Today we finished the trail section up to Port Clinton. No critter sightings today. The trail is fairly rocky and obnoxious through this area. We also got about 5 minutes of rain during the hike, which made all the vegetation wet and the rocks nice and slippery. PA is so much fun sometimes (just a tiny bit of sarcasm there)!

Here is what a lot of the trail looks like in this area in spots.

Brushy rocky wet trail

The descent down to Port Clinton is short but wicked steep by any standard.

Tomorrow we are heading to Little Gap near Blue Mountain Ski Area to continue the last section before New Jersey. Continue reading →

Today we slack packed again. This section was very rocky, buggy, and muggy. Not exactly ideal or fun conditions for hiking. It was a bit of a slog at times.

We did have a nice overlook right before crossing PA 501 at the Kimmel Lookout. This is a cool spot that’s super easy to get to from 501.

Kimmel Lookout

The rest of the trail from 501 almost all the way through to PA route 183 (over 9 miles) is insanely rocky. It ranged from large boulders down to many thousands of small foot destroyers. My feet hurt. My toes hurt. My toenails hurt. Ugh!

OK, OK, I’ll stop whining about rocks! Here’s the snake of the day!

Big black snake hanging on the trail today

On the positive side of things, Trippy seems to be just about back to 100%.

Tomorrow we have about 15 miles to finish up the section of trail up to Port Clinton. After that, we only need to hike the last 30 miles or so from Little Gap to the Delaware Water Gap / NJ border to finish up with PA. We’ve done the other sections either earlier in the week or earlier in March/April. Woohoo!

Vital stats:
Miles hiked today –  22.1
Mood – whiny from all the rocks, but good
Physical state – good
Smell – still fresh, still clean
Song stuck in my head – I Love Rocks ‘n Roll by Joan Jett and The Blackhearts

Today we resumed hiking outside of Duncannon, where we got off the trail last week when Trippy got hit by the Lyme truck. We took the Shikellimy Trail back up to the trail from off of PA 325. Pretty much within a mile or two of getting on the trail, we saw a fairly large black bear. I couldn’t get any good pictures unfortunately, but it wasn’t overly afraid of us and just kind of moseyed along. That was the first one we’ve seen on the AT in PA.

This section is definitely one of our favorite sections in PA. It’s not as rocky as a lot of other nearby sections and it has a lot of nice forests to amble through. We section hiked this area last year.

It also has some delicious PA water…

mmm, fresh cold orange spring water (Is this from mining? Clay? Residual tears of Flyers fans?)

We also had a number of snake sightings today. The first was a large rattlesnake that was straight chilling by the trail. It did not give a flying crap about us or my papparazzi actions.

Rattlesnake chillin’

The next interesting encounter was a fairly large black snake. It was also chilling on the trail, but decided that the safest place away from obnoxious hikers was up the nearby pine tree.

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This was pretty cool to watch it climb. I’ve seen them and their skins in trees, but have never actually seen one climb up one. It was pretty fast.

The rest of the day included some pretty easy hiking and a few minor climbs. Tomorrow we continue hiking through this section towards Port Clinton. Thanks to Ma and Pa Heiser for providing slackpack shuttle services! It’s a lot nicer to eat some pizza at the end of a long hike instead of our normal dehydrated gruel.

Vital stats:
Miles hiked today – 18.6 (plus a bonus .9 on the Shikellimy Trail)
Mood – good
Physical state – good
Smell – wonderful
Song stuck in my head – Dammit by Blink 182

We took another zero on day 81 (July 5) to let Trippy recover further from the effects of the Lyme.

On day 82 (July 6), we did a relatively short stretch (~9 miles) that we needed to finish between Bake Oven Knob Road and PA 248 at Lehigh Gap. We hiked up to Bake Oven Knob with Packy and Tapey, aka Ma and Pa Hnatow.

Packy and Tapey at Bake Oven Knob

Thanks again for the lift, guys!

The rest of the hike was uneventful and went fast. It was warm, but it was nice to not hike in 95% humidity.

The next few days the plan is to slackpack through the roughly 55 miles we have left between Duncannon and Port Clinton.

Since Trippy was feeling better, we went back out to the trail to try to finish up this local section. We are hiking some of these sections here in PA out of sequence. We also made the strategic decision to skip the local sections of trail that we hiked back in March and April for training considering we hiked them this calendar year with full pack weight anyway. It’s something like 15-20 miles.
Continue reading →

We zeroed to let Trippy recover from feeling like crap. As the day progressed, it became apparent pretty quickly though that she probably had Lyme disease. She had all the symptoms and the telltale bullseye rash appeared. We went to the emergency room and the nurses and doctors took about 2 minutes to confirm that suspicion. They still do a blood test to confirm, but it seems like a slam dunk diagnosis. At first glance Lyme sounds very bad, but it’s actually really treatable if caught early like this was. They prescribed the common antibiotic Doxycycline to kill the bacteria that causes Lyme and OTC drugs to help fight off the fever and headache caused by it. So we’ll be taking a few extra zero days for her recovery. We should be back on the trail within a few days. A small fortunate part of this ordeal occurring now is at least we were within relatively easy driving distance from the comfort of home.

We hitched a ride back to the trail in the morning with some nice folks who strangely call themselves Packy and Tapey. They were a little weird, but pretty cool nonetheless. Continue reading →

We took a double zero at home for Justin and Susan’s wedding picnic. It was a blast. Congrats again guys!
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