Potter County

It was really interesting to hear that and to hear the justification behind it.

And again, we're very thankful that we have that block of forested lands, managed lands, additional lands to the south there in southern Potter County and beyond, really.

We are concerned that there's Lights are just getting cheaper and cheaper to purchase.

And I think it was Ben that mentioned, I mean, the LED lights, they're bluer, whiter, which impacts the night sky more so than the warm glow, the softer lights that I personally enjoy more.

Well, it kind of came to me as well.

We moved up to the Hinterlands in central Pennsylvania, Potter County.

And if you've ever been there, it is remote.

Like I grew up outside Philadelphia, so I knew none of this part of Pennsylvania.

Yeah, well, kind of getting to Hershey.

Now, this is in the 80s, too, so it was a little bit different.

But point is, we moved up to Potter County, and I couldn't believe it.

And you could feel the remoteness.

That should be out this coming Thursday.

and then right after we killed on that Friday night, September 11th, September 12th, I drove up to Potter County, Pennsylvania, and was filming an elk hunt for about 11 days, so that was something I've always, always wanted to experience, and man, it was definitely something that I'm pretty sure I'm gonna be going back there every year to create a video, because it was just so dang cool, and we've truthfully we didn't experience like the best week of elk hunting either they were like dude this is super slow this week but i i still had a blast because i filmed some elk hunts out west before but there's just like nothing like here in an elk in your whole like in your home state now i've been to benazit plenty of times and like heard elk bugle and seen the elk but actually to like be a part of a hunt for them in pennsylvania dude it was just it was awesome it was awesome

Let's expand upon that a little bit more because I've been elk hunting out west and I've talked to a ton of people.

I've had a couple of people on the show talking about Pennsylvania elk hunting.

All right.

The last one is known as the Potter County Nondescript.

And it's a monster... formed in real time.

So on April 21st, 1897, readers of the Potter Enterprise encountered the beginning of one of Pennsylvania's strangest newspaper monster stories.

During the encounter, it allegedly made an enormous leap, estimated at roughly 25 to 30 feet.

And now the monster had a name.

The newspaper referred to it as the Potter County Nondescript.

What changed in seven days was that the April 21st story began with an unnamed fisherman.

Obviously, if there's less light pollution, you're more prone to seeing what's going on up there.

But there's not terrible many stories I've ever heard of Potter County, Pennsylvania, having the same sort of preponderance of UFO reports.

And so I've always associated, well, obviously, Annapolis and the Beltway, you're close to the centers of power and anything monitoring us would be aware of that, you would figure.

Mm-hmm.

And I think I've shared with you as well, the first time I saw a bald eagle in the wild, how I was, I couldn't, I couldn't really contemplate how large it was.

'Cause I was, I was up in Potter County, that northern tier of which I spoke earlier.

God's country.

Yep.

That's true.

Bigness.

[laughs] Yeah, we mentioned Potter County earlier.

Um, have you guys heard of the Potter County Nondescript?

Well, it's weird because like.

So from the big woods where I hunt, like in Potter County with Ethan, it's about three and a half hour drive, four hour drive up there.

And then my parents are kind of like in between at their camp that they have.

And like the temp drop between here and my parents, then my parents up to Ethan's is like, it's, it's drastic.

So we're gonna go on to our next story now.

In this story, this is a, a woman who lived in, uh, Potter County, Pennsylvania, which is, I don't know, what about hou- 100, 200 miles from here.

Her name was, uh, Martha, and she's a grandmother, and she was, um, finishing up baking a bread one evening in October.

And it was, you know, a typical October evening.

We start in a bark camp.

Tobias was 17 in the summer of 1898, and he was peeling hemlock bark for wages and board on a branch of Kettle Creek in Potter County.

Bark was the reason the hemlock got cut.

The tanneries needed it for the tannin, and the bark only slips off the log clean from about May into August while the sap's running.

Crews peeled it for the tanneries and left the logs lying on the hillsides to rot.

When the pine ran out, the companies went back for the hemlock itself and built logging railroads up the hollows to get at it.

Towns like Cross Fork in Potter County went from a few houses to a couple of thousand people inside of 10 years, and back to almost nothing when the mill shut down.

The men who did the cutting were called woodhicks in Pennsylvania, and a hick spent the season in a camp miles up a hollow with 50 or 60 other men.