PA rocks, oh my!

Another sub-par sleep and up and on the trail by 7:40. Because of the long day yesterday we only had 9 miles to walk into Wind Gap, PA – our destination for today and tomorrow! We’ve been waiting for the “rocks of Pennsylvania” to hit hard – their reputation precedes them! We’ve heard people warn us that our feet were going to fall off, that unless we got boots with hard soles we wouldn’t make it through, that our feet won’t stop killing us for hundreds of miles after PA… We’ve heard more reasonable accounts of PA – that it is rocky but only for the North 1/2, and that as long as we’re prepared for a slower pace and lots of rock hopping and maneuvering with some sore feet, we’ll survive, feet intact. As usual, we are taking dire warnings with a grain of salt but willing to be pessimistic – so we can be pleasantly surprised if it’s nicer than expected.

The first 6 miles last night weren’t bad but we now know what the PA rocky trail is like! Fun? Tedious. Sharp. (We went through a section called “wolf rocks”.) But, so far, intermittent. We’re hoping that keeps up but only time will tell.

We were glad it was overcast this morning (it was very slightly cooler) but for some reason that meant that the deerflies were vicious this morning! Circling and trying to get a chunk out of  us at every chance. We killed a couple – two-hit kills! You could see the outline of my hand from murdering one of them against my leg.

We tried to hitch into town but no dice so we walked 2 miles into the diner for late breakfast then another mile to our hotel. Sigh. At the Red Carpet Inn we were offered a smoking room with window, or a non-smoking room with no window. We don’t think it’s legal, but it smells good so now we just have no idea of it’s daylight outside or not! We walked back into town to get dinner groceries so we can just veg for the rest of the day and tomorrow – then, we began to veg in earnest! Watched TV and The Fast and the Furious 6 (amazingly awful), and streamed the All-Star vs Riot game (ultimate). And ate a bunch of foods. 😀

Ben & Jerry’s – Cinnamon bun! Who knew?!
http://www.benjerry.com/flavors/cinnamon-buns-ice-cream

Superfund isn't so bad!

Back to the trail! First we took a bold step and sent Megan’s sleeping bag home. I’ve barely been using mine, so we will share mine like a quilt. We also decided to stop cooking dinner for a bit. If we like it, our stove and pot will be next to be sent…

We ended up walking out of town, an annoying extra 3 miles.  That tops off our non-trail miles in this town at 10 – definitely not a good record to set!  We had to carry all our water for the day as well, which added 9lbs to each of our packs. Then we climbed up another ridge and followed it most of the day. We saw a rattlesnake, just far away enough not to be too scary. (mk: but I’ve never seen a rattlesnake before, and I was hiking in front, so it definitely scared me!). I wasn’t expecting to see any this far south. At the end of the ridge, we had some more interesting stuff. There used to be a zinc smelter in the area til the 80s, and the pollution deforested the ridge for the last few miles. We got great views all the way as a result… The area is called a “Superfund” clean up, which always sounds like “super fun” to me, and it delivered today!  The ridge ended with a steep, rocky descent, also with pretty views to the south. Right after the descent we hit some trail magic, which was awesome. Cold pop, orange slices, ding-dongs (yeah, what? Kind of like a wagon wheel). A cold drink and treats hot the spot! Thanks, Washington Country Bumpkins trail angels!

Dinner of champions

We crossed some roads and a bridge, then climbed up the other side, stopping half way up after a long day. Overall, better than expected. The Superfund area was supposed to be awful, but we got some clouds and the least humidity we’ve had since June, so it was actually nice.

We had a few wake-ups in the night – a fireworks show nearby at 10pm, then the moon was rising brightly, and last a deer crashing and snort-wheezing through our camp. But, we still woke up fairly early and hit the trail… Nothing exciting happened all morning. The awful PA rocks we were promised somewhat materialized, but interspersed with really flat, easy trail. At lunch we hit a B&B with a bar, so we had a beer with our trail lunch.

After that, more of the same… Both of us have sore feet now (shocker).  We made our way to a shelter, which turned out to be in someone’s backyard. We are camped on their side lawn. Lots of northbounders, including a French-Canadian! They were nice but definitely have their clique going on.

Question from email:
How many litres of beer have you consumed?

A: surprisingly few – hiking has made us lightweights. We haven’t had more than 2 (Megan) -3 (Ryley) beers each in any sitting.

Today we had a resupply planned so we got up early and we’re hiking by 7. We did hit patches of “Pennsylvania rocks!” but again it was intermittent and some fairly easy walking in between. More up and down today – we had a 1000ft climb to start the day and another after our resupply. We hiked about 12 miles by 11ish and stopped for an early lunch. About 2 minutes after getting back on the trail after lunch, I was walking and staring intently at my feet to avoid tripping on rocks and was startled by another big snake on the trail. Not a rattlesnake but also not moving! One more step and I think I would’ve stepped on it! It flattened it’s head to look bigger and hissed at us then slowly  slid off trail.

We had another few miles down into Fort Clinton. I was being pessimistic about hitch-hiking the 1.5 miles into Hamburg where we needed to buy groceries – partly because of our failed hitching in Wind Gap, partly because it was a busy and fast moving highway. But, Ryley insisted we at least try and we were picked up less than 10 minutes later by an ex-hiker and his son. Sweet! Also, Ryley wins this round.

Our resupply was a grocery Wal-Mart – not glamorous, but pretty cheap and close to the trail. And, they sell Ben and Jerry’s. So after purchasing our groceries we sat in Wal-Mart on a bench in the air conditioning and each ate a pint of ice cream. I thought it was an uncomfortable place to look homeless and eat ice cream in public (a kid sitting in a buggy literally stared us down with her mouth nomming the side of the shopping cart…) but Ryley was blissfully happy with his peanut butter core ice cream and happily people-watched.

We stuck a thumb out on the busy, fast highway to try to get back to Fort Clinton and got a ride from and Audi who aggressively switched lanes and kind of cut someone off to pick us up. We dropped in at Frank the barber’s – apparently a must-see hiker place. He had a few hiker’s shooting the breeze in his cool shop while he was giving his $8 haircuts. Once he knew we were Canadian he asked if we’d met Redfeather – he had an autographed note from her, framed, on the table – one of the few places she told people about herself, I guess! We met Seabiscuit – a NOBO who started June 15! And needs to finish by sept to go back to school. He’s flying! He warned us we were in for a “gnarly” climb (it was steep but only about 20 minutes back up to the ridge…).

We were marching along on some nice trail when we got soaked by 3 hard rain showers. It felt kind of nice, actually, but didn’t really break the humidity – and also soaked our shoes which is never awesome. We also saw 1/2 a tree fall down randomly 20m in front of us on the trail, and got stared down by a giant frog in the middle of the trail who was NOT about to give up his little piece of trail heaven (I guess). We got to the next shelter and set up our tent, wrung a lot of water out of our clothing, and had dinner with some northbounders at the shelter, exchanging news about upcoming water sources (pretty important topic these days as it’s mostly been dry and a lot of the water sources aren’t reliable mid-late summer). Then a big thunder and lightning storm came through and soaked everything one more time. We got into the tent for it but got sprayed with water from the inside… Ah well. Weren’t we just complaining it’s been too hot??

B&J blog:
Megan – Boomchoclata!
Ryley – Peanut Butter Chocolate Fudge core

We hit 1000 miles today! The day itself was probably our easiest hike, no climbing more than 200 feet at a time. It still dragged a bit though, as there wasn’t much to look at except our feet.

We did have a very good lunch spot at a viewpoint, where we were able to dry out all our soaked gear from last night’s epic thunderstorms.

Reader question:
How many calories are you eating per day? How many burned hiking?

A: I don’t know how many calories we are burning… Maybe I’ll try to quantify that another day.

But, as for calories – this took much math! But I (Megan) was curious anyways. Until recently when we decided to try no-cook dinners, our food breakdown looked something like this:

B: 2 bars (eg. Lara bar, Kind bar, oat bar)
Snack: trail mix
L: Crackers (wheat thins! Best flavour is sun-dried tomato & herb), cheese (sharp/hard), salami, chips (sun chips/BBQ grits are a favourite), 2 cookies (lemon or mint-chocolate oreos are winners), m&m peanuts
Snack: 1 of snickers/twix/trail mix
D: Knorr side (eg cheddar broccoli rice-pasta blend – filling but unfortunately very salty!), tuna or salmon packet (these also come in flavours – some better than others), 2 cookies, dark chocolate

Calorie count ~3000
Cal from fat ~1150
Cal from CHO ~1550
Cal from pro ~300

More curiosity led to:
Sodium 2400mg (that’s a lot)
Sugar 132g

Our no-cook has changed dinner to: a wrap with either 1/2 an avocado OR 1 packet tuna or salmon, some sundried tomatoes, dried cranberries, plus a shared mayo and mustard condiment packet – pretty tasty! Also gets points for being quick to assemble, no waiting time for eating, and not making us sweat from eating hot dinner before bed. We want to be done with sweating by this point in the day! (Oh – plus cookies and chocolate still for dessert, of course!)

And just to make this complete!

Water = 3-6L/day

#times Megan goes pee a day = 8-10
#time Ryley goes pee a day = 2-3

I wish I knew how much salt we were losing… We don’t feel too bad about our high salt diet considering how much we’re sweating!!

My poor hat!

Another day in PA! Not a lot happened again, we just hiked some more good miles. We met a woman hiking Northbound with her dog who has been on the trail since May 25th – making good progress. She said she was number 1350 through Harper’s Ferry (the official unofficial half-way point, and something we find interesting to know how many of the ~3000 northbound hikers that start the trail made it that far. It also gives us a very rough idea of how many hikers we may have passed going the other way. Although, there are also quite a few “flip-flop”ers – people who are doing the whole trail but not one end to the other). Megan is having a little bout of shin splints that we’re hoping to nip in the bud.

Reader question:
What has been your best “bang for your buck” meal?

A: We had nearly free meals in the Huts of the White Mountains in New Hampshire. All we had to do was a bit of work! Example “all you can eat” meal: soup, fresh bread w/ butter, lasagna, salad, green beans, and hot chocolate.

The sprinkling last night didn’t amount to much and we had another dry and sunny+clouds day of hiking. It turned out we were about 100m short of the shelter last night – oh well! More ridge walking today with some ups and downs, then we descended into the valley for for about 12 miles to Boiling Springs, PA. We lucked out and had a fairly overcast afternoon, which turned the heat down out in the open. We wove in and out of the forest, crossing hay fields, corn fields and soy bean fields – big corn and bean fields! And some of the corn was 10ft+ tall! It was actually kind of cool to see something other than trees for a change. We also crossed many roads today – a couple interstates and a few highways, railroad tracks (we saw a long slow train go by behind us 2 minutes later – WIN!) and quite a few smaller roads, we lost count.

It was really flat going the second half of the day – so flat we were complaining… Our feet were getting sore from the flat, hard ground (aw, poor us, right?). But, we’d already decided to stop in Boiling Springs for the night so we can go to Cafe 101 for breakfast tomorrow morning, even though we walked into town at 4:30pm, earlier than we’re used to stopping. We went to the gas station to grab a cold drink. Ryley asked if I could pay because I have cash, and I said “sure”, then couldn’t find my wallet (i.e. a ziploc bag with my cards in it). I turned my bag inside out but no dice. So, I called Ms Vicki from the Doyle Hotel in Duncannon and sure enough, she has it. She even jumped in her car, drove the mile to the trailhead and yelled up the climb at us hoping to catch us, but we were already gone. Huge props to Ms Vicki – she has our “home away from home” address in Virginia and will send my wallet there. In the meantime, Ryley has agreed to be my sugar mama for the next few days. But probably no beer till I get my ID back…

We set up camp in the designated free camping spot 1/2 mile out of town – right beside the train tracks! And we’re joined by 3 other southbound section hikers and a local couple just out for a campfire and night (we think it’s an odd camping destination for locals, being right beside the very noisy train tracks).

I got to talk to Grandma on the phone tonight, too – that was definitely a highlight! And catch up with my sister while we’re near town with service. Our camp mates made a fire and we hung out for a bit till hiker midnight hit us. Setting the alarm for an early morning walk to town breakfast, yayyyy!!

Not a very restful night. Drunken NoBos stumbled loudly into camp later in the evening (from the town tavern). The trains also kept coming all night. We still got up shortly after 6, heading into town for breakfast. We passed what looked like a sprint triathlon getting started, then had huge breakfast and americanos. While we ate, Gloworm, a section hiker joined us. Turns out she’s on the Board of Girl Scouts of America (maybe?) and she convinced us to do a little interview video with her about our gear. Megan did most of the talking.  It took a few takes, but we made a nice video I think. We will post it once it’s released.

It was 9 by the time we got to hiking, which turned out fine. We passed some  rocky areas that were a bit harder to navigate through, but otherwise just trucked til we got to Pine Grove Furnace State Park. We swam in a nice cold lake there, with hundreds of locals swarming around (turns out it’s Saturday, who knew?). Then we took a quick warm shower in the change rooms.  No soap though. A short stroll later we got to the general store, where we did a very mini resupply to get us one day further. Also, dinner and ice cream of course (moose tracks and chocolate)!  We met a nice NoBo, Peach, who is going a similar pace to us. After a quick chat over dinner, we headed on 3 miles to the next shelter.