The Susquehannock Trail Club:
2025 KTA Club of the Year

The editor of The Potter Enterprise collaborated with local businessmen, foresters, and hikers in 1967 to form the STC and then work with maps and boots-on-the-ground to link old railroad grades, logging roads, CCC trails, and other pathways to establish the loop that has drawn thousands of hikers and backpackers to the 84-mile trail known as the STS – the Susquehannock Trail System. The trail length is perfect for hiking in a week of hikes at approximately twelve miles a day.

The 84-mile trail is divided into 22 sections, based on where roads intersect the trail to facilitate maintainers accessing the trail to clear blowdowns and brush, refresh the orange painted 2”x6” rectangular blazes that mark the trail, post signs, and add features that make the trail more interesting, accessible, friendly, and fun, like signs for “Cardiac Club” and “Spook Hollow.”

Susquehannock Trail Club volunteer Melissa Wohlson, May 18, 2025

Volunteer work along the Susquehannock Trail

Over the past decade, the club has built nine three-sided lean-to style trail shelters and refurbished an historic, brick CCC dynamite storage building for a tenth shelter. All the shelters have picnic tables and other amenities such as clotheslines, fire rings, and usually caches of water jugs if no water source is nearby. Club volunteers have built bridges in a variety of styles around the trail and placed beautiful memorial benches at vista and valley locations. The STS is also one of the few Pennsylvania trails to have mile markers around the trail so hikers can mark their location and progress.

Cherry Springs Shelter on the Susquehannock Trail with volunteers Wayne, Pat, and Wanda in June 2025

STC volunteers Bill, Angela, Barry, Willis, Elizabeth, Janet, and Wanda at the Galetone Parade in July 2025

In addition to their work on the trail, the club and its members are active with other community endeavors. They man an aid station for the annual God’s Country Marathon, and members contribute to activities with the Friends of Lyman Run State Park and the Pennsylvania Lumber Museum, where the club holds its monthly meetings after a pot-luck lunch on the second Saturday of every month.

Certified circuit hikers

In the years since the trail was completed in 1970, more than 1,360 hikers or backpackers have received “Circuit Hiker” awards for hiking the entire loop, either in one thru-hike or in a series of many hikes spread even over many years. Based on names in the trail registers, the club estimates that probably three times that many hikers have actually completed the entire trail but never submitted logs for the circuit hiker certification. Those whose logs are approved are awarded official circuit hiker numbers, certificates, patches, and small tokens of accomplishment.

Cherry Springs Fire Tower cabin along the Susquehannock Trail

STC Maintainers

The STC has approximately 275 members, though only about a quarter of them live locally and participate in meetings, maintenance, and other activities. Some members have Potter County camps, and others come from as many as ten different states but have “Hiked it and Liked it!” so they send the annual $15 dues – or even invest in life memberships – to support the club and get the quarterly newsletters. The club also enjoys an annual “Camporee” at Ole Bull State Park. Top maintainers are awarded shirts, hats, and other tokens of appreciation at the annual winter celebration and recognition dinner.

The 2019 Susquehannock Trail Club trail crew

As recently as fifteen years ago, all maintainers had to supply their own equipment, but over the past decade and a half, the club has purchased two trail mowers, half a dozen weed-wackers or brushcutters, a couple chain saws, and a large array of other trail maintenance tools including folding saws and loppers for branch clearing, pulaskis and rogue hoes for treadway widening and leveling, and a tool trail trailer for storing the equipment and transporting it to work sites as needed.

How to join the STC

Hikers can find more information on the club’s website and can purchase guidebooks or the FarOut app for the STS.

Members are asked to pay membership dues, which go toward trail maintenance and club costs. Cost is $15 annually for individuals or $25 annually for families, or $500 for a lifetime membership for individuals or $800 for a lifetime membership for families.

Although members are encouraged to volunteer with hands-on work if possible, these efforts are made possible by the dues of hundreds of members throughout the country. Whether you are thinking of volunteering on-trail or supporting STC’s work through membership, please consider joining today!

About the author, Wanda Shirk, Susquehannock Trail Club president

Wanda Shirk has been president of the STC since 2010, and over those past 16 years also did double duty by serving five years as vice president and three years as president of the statewide Keystone Trails Association. A retired Northern Potter high school English teacher, Wanda first backpacked the STS in 2000, and since then has gone on to hike 24 of Pennsylvania’s 25 long-distance (over 20 miles) hiking trails, half of the Appalachian Trail, most of the Finger Lakes Trail, and six ADK high peaks, for a total of over 3500 trail miles. Doing trail maintenance is also one of her great joys and satisfactions. She has received the State Forest Hiking Trails Award and KTA’s Lifetime Achievement Citation Award, but she says hours in the woods are about time to think and to enjoy peace, quiet, and the beauty of nature as well as to find challenge and adventure. Her goals: to “love (be kind), learn (read, think), lead (serve), live (hike, adventure!), and leave a legacy.”