The Man Who Couldn't Cut the Trees

Now that Ranger Quinn's got you climbing, let me walk alongside and tell you whose mountain this is — because there's a man behind all this beauty, and he's not who you'd expect. I'm Boone Merrick, and I tell the tales out here. Here's the first one, and it's true.

His name was Robert Bruce Ricketts — Colonel Ricketts — and he was, of all things, a lumber baron. In the years after the Civil War he bought up this whole country, tens of thousands of acres of Pennsylvania mountain, and he bought it for one hard-nosed reason: the timber. Great old pines and hemlocks, worth a fortune to a man with saws and a railroad. Ricketts had both. The plan was simple and it was the plan of his whole ruthless age — cut it all, sell it all, leave the mountain bare. That's what happened to most of Pennsylvania's forests. They were stripped down to stumps as far as the eye could see.

But then the Colonel walked into this glen. He came down into these two canyons, with the water stepping down them fall after fall, under trees that had been standing five hundred years, and something happened to the hard-headed businessman. He couldn't do it. He could not put the saw to this place. So this man who owned it all, who could've turned every one of these ancient trees into cash — he left the glens standing. Uncut. He drew his loggers off, and instead of a saw crew he sent in a trail crew, to open the falls up so people could come and see them.

Think on that as you climb past these giants. Every one of these old trees is a tree a rich man decided not to sell. In an age that cut down nearly everything, one man stood in this green canyon and said: not this. Not here. And that single change of heart, a hundred and thirty years ago, is the only reason you're walking through cathedral timber today instead of a field of stumps. Quinn will show you the falls. I just wanted you to know they're a gift — and who gave them.