Crowd takes Groundhog Stomp
To celebrate Groundhog Day, about 90 people hiked a snowy trail Saturday afternoon at Moraine State Park.
The 2019 Groundhog Stomp Hike drew the biggest crowd of any so far, according to Jess Rohrdanz, an environmental educator at Point State Park. Rohrdanz and Natalie Simon, an educator at Moraine, led the hike together.
They've been putting it on for about five years, Simon said.
“We're here to have some fun in the wintertime,” Simon said. “And it is a beautiful day for it.”
The group marched through about a mile-and-a-half of the park. The pair explained the history of Groundhog Day and shared their ecological knowledge of the hairy critters.
Groundhog Day, Rohrdanz explained, gets its origins from an old European calendar-keeping tradition. When male groundhogs came out of hibernation and began staking out their territory for the year, people saw it as the start of spring. Years later, a Punxsutawney newspaper editor dreamed up a weather forecasting groundhog as some kind of promotional idea for the area, according to Rohrdanz. From there, Punxsutawney Phil became an American legend.
Sandy Bizon, of Allison Park, was tickled by Rohrdanz's account.
“I've lived here all my life, and I've never heard that whole story,” Bizon said. “It's wild.”
She wasn't the only hiker experiencing new things. Tina Dunkle, of Butler, was finally seeing the trails of a park she's visited for years.“I've never in my life hiked out here,” Dunkle said. “It is beautiful, no two ways about it.”Brenda Hudak of Shaler Township said, “I went to school with someone from Punxsutawney,” Brenda Hudak said. “They were very serious about it.”Rorhdanz said she once attended the annual event in Punsutawney to cover it for a radio station. She got to meet Phil.“He wasn't as pleasant as I expected,” she said.But don't think the organizers of the Grounhog Stomp Hike have it out for the rodents. “It's just an expression,” Simon said. “No groundhogs will be stomped today.”Some 80 miles from Moraine, Phil declared that spring is just around the corner. It was the 19th time he hasn't seen his shadow in 133 Groundhog Days.
