The drive up Route 191 past Buck Hill Falls in Barrett Township is a favorite of fall leaf peepers. In early spring, the view is very different — the trees that crowd the road wear just a haze of new growth, so I can see the folds of the terrain on either side, highlighted by lingering patches of snow. Dark grey masses of sandstone boulders and rocks are everywhere.

At about 1,940 feet, cool air greets me at the Chestnut Mountain trailhead. When the gate is open, there is parking for dozens of cars, in a flat, grassy area surrounded by decomposing logs and tree roots. After plans to build townhouses here failed, the new owner chose to timber the land — and what is now the trailhead was the staging area for logging.

It took the Buck Hill Conservation Foundation almost 20 years of persistent negotiation and fundraising to acquire these 479 wooded acres. Finally, in 2012, Chestnut Mountain Nature Preserve opened to the public.

The blue-blazed trail leads me off toward the east, following a rugged woods road through large stands of old native rhododendron. It may take 50 years or more for the forest to recover fully from the logging and re-create the healthy mix of stately sugar maples, beech, oak, and ash trees of a healthy Pocono woodland.

But there is pleasure to be had in every stage of a woodland’s life. At first, the trail is mostly level, but soon starts downhill, past a large, bear-clawed beech tree. After a mile, the trail bottoms out and a green carpet of moss leads up to a small table-land overlook. It is a sweet circular view that includes a privately conserved tree farm, along Pocono Plateau to Spruce Mountain, Mount Wismer and Skytop’s West Mountain beyond.

Down below, Griscom Creek winds through a narrow valley on its way to joining Buck Hill Creek, the Middle Branch and Leavitt Branch to form Brodhead Creek, one of the finest trout fisheries in the nation. This nature preserve protects these waters from pollution and helps keep them pure as they flow toward the great Delaware River, providing drinking water for millions of people as it flows to the Atlantic Ocean.

Like much of the surrounding woods, this overlook is littered with glacial till — native rocks and boulders of all sizes, eroded, plucked up and dropped helter-skelter by the last glacier, 12,000 years ago. The glacier dropped large non-natives here, too: boulders studded with nuggets of pink and white quartz, carried for hundreds of miles to their new home on the Pocono Plateau.

The trail makes a steep descent from the overlook and then circles back uphill to the trailhead — a loop of 2.8 miles. I walk these woods, hearing the calls of cardinals where the whine of chainsaws so recently filled the air, and a hopeful thought rises: People do value natural beauty and wildness — and will pass it on.

Carol Hillestad is a hike leader and writer for Get Outdoors Poconos, a grant-funded series administered by Brodhead Watershed Association.