Last fall, friends and I walked the newly cut trails of Van Buskirk Preserve in Paradise Township. We found fragrant pears in an overgrown orchard, the stone foundation of a long-gone barn, and a vernal pool in an old red rock quarry.

The first week of May this year, we went back. Rocks and boulders along Cranberry Creek were blanketed with thick mats of dark green moss. The creek was gushing. A red eft glowed in last year’s leaf litter. Spring wildflowers were just starting; we found purple violets, red trillium, a pink lady’s slipper orchid and the mottled leaves of trout lily. The nor’easters of March had toppled trees across the trail, but nothing we couldn’t duck under or climb over.

On my next visit two weeks later, everything had changed.

The violent windstorm that rocked the watershed on May 15 left its mark here. Fallen pines blocked most of the trailhead parking area. Getting through to the creek crossing meant scrambling over, under and around branches and trunks. Tree limbs were embedded like swords, deep in the earth. Reaching the far side of the swollen creek, we saw more white pines uprooted, their giant root masses on end and exposed, as tall as houses and studded with slabs of stone. Imagining the roaring tumult that must have engulfed this place gave us the shivers.

We followed the yellow-blazed trail, roughly paralleling the creek, toward the woods road that would lead uphill to the old farm. Where fallen trees blocked the way, we made our own trail, clambering through, around and over obstacles. The footing varied from smooth and grassy to rocky glacial till to marshy and wet. The newest parts of the trail have many sapling stubs that take attention to avoid.

Above the farm, we take a short out-and-back detour to a viewpoint at the top of the quarry. Overlooking the narrow valley of Cranberry Creek, the view takes in the green ridge of Paradise-Price Preserve beyond. The pure, cold Cranberry rises in wetlands and marshes to the north, in Cresco. The creek is protected as an Exceptional Value coldwater fishery, home of our beautiful native brook trout. From here, the creek runs along the east side of Route 191 to join Paradise Creek, and then the Brodhead. Below Stroudsburg, the Brodhead enters the mighty Delaware River, providing drinking water for millions before reaching the Atlantic.

Against the backdrop of raw and broken trees, spring doesn’t despair. Low-bush blueberries are covered with nodding white flowers. Violets in every shade, false lily of the valley, star flower, wild geranium, and Jack-in-the-pulpit abound. Thousands of oak seedlings and saplings are filling in for the skeletal old oaks the gypsy moths devoured a few years ago.

Before the storm, I made a note to myself about the preserve: “This place feels primeval, as if it were somehow outside of time.” Certainly, it is outside the timescale we humans occupy. And that is a thought that gives me pleasure to contemplate – even if it gives me the shivers.

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