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Ice Capade on Oil Creek

Bob Steiner, Retired Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission

It was half a lifetime ago, now. But on that late December day 38 years ago, for about seven minutes, this was half of a lifetime I wouldn’t have believed I was going to live to see. A light drizzle was falling after days of flooding. The afternoon was gray and the temperature was just above freezing. The early ice, which had frozen half a foot thick, had been lifted by the flood waters and stacked on the shoreline along raging Oil Creek, a stocked trout stream.

A new Delayed Harvest Artificial Lures Only Area (DHALO) in Oil Creek State Park, here in Venango County, would go into effect the first of January. I needed to get the signs up along the 1.6-mile stretch of stream so fishermen would be aware of the regulation changes. Since there were some folks opposed to the change from catch-and kill fishing, I thought it would be a good idea to use the stacked bank ice flows to post the signs out of reach. If the opponents to the regulation couldn’t reach the signs once the ice melted, they couldn’t tear them down. If they couldn’t tear them down, they couldn’t plead ignorance.

I crossed Oil Creek at the lower end of the DHALO on the railroad bridge and started upstream along the remote back side of the creek. Dressed in blue jeans, hip boots and several wool shirts, I proceeded, making good time, but quickly realized I would be lucky to get done with one side of the creek by dark. Around three o’clock in the afternoon, where the creek makes a 90-degree turn, I dropped down to the flat from the hillside. I was immediately confronted with what obviously had been a cauldron of churning ice blocks a day or two earlier. As the water receded it had settled in an area the size of several football fields. The area was covered with irregular, broken sheets of ice. A trickle of water a foot wide, Rattlesnake Run, flowed underneath.

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