Relive history the hard way: Pennsylvania's Thousand Steps trail

Cover photo: The Thousand Steps trail, built with rocks on Jacks Mountain in Huntingdon County, PA, rises above morning mist and fall colors. (Ad Crable)

Think about walking 3 miles from your home, then climbing almost straight up a mountain on irregular stone steps just to begin a 12-hour backbreaking workday of busting rocks with a sledgehammer and loading them into rail cars.

With just a little imagination, reliving the six-day-a-week routines of quarry workers in central Pennsylvania is vividly brought home by hiking the short but arduous Thousand Steps trail. It honors the men, many of them immigrants, who helped make nearby Mount Union, for a time, the silica brick capital of the world.

Nearly lost to private development, this unique and historic rock staircase built in 1936 by the rock gatherers themselves was saved in 1998 by a groundswell of support that raised the money to buy 670 acres. Contributors included local residents, hiking groups, land trusts and the state. The Thousand Steps were restored.

The hike up the steps (it’s closer to 1,050 of them) is only about a half-mile. But you gain 843 feet of elevation and have to work for each high footstep on the sandstone slabs.

Along the way, you will cross many abandoned narrow-gauge railbeds that transported broken rock off the mountain. The rock, a quartz-rich sandstone known as ganister, is found in piled slabs on open-face scree slopes — thought to be the remnants of an ancient, shallow seabed. You’ll also see picked-over quarries that look just as they did when the workers walked away. And you will come across stone walls erected along the grades and an occasional fragment of iron train track left behind.

The steps in Pennsylvania’s Thousand Steps trail were wedged into place by quarry workers in 1936.

Just a few hundred yards beyond the last step is the gutted but still intact Dinkey Shed, handsomely and stoutly made from stones. Here, tiny gasoline-powered locomotives, known as dinkies, were stored and serviced for transporting loads of rocks off Jacks Mountain.

Your burning thighs will be rewarded with several views of distant Appalachian Mountain ridges in Pennsylvania’s Ridge and Valley region, as well as Jacks Narrows, where the Juniata River is squeezed between the hillsides, forming the state’s deepest gorge. Across centuries, modes of transportation were concentrated in this bottleneck, from the Frankstown Indian Path and Pennsylvania Canal to the Pennsylvania Railroad and today’s U.S. Route 22.

Refractory companies had been collecting ganister from Jacks Mountain since 1899. The rocks contain silica, a heat-resistant material greatly valued then as a liner in steel, iron, glass and railroad industry furnaces.

In its heyday from the turn of the 20th century to about 1950, nearby Mount Union and its silica brick or “fire brick” refractories turned Mount Union — tucked into a bend of the Juniata River — into “Brick Town USA.” Three factories employed 2,000 people and turned out 500,000 bricks a day.

But the steel industry declined and newer processes for making the bricks developed. A latter-day version of silica brick is still made there. The Hubble Space telescope now floating in space contains silica mined from Jacks Narrows.

Jason Graney and his dog scale the sandstone steps built by quarry workers in 1936 that now form Pennsylvania's Thousand Steps trail.

The St. Patrick’s Day Flood of 1936 took out a bridge across the Juniata that carried mine carts from factory to mountain. Rather than lay off employees, the brick company put them to work building the rock stairway that is now the Thousand Steps trail — providing more access up the mountain to the ever-expanding quarry sites.

Until then, quarry workers had to walk 3 miles every day to the base of Jacks Mountain. From there they would trudge like worker ants up the steep dinkey inclines or sometimes surreptitiously hitch a ride in the pulled steel dump cars — a dangerous ride-share that killed at least two workers.

The precipitous stairway was used until the last of the steep-slope rock piles were quarried in the late 1950s.

After the first few steps, a hiker soon realizes this is no ordinary stairway. The stone treads, made from the very rocks the workers were mining, are irregular and often slanted. The vertical distance from one step to the next varies greatly; you have to pay attention to each lift. Some climbers compare the ascent to a 90-minute workout on a StairMaster fitness machine.

When I started up the trail, I was at first a little annoyed that each 100th step is marked. But I soon realized that they serve as little milestones of accomplishment, buoys of encouragement to keep going.

This is one of several overlooks earned by climbing Pennsylvania's rugged Thousand Steps trail.

One climber I encountered, Army veteran Zach Irwin, was more dismayed than encouraged when he found that he had only climbed 200 steps so far. His mother, a pastor in Mount Union, had told her son, visiting from Fort Bragg, NC, that he just had to hike the Thousand Steps. Visibly out of breath in shorts, a T-shirt and sneakers, Irwin was not exuding affection for mom.

In contrast, I came across Jason Graney of Mount Union, who was fairly gliding up the steps with his dog. The 46-year-old scales the steps several times a week for fitness. This day, though, was one of his “leisurely” trips to enjoy the views and fall colors.

Graney’s dad worked in one of the brickyards in Mount Union but he was laid off when the steel industry declined. His father never had to gather stone from the mountain, but Graney imagines the sweat and grit of those who did.

“I’ve often thought, boy, what would it be like to climb up this mountain and then have to bust rocks all day, just to get them over to the brickyard. It’s crazy stuff,” he said.

As an early present for her 25th birthday, Skye Fedkenheru came with her partner, Chris Domkowski of Pittston, PA, and their three dogs to hike the steps. “It’s kind of been one of those bucket list items,” she said. “It’s not something you see every day.”

Not long after that exchange, I was dumfounded to see Jessica Tenley of Saxton, PA, and all six of her children, ages 3–15, ascending the staircase with alacrity.

A family ascends the Thousand Steps trail in Pennsylvania.

The 35-year-old mom estimated that this was the seventh time her family had made the climb. The first time, she was pregnant and lifted her 1-year-old daughter onto the bigger steps.

Denuded of trees more than a century ago, Jacks Mountain was for a time a bare-sided slope of bleached rocks. But time has healed nature’s wounds and the Thousand Steps path climbs through groves of rhododendron shaded by beech trees and jack pines.

The allure of the Thousand Steps has only grown with time. During the COVID pandemic in 2020, trail counters showed that more than 42,000 people hiked the trail — double the typical numbers of pre-COVID years.

“The appeal of the Thousand Steps for a lot of people — number one, it’s a challenge. But I think there’s also nostalgia,” George Conrad, president of the Standing Stone Trail Club, was quoted as saying in a newspaper story. “It’s the nostalgia of putting yourself in the shoes of quarrymen going to work every day.”

The Thousand Steps section of the Standing Stone Trail is only a half-mile long but very steep. It’s thigh-busting on the way up and knee-pounding on the way down. Trail managers strongly caution against climbing when it’s icy or wet. The most popular times to hike it are early spring for the clearest views and in the fall for colors. Dogs are allowed on leashes. There is no camping in State Game Lands, where the trail is located.

Access the trail from a parking area on the north side of U.S. Route 22, 1.3 miles west of Mount Union. From there, walk toward a creek and bridge and follow a blue-blazed trail to the start of the orange-blazed Thousand Steps. The trail crosses many railbed switchbacks that provide places to rest.

At the top of the steps, you can turn right and follow a blue-blazed trail for 0.3 mile to a vista of Mount Union and the Juniata River. Or go left on an orange-blazed trail for 0.2 mile to the 1938 Dinkey Shed used for small trains. From there, you can climb another 95 steps and follow the Standing Stone Trail for 0.5 mile to the Ledge Quarry Lookout with views of Jacks Narrows, the town of Mapleton and surrounding mountains.

If you climb the Thousand Steps and walk to both overlooks, the total distance roundtrip is about 3 miles.

For an overlook near the summit of Jacks Mountain, continue beyond Ledge Quarry for 2.5 miles to the Mill Creek Quarry Vista.

Visit this site for another good review of the Thousand Steps trail.

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