Ricketts Glen State Park is a Pennsylvania state park on 13,193 acres in Columbia, Luzerne, and Sullivan counties. It is a National Natural Landmark known for its old-growth forest and 24 named waterfalls along Kitchen Creek. The park offers hiking, ten cabins, camping, horseback riding, and hunting. In 1999 Hurricane Floyd briefly closed the park and downed thousands of trees.
About Ricketts Glen State Park in brief
Ricketts Glen State Park is a Pennsylvania state park on 13,193 acres in Columbia, Luzerne, and Sullivan counties. It is a National Natural Landmark known for its old-growth forest and 24 named waterfalls along Kitchen Creek. The park offers hiking, ten cabins, camping, horseback riding, and hunting. The Glens Natural Area has eight named waterfalls in Glen Leigh and ten in Ganoga Glen, these come together at Waters Meet. In 1999 Hurricane Floyd briefly closed the park and downed thousands of trees; helicopter logging protected the ecosystem while harvesting lumber worth nearly USD 7 million. The Benton Air Force Station, a Cold War radar installation in the park, operated from 1951 to 1975 and still serves as airport radar for nearby Wilkes-Barre and as the Red Rock Job Corps Center. It was named an Important Bird Area by the Pennsylvania Audubon Society and is an Important Mammal Area too. Ricketts Glen is in Pennsylvania, where humans have lived since at least 10000 BC. The first settlers in the state were Paleo-Indian nomadic hunters known from their stone tools. The hunter-gatherers of the Archaic period, which lasted locally from 7000 to 1000 BC, used a greater variety of more sophisticated stone artifacts. The earliest recorded inhabitants of the park were the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks, who lived in villages of large longhouses, but their numbers were greatly reduced by disease and warfare with the Five Nations of New York.
The Iroquois had a strong confederacy which gave them a strong power beyond their numbers, which left them in the void by the end of the 19th century. They also lived in what is now the New York state of New Jersey, where they had a matriarchal stockal stock. The land was once home to Native Americans, but by 1675 their numbers had died out, and they moved away or been moved into other tribes. The park is in the Susanna River drainage basin, which is now in Sullivan County and Columbia County, and is in five townships: Sugarloaf, Fairmount, Ross, Colley and Davidson, and Colley & Davidson. It has four rock formations from the Devonian and Carboniferous periods and is home to a wide variety of plants and animals. It also has a new dam for the 245-acre Lake Jean, the breaching of two other dams Ricketts built, trail modifications, and a fire tower. In winter there is cross-country skiing, ice fishing, canoeing and kayaking on the lake, and ice climbing on the frozen falls. The state park was named one of the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources and its Bureau of State Parks as one of \”25 Must-See Pennsylvania State Parks\”. It was opened in 1944 and fully opened by the state in 1942 and is on the Allegheny Front escarpment from Allegheny Plateau to the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians.
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This page is based on the article Ricketts Glen State Park published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 03, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
