Ironstone 100K: Through Stone, Fire, and the Long Memory of a Nation

There are races that test endurance, and there are places that tell stories. The Ironstone 100K does both by tracing a 100-kilometer route from Canoe Creek State Park to Greenwood Furnace State Park through one of the most historically dense corridors in America. Along the way, runners follow ancient Indigenous trails that became warpaths, turnpikes, canals, and railroads; pass the remnants of industries that helped build the nation; and move through forests that were once erased and painstakingly restored. Here, the land does not simply host the race… it defines it. Every mile carries the imprint of those who came before, making Ironstone less a competition and more a passage through the deep, unfinished story of Pennsylvania and the country it helped shape.

Introduction

There are races that test the body, and there are races that stir the imagination. And then, on rare occasions, there is a course that does both while carrying the full weight of a nation’s past beneath your feet.

The Ironstone 100K does both. The course traces a corridor so dense with history that it feels less like a route and more like a cross-section of America itself. From the limestone kilns of Canoe Creek State Park to the ironworks at Greenwood Furnace State Park, runners move not just across terrain, it crosses eons.

This is the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians where rivers older than the mountains cut straight through stone, where Indigenous trails became warpaths, then turnpikes, then canals, then railroads. Where industry flared hot and fast, vanished just as quickly, and left the land to reclaim itself.

In my estimation, and I don’t make this claim lightly, there may be no race course in the country that carries this much history, layered this tightly, mile after mile.

If you listen closely as you run, you will hear it: the echo of axes and hammers, the murmur of traders and soldiers, the roar of furnaces, and beneath it all, the older silence of stone.

Come along. This is not a race report. This is a passage through one of the most historically dense corridors in America told over 100 kilometers, one footfall at a time.

Abandoned quarries and two lime kilns from the 1900s remain as reminders of this industrial past. Runners will pass two kiln sites, including remnants of the Blair Limestone Company’s operation.

Chapter I: Lime, Fire, and the Brief Violence of Industry

At the starting line in Canoe Creek State Park, it would be easy to mistake the calm for something ordinary. A lake. A trailhead. Birds moving through the trees. Even an occasional bald eagle above the waters.

But this ground once burned and the story begins in stone.

The hills around Moore’s Hill are rich in limestone valuable enough that, between roughly 1907 and 1910, they were carved open to feed the insatiable appetite of steel mills in Pittsburgh. Operations like Carnegie Steel Company and Jones and Laughlin Steel Company required enormous quantities of lime for survival.

Without it, steel fails.

Here’s how it worked: limestone was quarried from the hillsides and hauled up to towering kilns some reaching eight stories high. Then came the process, equal parts methodical and unhinged:

Layer limestone. Layer coal or wood. Repeat. Set it on fire.

What emerged was quicklime, calcium oxide. It is the essential flux that stripped impurities like silica, sulfur, and phosphorus from molten iron. Without it, steel would be brittle, unusable. With it, the industrial age marched forward.

The entire operation lasted barely a few years. By 1910, cheaper sources farther west rendered Canoe Creek obsolete. The fires went out. The workers left.

And the forest returned, as if nothing had happened at all.

Chapter II: The Bats, the Silence, and the Return

Just beyond the industrial remnants stands the Frank Felbaum Bat Sanctuary. A place that, at dusk, once erupted with life.

The Frank Felbaum Bat Sanctuary at Canoe Creek State Park is home to Pennsylvania’s largest nursery colony of little brown bats. Visitors gather at dusk to witness thousands of bats emerging from the former church-turned-Canoe Creek Bat Refuge.

This is Pennsylvania’s largest nursery colony of little brown bats. Thousands emerge from what was once a church, now repurposed into refuge. Nearby lies a hibernaculum sheltering six species, including the endangered Indiana bat.

At Mile 1, atop Moore’s Hill, you pass abandoned mine entrances which were once home to 30,000 bats.

Then came White-nose Syndrome.

By 2009, the population collapsed to just 71 survivors.

Today, there are signs of recovery with numbers creeping back toward 1,000. It is not what it was, but it is something. In this landscape, recovery is a recurring theme.

You will see Brush Mountain on your left, once protected as The Nature Conservancy’s Brush Mountain Preserve until October 2024. This vast oak-hickory forest was considered one of the world's most biologically diverse temperate broadleaf forests. Now managed by the PA Game Commission, it remains both a County Natural Heritage Area and a Landscape Conservation Area, preserving its ecological importance in the Central Appalachian landscape.

To your left rises Brush Mountain, once protected by The Nature Conservancy, its oak-hickory forests among the most biologically diverse in the world. Now managed by the Pennsylvania Game Commission, it remains both a Natural Heritage Area and a Landscape Conservation Area.

Above the ridge, hawks circle. Gliders ride thermals. And the ridge itself runs unbroken south all the way to Tennessee.

Chapter III: An Important Transportation Corridor — The Line That Never Moved

At Mile 3.9, you pass beneath U.S. Route 22 at the Terry Wertz Memorial Underpass. It feels like a brief interruption with traffic overhead, a flicker of the modern world, before you slip back into the trees.

But this is no ordinary crossing.

You are intersecting one of the oldest and most persistent corridors of movement in Pennsylvania. It is a line that has carried people, goods, armies, and ideas for centuries. Long before pavement, long before surveyors and engineers, this route existed because it had to. The land dictated it.

Running parallel to the Frankstown Branch of the Juniata River, this corridor connects east to west from Susquehanna to Ohio and threading through the Ridge-and-Valley like a needle through cloth. There are only so many ways through these mountains. This is one of them.

The first formal road here was cleared in 1789 as a rough wagon route, little more than a widened path, but immediately vital. By 1807, improvements elevated it to the Huntingdon Pike. By 1821, it became the Huntingdon, Cambria, and Indiana Turnpike or also known as the Northern Pike. It’s a name that carried weight in its time. Iron from the Juniata region moved west toward Pittsburgh, feeding a growing industrial hunger.

But even that was not the beginning.

Long before wagons, there was the Frankstown Path, a footpath worn into the earth by generations of Indigenous travelers. Part of the broader network known as the Great Indian Warpath, it connected Harris’ Ferry (Harrisburg) to Shannopin’s Town (Pittsburgh) as early as 1721.

It was along this path that traders like John Hart established outposts at his “logg” near present-day Alexandria becoming a waypoint in a contested landscape. By the 1750s, the path had turned violent. Lenape war parties, led by Chief Shingas, moved swiftly along it by raiding settlements along the Juniata River, burning Fort Granville (near present-day Lewistown), and returning west with captives.

Then came the counterstroke.

John Armstrong followed this same line through this valley, to Canoe Place (Cherry Tree in Indiana County) and onward to Kittanning, destroying the village in 1756. The path had become a warpath, then a road again.

And it never moved.

By the 19th century, the corridor transformed once more with the arrival of the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal. Beginning in 1827, engineers carved a water route along this same line eventually extending 127 miles to Hollidaysburg. To overcome the 584-foot elevation change, they constructed 86 locks, lifting and lowering boats through the mountains with remarkable precision. One of those locks still stands on your right near Mile 12 of the course, a quiet, moss-covered reminder of an audacious undertaking.

At Alfarata, this corridor reached a kind of apex. It was a junction not just of canal and road, but of three Indigenous trails: the Frankstown Path, the Warriors Mark Path, and the Penns Creek Trail. Movement converged here from every direction.

Then came the railroad.

The Pennsylvania Railroad laid track along the same path, eventually becoming the largest transportation system in the world (Mile 23 at the village of Barree). Between Barree and Tyrone, the line crosses the Little Juniata River fifteen times in twenty miles, an engineering necessity dictated by the stubborn geography of the valley. Now operated by Norfolk Southern, the line still carries freight through the same narrow gaps.

Lower Trail (pronounced like  "Flower") is a 17-mile multi-use raiils-to-trail which Ironstone participants will run from end to end. The Lower Trail is now a part of the September 11th National Memorial Trail.

The Lower Trail you run today follows that abandoned Petersburg Branch, purchased in 1989 and extended in 2004. The rails removed, but the corridor preserved. In 2022, it became part of the September 11th National Memorial Trail, linking sites of national memory across 1,300 miles.

Even the race honors this lineage with the first four aid stations are called “stations,” (Williamsburg Station, Flowing Spring Station) echoing the stops that once punctuated this line.

And still, the river flows beside it all, ancient, persistent, older than the mountains themselves. The Little Juniata once carried freight on flat-bottomed “arcs,” launched only when water levels allowed safe passage. Even now, surprisingly it retains its legal status as a commercially navigable river.

This is not just a section of the course.

It is the course set long before the race existed.

And as you run it, you are simply the latest traveler to pass through.

This aero-view print of Williamsburg, Pennsylvania was drawn by Thaddeus Mortimer Fowler and published by Fowler & Kelly in 1906.

Chapter IV: Williamsburg and the Architecture of Ambition

In Williamsburg, the race passes through a town built on water, industry, and unusual civic ambition.

Founded in 1795 by Jacob Ake, he established the area’s first free school, hired its teachers, and personally enforced attendance. The town grew quickly. By the 1830s, it was a hub of mills, tanneries, ironworks, and canal activity.

In 1831, thousands gathered here to bid on contracts for canal construction with more than 4,000 bids submitted for dams, locks, and sections of the line.

From this small town came Charles M. Schwab, who would lead U.S. Steel as the first billion-dollar corporation in the world.

His influence returned home in the form of industry: a paper mill, worker housing, and a hotel, an imprint of global industry on a small river town.

As you pass through this modest borough: greatness, in this region, rarely announces itself at the beginning. 

Indian Steps Trail after leaving Aid Station #6

Chapter V: The Battle of the Indian Steps — Where History Blurs Into Legend

In the folds of Spruce Creek Valley, lies a story that resists certainty.

It is known as the Battle of the Indian Steps, dated in some accounts to 1635. A clash between the Lenni-Lenape and the Susquehannock, two powerful nations competing for control of this region. Power, here, was never static. It shifted rarely violently every generation or so.

According to tradition, the Lenni-Lenape advanced into Susquehannock territory and were met with overwhelming force. The result, if the accounts are to be believed, was catastrophic. Some narratives claim casualties exceeding those of Gettysburg. A staggering assertion, and one that historians continue to treat with caution.

What is known is this: the Lenni-Lenape were driven eastward, toward the Delaware River, and in time would encounter an entirely new and far more permanent force… Europeans.

Much of what we know (or think we know) comes from the work of Henry W. Shoemaker, a prolific and sometimes controversial chronicler of Pennsylvania folklore. Shoemaker was not merely a collector of stories; he was a builder of them, shaping narrative as much as preserving it.

He wrote of the “Indian Steps” as stone formations said to have been constructed to allow warriors to quickly cross the mountain during raids. Whether literal or interpretive, the image endures: a staircase carved into the mountain, a path of urgency and intent.

But here, the line between history and folklore begins to blur.

Some argue the steps were not Indigenous at all, but constructed by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s. Others suggest a combination as ancient paths were later formalized or repaired. Shoemaker himself wrote decades before the CCC existed, lending some weight to the idea that something older was there.

The truth may never be fully settled.

And perhaps that is fitting.

Because this landscape does not always give up its stories cleanly. It holds them loosely, in fragments—half in record, half in memory.

As you pass through, you are moving not just through a place of documented history, but through one of Pennsylvania’s enduring myths.

You will climb “The Indian Steps” at mile 37 after leaving Aid Station 6. 

Tiltrock Country is an anticline, a folded system of ridges composed of sandstone, shale, and quartzite.

Chapter VII: Stone, Tilt, and Deep Time

The mountains here are not merely scenic—here the land itself tells the oldest story.

Tussey Mountain stretches roughly 80 miles, part of a folded system of ridges composed of sandstone, shale, and quartzite. These are the remnants of a once massive anticline formed during the collision of continents approximately 480 million years ago. 

Stand on the ridge and look west.

Now imagine the valley filled—not with trees, but with rock. A mountain range on the scale of the Himalayas, slowly worn down over hundreds of millions of years.

The slanted rock, “tiltrock”, you pass along the Mid State Trail is a fragment of that story, frozen mid-motion.

Chapter VIII: Rothrock and the Wildest Footpath — A Forest Reclaimed

By the time you enter Rothrock State Forest, you are moving through a landscape that, not long ago, barely existed.

In the late 19th century, Pennsylvania’s forests were effectively erased. Timber companies clear-cut vast swaths of land. Iron furnaces consumed entire hillsides for charcoal. Fires swept through the debris left behind. What remained was a barren, exhausted landscape stripped not just of trees, but of resilience.

It was here that Joseph Rothrock stepped in.

Appointed as Pennsylvania’s first forestry commissioner in 1895, Rothrock believed something radical for the time: that the land could recover, if given protection and care. His efforts led directly to the 1897 legislation allowing the state to purchase “unseated lands” for forest reservations and the foundation of the state forest system.

Rothrock was not restoring a forest.

He was rebuilding the possibility of one.

Today, the forest stands as proof that he was right.

Alan Seeger Natural Area is one of only 20 old growth forests in Pennsylvania. Along Standing Stone Creek, includes virgin white pine and hemlock tree and 20-foot-high rhododendrons.

Right before the last aid station is Alan Seeger Natural Area, one of only 20 old-growth forests left in Pennsylvania. This 390-acre ancient woodland along Standing Stone Creek is home to towering white pines and hemlocks, spared by loggers at the end of the 19th century.

As you weave through 20-foot-high rhododendrons, look up—the ancient hemlocks still stand, watching over the trail. This cathedral-like forest is named after Alan Seeger, an American war poet who fought and died in World War I at the Battle of the Somme. Sometimes called the "American Rupert Brooke," Seeger is best known for his haunting poem, "I Have a Rendezvous with Death."

Running through Rothrock State Forest is the Mid State Trail.

At roughly 327 miles, it is the longest hiking trail in Pennsylvania, stretching from Maryland to New York. Conceived in 1966 by Boone Sumantri as the Central Allegheny Trail, it was meant to follow the high ground and the ridgelines that define this region.

Three years later, in September 1969, Tom Thwaites and a small group from the Penn State Outing Club climbed to Little Flat with tools in hand and began cutting the first section. No heavy machinery. No grand funding. Just a line scratched into the mountain by people who believed it should exist.

They opened their first view along Fourth Mountain—looking out over Bear Meadows. A monument nearby now marks the spot of this first original section.

A stone monument with a plaque sits on the trail near the location of the first blaze marked in 1969. It is dedicated to Thwaites, who has been described as “the father of the Mid State Trail.”

The trail has grown since then linking into larger systems like the Great Eastern Trail, connecting to the Standing Stone Trail and beyond but it has never lost its character.

It is rugged. Rocky. Often remote.

And yet, rarely more than a mile from a road, a paradox that defines much of Pennsylvania’s wild places.

Thwaites once wrote of hiking:

“The wilder and more beautiful the land, the better the hiking… these experiences are spiritual.”

That idea holds here.

Because as you run this section of the course, you are not just moving through a forest.

You are moving through a landscape that was lost, and deliberately, patiently, brought back.

After purchasing the Freedom Iron Works in nearby Burnham in 1833, Norris, Rawle and Company needed a steady supply of iron. A suitable location with iron ore, limestone, water, and trees was found here so they built Greenwood Furnace, which went into blast on June 5, 1834. The charcoal-fueled furnace produced about four tons of pig iron ingots per day with an annual output of around 1,200 tons. The iron was hauled by wagons over Stone Mountain to Freedom Iron Works to be turned into wrought iron.

Chapter IX: Greenwood Furnace Where Fire Built the Future

At last, you arrive at Greenwood Furnace State Park.

On June 5, 1834, the furnace here went into blast, producing four to five tons of pig iron per day. A company town formed around it with houses, store, blacksmith shop, all sustained by the surrounding forest, which was steadily consumed for charcoal.

In 1847, the operation came under the control of John A. Wright. Among those who passed through was a young Andrew Carnegie, learning lessons he would later apply on a far larger stage.

By 1904, the ore was gone. The forests were gone.

The furnace fell silent.

But in 1905, the state purchased the land. By 1906, a tree nursery was established—eventually producing millions of seedlings annually, reforesting Pennsylvania.

What industry destroyed, conservation began to rebuild.

This furnace at Greenwood Furnace State Park was built in 1864 and operated until just after the turn of the century. It was restored to its original appearance in 1935. 

Final Words: You Passed Through Something Larger

It is tempting, at the finish, to think in terms of accomplishment.

Distance covered. Elevation gained. Time elapsed.

But Ironstone resists that idea. 

Because what you have just crossed is not merely a course… it is a continuum. Because long before you arrived, and long after you leave, this corridor will remain. A place where stone predates memory, where rivers ignore mountains, where industry rises and falls, and where the land, given time, reclaims itself. The forests will grow, fall, and grow again. The stories, some written, others only whispered, will persist in the spaces between. 

You did not conquer the course. You merely passed through it. Just like warriors, like traders, like canal workers, like railroad men, like all the others who have moved along this corridor for centuries.

And now, for a brief moment, you are part of that line with the rare understanding that, for a few fleeting hours, you were running through the long, unfinished story of America itself.  

The race ends.

The story does not.