are evaluating how the Susquehanna is affected by runoff from manure and fertilizer on farms, by medicines flushed into sewers and by invasions of algae that reduce oxygen levels. The water also is becoming warmer and more acidic, researchers have found.
Hazletonians also fish for bass in regional lakes.
“You name it. I’ve probably fished it,” Robert Skulsky said while listing some bass fisheries: Lake Lackawanna, Lily Lake, Brady’s Lake, Tobyhanna Lake and Beltzville Lake.
Beltzville is a man-made lake large enough to operate motor boats in a state park of the same name.
For decades, regional business and government leaders advocated a plan to create lakes of the same scale by damming the Nescopeck Creek at the Nescopeck State Park.
A plan to preserve the natural areas rather than to flood them prevailed. Now the Nescopeck State Park is noted for its environmental education program, fields where woodcocks put on an aerial show during their mating rituals in the spring and trails that circle a smaller lake, pond and forests.
In decades past, a bonfire and mug of hot cocoa fought off the chill and let skaters return to the ice at Hazle Park, where Hazleton residents skated even after the amusement rides closed there.
Skaters also met at Lake Irena, which remains popular for ice fishing.
The Hazleton Fire Department converted the street hockey rink at the Beech Street Playground and the soccer field at the Pine Street Playground for ice skating during a few winters around 2000.
Nearby, Sugarloaf, Freeland, Conyngham and other towns also put down temporary rinks, usually on ballfields in the 2000s.
Racers have competed on snowshoes in events at the Nescopeck State Park, where the trails also suit cross-country skiers.
Whitetail Preserve in Black Creek Township hosted winter biathlons, pairing snowshoe racing with target shooting.
Alpine skiers glide downhill at resorts for which the Poconos are famous, but also find ski trails as close to Hazleton as Eagle Rock Resort.
Cove Village in Zion Grove formerly operated a ski area.
Norb Kotzer of West Hazleton started skiing on a rope tow at Split Rock Lodge when he was 14.
He is 79 now, has skied from Camelback to Colorado and won national championships for his age group in the NASTAR Ski Racing Series.
His first pair of skis were wooden boards with a leather strap wrapped over his boots.
“You fell, and the ski went with you,” Kotzer recalled.
Now his parabolic skis turn more effortlessly, his boots click into bindings and his clothing is warmer and lighter.
Ski areas also improved at making snow and getting skiers up the mountain.
Big Boulder and Elk Mountain opened before he started skiing and moved skiers upslope with chairlifts and T-bars by his first visits.
“I don’t think anybody has T-bars anymore,” Kotzer said.
Children, of course, didn’t need skis or lifts to go fast over the snow.
Some Freelanders remember when Yale Street closed to motorists and opened to sledders.
Generations of youngsters have barreled down hills at the Valley Country Club, the old Cranberry Ballfield and the Heights-Terrace Elementary Middle School on sleds, toboggans and inner tubes.
Thomas Ogorzalek recalls sliding down coal banks on car hoods.
He and his friends piled on for a ride that they couldn’t steer or stop.
“When I think about it today, we were crazy to do it,” he said.
Ogorzalek became intrigued by the woods and coal lands around Hazleton as boy when his father brought home a collection of topographic maps. He started walking to places on the maps, but in the 1970s he bought a bicycle and extended his range.
While riding backroads and dirt trails to Sheppton, Weatherly, Humboldt, Tomhicken and elsewhere, he seldom saw another bicyclist.
Ogorzalek was, perhaps, 80 years late.
In the 1890s, the Associated Wheelmen of Hazleton built bicycle paths for their own enjoyment.
Riders paid a subscription fee to use the paths, and the association negotiated rights-of-way with coal companies, University of Vermont Professor Robert McCullough, writes in his 2015 book, “Old Wheelways: Traces of Bicycle History on the Land.”
Some riders pedaled high-wheelers with large front wheels and smaller rear wheels. Others rode safety bicycles, which look more like today’s cycles, with the same sized wheels in front and back.
A mining engineer, Louis O. Emmerich, and crew foreman Anthony Payne, supervised construction of trail between Hazleton and Eckley. Laborers cut forests and blasted rock to carve a trail 6 feet wide that they covered with clay and gravel and compressed with a 3-ton roller, McCullough wrote.
An undated newspaper article in the collection of the Greater Hazleton Historical Society said A.E. Dick, following Emmerich’s direction, built the first trail from Hazleton, up the No. 6 Hill and through woods to Beaver Brook and Audenried.
McCullough said the first trail, about 1.5 miles connected Audenried and Jeanesville and the second stretched 3 miles between Audenried and Hazleton.
The trail between Eckley and Hazleton, built in 1898, ran for seven miles. Cyclists enjoyed the scenery of the elevated path, which ascended a mountain ridge above Ebervale before looping down to Eckley. On summer nights, the bicyclists rode by lamplight, McCullough said.
On Broad Street in Hazleton, authorities posted a speed limit of 8 mph to curb reckless bicycling in 1896, although bicycles remained novel enough that the historical society’s article listed the owners by name.
Stephen D. Engle, a jeweler most famous for inventing a clock that also showed movements of planets and historical scenes, also built a bicycle of wood in the 1870s. It weighed about 100 pounds.
Percy Haydon, son of mine and ironworks operator in Jeanesville, owned the first high-wheeler in the area.
Charles Wilde won a 1-mile race in Bloomsburg in 1885 and then rode and pushed his high-wheeler home to Hazleton.
Bicyclists in Hazleton once raced on a half-mile track on land of the Diamond Coal Land Co. in the city’s northwest.
More than a century later, racers are circuiting a BMX or bicycle motocross course at Louis Schiavo Park on the Hazleton South Beltway. The Tri-Area Recreation Authority opened the BMX course in 2008. Riders as young as 5 don full-face helmets and zoom down a starting gate onto the dirt track that rolls up and down bumps and whips through hairpin turns.
Mountain bicyclists ride the D&L Trail through the Lehigh Gorge between Jim Thorpe and a new section in Mountain Top. They attack more challenging trails on public lands in Mocanaqua, Moon Lake State Park, gamelands like the Broad Mountain near Jim Thorpe, and the Moosic Mountain Preserve where the Hubbard Bike Club built trails with The Nature Conservancy in 2008.
In his book, McCullough writes that the path between Hazleton and Eckley might be one of the nation’s most enduring bicycle corridors. A survey, he said, would be needed to determine what sections that remain today were part of the trail built by the Associated Wheelmen, or of trails developed by groups in Freeland and Jeddo or of roads established by coal companies.
Ogorzalek, who volunteers to help develop the Hazleton rail trail where he still bicycles and skis, said he would like to follow the historic route when extending the trail to Eckley. The actual route, he said, will depend on where the Civic Partnership can obtain rights-of-way.
Another preserve on donated land abuts an abandoned stretch of the Delaware, Susquehanna and Schuylkill Railroad where the Greater Hazleton Civic Partnership developed a 6-mile trail in 2005.
Before the trail opened, a feasibility study said outdoor recreation would entice college graduates to stay in Hazleton and encourage businesses to open.
Now 40,000 visitors a year come to the trail to walk dogs, hike, bicycle, run and ski.
Robert Skulsky, the executive director of the civic partnership, said people are more apt to use a trail if it is within a mile or two of where they live or work.
Building the trail required help, and volunteers started walking possible routes in the late 1990s.
Thomas Ogorzalek, whose company, Butler Enterprises, donated 119 acres for the preserve along the trail, said Highway Equipment loans him an excavator whenever he needs to fix drainage along the trail.
Last spring, students at Hazleton Area High School and workers from American Eagle and Coal Contractors planted trees along the trail.
Trail builders overcame obstacles.
When terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001 raised fears that others would defile public water sources like the Dreck’s Creek Reservoir along the trail, the partnership built a fence between the trail and the reservoir. Skulsky pointed out that hikers visiting the trail throughout the day might spot trouble faster than security guards who patrol less frequently. Leaders of the Hazleton City Authority that owns the reservoir dropped their reservations and now support the trail.
The partnership also built a bridge in May 2015 so the trail can cross a rail line of Norfolk Southern.
Planners are adjusting the route to accommodate residents of Hazlebrook who don’t want the trail so near homes and planning to bypass a grove of hemlocks where the northern flying squirrel, an endangered species, might live.
As Skulsky and others envision it, the trail eventually will cover 16 miles. Starting at the current trailhead on East Broad Street, the trail will split at Stockton Junction. One leg roughly following a century-old bicycle route will reach Eckley Miner’s Village, a state museum. The other leg will hit the Lehigh River and connect to the trail of the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor, which runs 165 miles between Bucks County and Mountain Top and is scheduled to reach Wilkes-Barre.
The Lehigh Gorge State Park is part of the D&L Trail. In the gorge, hikers, bicyclists and skiers can cover 26 miles between White Haven and Jim Thorpe. Rafters and kayakers navigate the river, which also is popular for trout fishing.
Megan Fedor, a state park naturalist, leads hikes through the gorge and two related state parks, Hickory Run and Nescopeck. Her group gathers a few times each month from spring to fall, tries a different trail each hike and covers more than 40 miles each year.
At two other state parks near Hazleton, Tuscarora and Locust Lake, the parks’ naturalist Robin Tracey also guides hikers on regular outings. Dennis “Pap” Knauss built a trail that he calls the Spirit of Tuscarora because it meanders through most of that park’s natural features: the lake, stream beds, mountain laurel, clearings, hills and evergreen forests.
Boy Scouts have fewer places to hike on private land than they did when Wayne Oberst became scoutmaster of Troop 207 in Conyngham in 1958.
“With all the lawsuits, a lot of people shut their land to us, and I can’t blame them,” Oberst said.
The Scouts still find miles to hike on public lands in Pennsylvania, said Oberst while naming the Loyalsock, Donut Hole and Appalachian trails.
When the troop members hit the trails, sometimes practicing for 50-mile hikes that they take most summers, the pathways aren’t as crowded as Oberst remembers.
“I notice a lot less people using the outdoors than there used to be, and it’s a shame. It’s beautiful out there,” he said.