Cook Forest State Park

  Cook Forest will always be a special place for me. Every year my mother and father would load up our old car, packing camping supplies high on the roof. More equipment was layered on the floor in the back with a piece of plywood covering everything to make a footrest for the short legs of my two brothers, my sister, and me. Then we were off to spend two weeks camping in a leaky canvas tent, cooking marshmallows over a campfire, and hiking in the cool, shady forest. But we weren’t very good at posing for pictures!

   I think this was the last camping trip for my father. Shortly after this summer he had open heart surgery to correct damage from a bout of childhood rheumatic fever and didn’t survive the operation.

  Cook Forest has one of the largest stands of old growth forest east of the Mississippi. The Cook family settled along the Clarion River in 1828 and built a sawmill. By the 1920s Pennsylvania's forests were reduced to stubble but the Cooks had preserved about 6000 acres which was bought by the state with help from an early environmental group, the Cook Forest Association. Hiking trails wind through the forest leading to trees that stretch 150’ to the sky and have diameters of four and five feet.

   Most of the hiking trails are steeply sloped or have steps. We walked and rolled along the fire tower road which is directly across from the campground entrance. The road is hard packed dirt and gravel and pretty easy to push along. It travels through old forest with few signs of logging. The road is about 3 miles round trip. It’s better to go out and back the same way because the second half has more hills. The overlook is not accessible.

  The campground has 210 sites. The condition of the sites varies a lot. Some have gravel parking pads, others are just grass which gets very muddy. Some sites have electric hookups and one section is getting made over to have full hookups. The accessible sites in E section are excellent with concrete parking pads that extend under the accessible picnic tables and to the grills and fire rings. They’re close to the accessible restrooms.  Park