A spine of trails runs through Northeast Pennsylvania.
People walk, bike and hike on the spine. It is surrounded by communities with conserved land, state parks, and forests and city and county parks with more paths.
The D&L, D&H and Heritage trails run from the New York/Pennsylvania border to near Philadelphia in Bristol.
The trails preserve the past. Walkers meander down repurposed railbeds where steam engines once ran. They bike along rivers where coal breakers once stood on their shores and paddle down waterways where barges floated anthracite to larger metropolises.
The trails provide a different purpose with a similar economic driver for those once industrial communities that helped fuel the country’s industrial revolution.
"We have a lot of examples across Pennsylvania about what a trail through a community can do to the economy,” said Cindy Adams Dunn, Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources (DCNR) Secretary.
Pennsylvania is home to 6,100 local parks, totaling 195,000 acres; 20 state forests spread across 2.2 million acres; 124 state parks; and 12 heritage areas, six of which have national designations, according to DCNR. And across those public lands are miles and miles and miles of trails, both on land and water.
In 2023, outdoor recreation contributed $19 billion to Pennsylvania’s economy, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. The industry supports over 168,000 jobs statewide.
Those numbers are felt in Northeast Pennsylvania.
"Once you see the trail developed, and in communities where the trail has been developed, it's a huge shift from people that wanted a fence put up along their property at first, and then a couple months into the trail being opened, coming back and asking for a gate to be put in or breaking down pieces of that fence,” said Liz Rosencrans, Director of Trails & Conservation for the Delaware & Lehigh National Heritage Corridor Inc.
Pennsylvania supports the growing industry. In 2022, Nathan Reigner was hired as Director of Outdoor Recreation. Under Governor Josh Shapiro, the state added an Office of Outdoor Recreation. Last May, Shapiro launched Pennsylvania’s new tourism brand – “the Great American Getaway” – from PNC Field in Moosic to promote the Keystone State’s outdoor amenities. He spent Memorial Day at Lake Wallenpaupack.
The pandemic bolstered Pennsylvania’s outdoor recreation economy.
Dunn said businesses in trail towns often survive because of visitors to the trails. From there, gear shops begin popping up. Many small stores near state parks and trails were able to weather the pandemic because of the increase in outdoor recreation.
"The COVID pandemic was a good indication to us, and the world really, about how essential time in the outdoors really is," she said. "People flocked to the outdoors during the pandemic; they needed that time in nature for mental health, physical health, to be with family or to get away from family."
Equipment sales spiked. Bike purchases were up by 121%, camping gear by 30% and kayaks by 85%, according to the state.
Rail paths to foot paths
In the 1960s, rail corridors were closing at an increasingly rapid pace across America, according to the Rails to Trails Conservancy. A movement began in the Midwest to convert those corridors into paths for recreation. Wisconsin was the first state to transform an abandoned rail corridor into a trail in the late 1960s.
There are now more than 25,000 miles of rail-trails nationwide, according to the conservancy.
The Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor is a nonprofit organization that was formed in 1988. It’s both a national and state heritage area. The trail, called the D&L, runs through Luzerne, Carbon, Northampton, Lehigh and Bucks counties. The trail segments in the Northeast are in the corridor’s Anthracite Region.
“So we preserve, interpret and leverage the 165-mile historic transportation route that transported goods from Wilkes-Barre to Bristol along the Delaware and Lehigh canals and railroads that fueled the Industrial Revolution,” said Rosencrans.
The nonprofit awarded $11,074 in Trail Town Event & Amenity funds in 2024, said Alice Wanamaker, Economic Development Manager. Those grants resulted in $77,523 into local communities in projects such as benches, bike racks and gardens and events like bike rides and running events.
The D&L is not yet complete. There are gaps near Wilkes-Barre and Jim Thorpe. More than 30 landowners actively develop and maintain the trail.
"We're hoping by 2035 those gaps will be closed. That timeline is considering that every grant that we work with landowners to apply for is awarded the first time, which isn't always the case," said Rosencrans.
Once complete, it will be the longest trail in Pennsylvania, she said.
"It becomes a community asset. First and foremost, it's the place where you're going with your neighbor for a walk into town. You're walking your dog, maybe you're even walking your kids to school along this trail. And it's majority community use ... but then it also brings in some tourism," she said.
The Schuylkill River Trail is a multi-use path that runs a similar course over abandoned railroad lines. Once complete, it will extend 120 miles from Frackville to Philadelphia.
Nancy Ross is the late founder of the Rail-Trail Council of Northeastern Pennsylvania. She took part in a feasibility study with the National Park Service in the late 1980s, said Lynn Conrad, the council’s executive director. The park service was studying all of the abandoned rail beds in the state.
What the study found was that the D&H was unique. Unlike the D&L trail, which runs through property owned by different people and organizations, the D&H corridor had a single owner.
"They found that this was most feasible as development into a rail trail because it was intact, one owner. And you know, not a whole lot of problems in between," said Conrad.
The Rail-Trail Council of Northeastern Pennsylvania was formed 36 years ago.
The Delaware & Hudson railroad was built in 1870, said Conrad. Since 1998, the council has owned the entire railbed – 38 miles in Susquehanna and Wayne counties.
People were hesitant at first about the trail, said Conrad. But now realtors use it to attract new homeowners to the region.
“We did a survey last fall, which blew us away at the amount of people that were on the trail … We interviewed 102 people, and of those 102, 30% … were from totally out of the area, not even Scranton, Wilkes-Barre or Binghamton, but further than that,” said Conrad. “And 19%, almost 20%, stayed overnight to use the trail. And we do have figures of how much money they spent, so we really were surprised.”
Conrad’s goal is to keep the railroad alive.
"There are 18 signs that tell the history of the railroad or the towns it went through," she said.
There’s an old steel-bodied caboose outside the council’s headquarters and near its trailhead in Union Dale. It once ran on the D&H.
The trail is almost complete. The rail-trail council is working on two projects this year.
Connecting trails
The D&H, together with the Lackawanna Heritage Valley Authority’s Heritage Trail, forms the Lackawanna Greenway. The Heritage Trail runs mostly along the Lackawanna River from Carbondale to Taylor in Lackawanna County. It’s not and will not be all continuous, some parts will always meander through towns like Carbondale and Olyphant, which presents another opportunity to get people visiting Northeast Pennsylvania’s small towns.
The plan is eventually to end the trail in Pittston, and soon it will finally extend it into Luzerne County.
Duryea Borough recently purchased an over 160-acre site and is working with the (LHVA) to create a formal 2.5-mile loop trail through the borough’s wetlands between Stephensen Street and Coxton Road.
When the Susquehanna River rises, it pushes the Lackawanna back and covers the area, creating the wetlands. It’s a prime area for not just biking and hiking, but also fishing.
Above the wetlands and up a mountain is the iconic Campbell’s Ledge. The Trust for Public Land (TPL), a national private nonprofit conservation organization, received state and federal grants and has the option to purchase and preserve the area for outdoor recreation.
Duryea’s manager, Carolyn Santee, hopes the trail projects will reinvigorate the small borough.
State attention
The state has a goal to have a park and trail within 10 minutes of every Pennsylvanian, said Dunn. Cities, like Scranton, and organizations, like TPL, are already working towards that goal.
Most of the local trail projects wouldn’t be possible without state or even federal funding.
"Our staff in that bureau provides technical assistance and outreach to help communities plan for and create those opportunities," she said. "Oftentimes, our grants are the first building block of an opportunity to build a trail.”
The D&L, the D&H and the Heritage Trail are just three of the many examples of people, often volunteers, working around the region to get people outdoors, whether it be on foot, on bike or even snowmobile or ATV.
"One of the best things about Pennsylvania, we have natural features, mountains and rivers — 83,000 miles of rivers — mountain ranges across the state," said Dunn. “What we find is time outdoors in nature, whether it's more passive, like really just sitting in nature, reading a book in nature, to walking, and especially walking, is helpful in mental health, physical health, and frankly, our economy as well.”
Watch the full Keystone Edition Reports episode Monday at 7 p.m., see link below.
