10/19 - 10/24 Pennsylvania Part III

Day 101

Tuesday October 19th

Carlisle, PA (Quality Inn)

1047.5 - 1061.2 = 13.7

We set our alarm for 6:45 knowing that if we try for any earlier it will be too dark out and we won’t be motivated to get up. Luckily the shelter faces the sunrise and we can see light coming to the sky. Twilight begins at 6:52 today and sunrise isn’t until 7:20! The days sure are getting short! We eat several snack bars for breakfast instead of cooking, so we can get moving quickly. Before leaving camp we have the joy of getting to use the outhouse! We can’t remember the last time we got to use an outhouse.

Seven miles into the day we reach the next shelter, via a short side trail. Rather than just skip it we stop for a break to enjoy the picnic table and just see what the shelter looks like. All of the shelters have been so different recently and they are neat to see. Shortly after the shelter we descend off the ridge and into the Cumberland Valley. The valley is 17 miles across, and for 15 miles there is no camping and there is no water that is clean enough to drink for 13. Lucky for us we’ve made the decision to get off the trail in 6 miles at highway 11 and go to a hotel!

The walking in the valley bottom is easy and surprisingly pleasant with little corridors of forest along Conodoguinet Creek and through farm fields. We cross over the busy interstate 81 on a road bridge, the highway is jam packed with semi trucks. Shortly after the highway, we pass a farm stand. As we approach a girl in the house nearby comes out and gets on a bicycle and rides over. It’s a Mennonite farm and they sell freshly made apple cider, cold from the fridge! They also sell pumpkins, green beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes and apples. We get 4 extra large apples, 2 honey crisp and two ginger gold. We get a cider too and also two big sweet potatoes. I know I will be able to cook sweet potatoes in our hotel microwave, but beyond that I don’t know what I will do with them, I’m just excited to see them! The total for our items is just $3.50. What a great deal and such a welcome site and good surprise on a dry stretch of trail. We were getting hungry but were trying to hold off until we reached the hotel. Apples and cider really hit the spot! As we leave I can’t help but wish I also got potatoes and green beans! I miss shopping for food and eating healthfully.

We reach US Route 11, the Harrisburg Turnpike around 3:30. It’s a busy road with traffic lights, but there is a 10 foot wide shoulder for us to walk on. Just half a mile down the road we reach the Quality Inn, which has a $60 hiker rate! Right next door is one of the most highly rated diners in the county, the Middlesex Diner. Oh how we have longed for an anonymous motel stay! A stay in which there are no other hikers around and no one wishes to interview us about being hikers. We can just simply rest indoors with running water and electricity and warmth and comfortable surfaces to sit upon. We stayed in motels so frequently on the PCT, but there really haven’t been too many opportunities on the AT. The motel feels like home and we breathe a sigh of relief!

We take showers and head for the diner. We get incredibly satisfying spaghetti dinners and peanut butter pie for dessert. They had a surprising number of vegetarian options, and it was hard to choose. The menu as a whole is very diverse with pages and pages of food from just about every category. Our server tells us they have 408 choices! How do diners do it?? We can’t wait to come back for breakfast. I’d love to work in a diner and see how they do it!

Cove Mountain Shelter in the morning light

A patch of neat mushrooms near the shelter. From a distance they resemble chicken of the woods, but they are something else.

A brief view thanks to a gas line, then right back into the forest.

Darlington Shelter for break time. We’ve been able to count on picnic tables at shelter and even at some campsites since Massachusetts. They were sparse before that and totally non existent in Maine.

An AT symbol on the side of the shelter and a stick bug.

We learn about a new long distance trail today, Tuscarora!

Entering the Cumberland Valley

View South into the Cumberland Valley, just before we dropped off the ridge and entered the flat lands

A nice stone retaining wall and bench at the view

A very heavily carved beech tree along the trail

We crossed under a few busy roads today in tunnels like this one

Walking along Conodoguinet Creek

A view out to the pretty farm country and houses from our little corridor of wilderness along the creek

Conodoguinet Creek

We found this neat fruit along the river, never learned what it was. It was hard and starchy inside but smelled good!

View over the farm lands and back to the ridge where we came from

The trail through farm fields on the way to the interstate 81 crossing

Interstate 81. It’s neat standing over top of a highway and looking down.

The little Mennonite farm stand

Day 102

Wednesday October 20th

Campsite near Alec Kennedy Shelter

1061.2 - 1073.5 = 12.3

We originally aspired to be back out on the trail early, and try to hike a long way today, and then we decided what do we care? We have a hotel and we should enjoy it! We wake up at 6:30 without even trying and lounge for awhile before heading over to the diner. We share 3 big plates of food and leave feeling very satisfied. The hotel would normally have a good breakfast, but the breakfast room has been closed down since COVID started and it never re opened. Now they offer nutri-grain bars and frozen breakfast sandwiches that you have to get from the front desk and take back for your room for microwaving.

We are back on the trail by 10:30 and have a great time walking through the Cumberland Valley. We didn’t expect it to be so nice. We saw all the road crossing and the low elevation valley on the map a few days ago and didn’t expect it to be pleasant, but it is! We walk across and along many roads, but there are also neat corridors of trees for us. We are surprised to see many very large and old trees and tons of squirrels! We also walk through many fields, mostly corn and soy beans, and past many farm houses, barns and silos.

By 2:00 we’ve already gone over 8 miles and made it to the town of Boiling Springs. Our first task is to pick up our box from the post office. My mom originally sent this box to Palmerton, weeks ago, and we reached Palmerton on a Saturday and couldn’t make it in time before the post office closed, so we called the post office and they were nice enough to send it ahead to Hamburg. When we were in Hamburg we were still in a heat wave so we picked up the box, then had it forwarded to Boiling Springs. We go into the post office and learn they don’t have our box! It was over a week ago that we sent it and we don’t have a tracking number for it. Usually flat rate priority mail boxes get delivered within a couple days. We are perplexed and a little worried too, since the box has so much expensive gear inside of it that we need in order to be warm! The post office lady is very nice and takes down my number and tells me she will call if the box shows up. She thinks it must just be delayed at the main post office but I don’t think so.

Boiling Springs turns out to be a beautiful little town full of historical buildings and homes centered around a cold spring fed pond. Judging by the name alone, we thought it was going to be a boiling hot desert of a place and our traverse of the valley was going to be dry, exposed and treacherous! Boy were we wrong! We explore the park surrounding the spring and enjoy the bright sunny day. The park and water is full of ducks and geese and surrounded by stately old trees and plenty of benches and green grass for lounging. How we long to lay in the grass, but instead we head for lunch at Caffe 101.

We get another pleasant surprise at the café when we have one of our best meals in awhile and maybe among the best on the whole trail! They have an extensive Mexican menu, which we just cannot resist. We share some delicious veggie tacos and a roasted vegetable salad. It’s so nice to have a healthy and veggie filled meal!

Boiling Springs is just so incredibly pleasant we hate to leave, but we’ve got miles to hike, and we sadly continue out of town around 4:30. There is a B&B in town called the Red Cardinal. It sure would be nice to stay! We passed another B&B just before town too, the Pheasant Field B&B. I’m sure it would be a great stay and both of them, but we can’t stop every few miles! Maybe one day we’ll come back and visit the Pennsylvania high point, Mt Davis, which is nearby, but not on the AT.

We pass through many more beautiful fields before finally reaching the edge of the valley and reentering the forest. We climb over a small ridge and onto Center Point Knob, the former halfway point of the AT. The mileage of the trail changes every year due to re routes and trail upgrades and maintenance. We are close to halfway, but this isn’t quite it. There a nice monument though and place to sit for a break.

We go a couple miles further making it a total of about 12.5 miles by 6. Not bad a day considering it was less than 8 hours from the time we started walking and the time we stopped! So much leisure was had today! We get one final joy in our day, the sweet potatoes! Before I left the hotel I microwaved the sweet potatoes and stored them in our silicone bags. Jeff carried them all day, and they are pretty heavy! I slice them and then use a fork to smash them onto tortillas that have been spread with almond butter and sprinkled with apple pie spice, sugar in the raw and pretzel salt. It is a delight and I am pleased with the outcome of my sweet potato purchase and my invention that I had all day to dream up.

Taking the path to the Middlesex Diner at sunrise

Chocolate chip banana pancakes, baked oatmeal and country fries (scrambled eggs, potatoes, onions and green peppers) with toast.

Quality Inn along US route 11

View of US Route 11, looking west, back toward the Quality Inn and Middlesex Diner

We’ve started seeing these trees with a really neat looking bark. Jeff’s friend Allan had identified them for us as Hackberry.

Farm fields and a farm house near an AT road crossing.

Trail signage and a corn field at a road crossing

Looking across a sea of soy beans to a farm

Pond in Boiling Springs

Informational sign about the AT

Informational sign about the history of the pond

The path of the AT past the AT headquarters building, through the park and along the pond

The source of the spring. It comes out of the ground so fast it looks like a flowing river!

One of many neat old buildings in town. This is the tavern, across the street from Caffe 101

Wow what a pleasant surprise!

A section of park is dedicated to veterans

View down the pond

Cool old building on the far end of the pond

A massive estate right on the pond. They were doing renovation work there. There is also a truly massive sycamore tree along the pond on the right.

Jeff and the sycamore tree

And old cast iron furnace in town

Me with a pair of massive sycamore trees

Soy beans in their first stages of drying out.

More soy beans and corn and an informational sign about how they keep the fields here on purpose to retain the historic character of the trail

One last look at the valley, the crops and the pretty farm houses, before going back into the forest

This tree has a nice knot at its base for sitting on. We are never in too much of a hurry to stop and admire trees!

Center Point Knob

Jeff at the old half way monument. I actually got him to smile for this photo. He said all he had to do was thinking about the fig bars we were about to eat and he couldn’t help but smile!

Day 103

Thursday October 21st

Iron Masters Mansion

1073.5 - 1088.4 = 14.9

The morning walking is easy and interesting, through a maze of big boulders and rock formations. Around noon we reach a road crossing with PA 34. Less than half a mile down the road is the Green Mountain General Store. Inside is a deli and typical small market grocery items. We get veggie sandwiches, bananas and a can of baked beans to eat for lunch. There are picnic tables out front in a grassy lawn with nice big oak trees for shade. It’s warm and sunny again today. We take more bananas to go, along with canned white beans to put in our mashed potatoes tonight, a big bag of pretzels and a few more snack bars.

Our afternoon miles are rocky and seem to drag on. The forest is dense pine and oak and is a bit boring. Eventually we reach something of interest, a side trail to a view called Pole Steeple. It’s only a quarter mile off on a really easy trail and we haven’t had a view all day! As far as AT view ledges go, it’s a really nice one, we have unobstructed views of the valley and of a little lake. It’s a poplar day hike from Pine Grove Furnace State Park, so we see a few day hikers. I always enjoy visiting day hiking destinations along the AT, it almost always makes for more interesting scenery. I bet most hikers just blast right past!

Shortly after the view point we enter the state park and follow a bicycle path for about a mile as we go through. There’s another lake and a swimming beach, but the swimming is closed for the season. There’s also a huge parking lot, a bathhouse and a snack bar. The snack bar is also closed for the season and the parking lot is nearly empty. We also see another old iron furnace, which the park is named for. The park also has a campground and a general store, but the store is open Friday, Saturday and Sunday only. There used to a little city here of workers whose lives revolved around the furnace. The furnace stops operating in the late 1895, and the surround lands eventually became state forest. In the 1930s, during the Great Depression, it became a CCC camp. The CCC reforested and remediated the area and built park infrastructure and roads.

This area is considered the halfway point on the AT, but we are still not exactly halfway. The state park is home to the AT museum run by the ATC (Appalachian Trail Conservancy) and a hostel for hikers in the old Iron Masters Mansion, also run by the ATC. Because of the halfway thing there is a competition here called the Half Gallon Challenge, where hikers attempt to eat a half gallon of ice cream on their own. I guess they get a special spoon if they succeed. The challenge sounds disgusting to me and it annoys me that the ATC would promote over-consuming to the point of illness. The museum is open only on Fridays and weekends right now, so we won’t get to visit or do the half gallon challenge. The hostel is still open and we get to stay the night! It’s supposed to be $25 per person per night, but it’s cash only, and we only have $40 left. The caretaker lets it slide but it means we can’t buy dinner. Dinner is made by the care taker and would have been veggie burgers and fries!

We are done pretty early, around 5! We get to use the kitchen to cook our mashed potato dinner and the care taker cuts up an extra potato and gives us some of his thick cut homemade fries. They taste like the best fries we’ve ever had! There is one other hiker in the hostel tonight, a guy who hiked the PCT northbound from April 1st to August 9th, then began a SOBO AT on August 19th!! Holy smokes he’s fast, he started well over a month after us! After dinner we take showers and go to sleep in our big empty dorm room. I get to wear warm flannel loaner pajamas!

The trail through a boulder field

We could see chalk on some of the rocks, meaning rock climbers have been here.

Jeff in a passage though the boulders

Narrow passageway

Green Mountain General Store

The view ledge at Pole Steeple, 1,293 feet

Looking south over Laurel Lake from Pole Steeple

Please give us your bicycles!

Sand beach at Fuller Lake

Iron furnace on the national historic register

The AT museum

Day 104

Friday October 22nd

Camping near Quarry Gap Shelter

1088.4 - 1105.5 = 17.1

We set ourselves a lofty goal of 17 miles today. We leave the mansion much later than we think we should, but we don’t even wake up until 7. Then we dilly dally in the kitchen and make several cups of green tea and enjoy the luxury using the toaster for pop tarts. In the end is it fine, because just before we leave the caretaker comes out and offers us yesterdays leftover buckwheat pancakes. We happily pack them away and head out around 8:45.

The day trickles by little by little. We hike a few hours and stop at Tom’s Run Shelter for pancake sandwiches. Then we hike a few more hours and stop at Birch Run Shelter for cereal, which we got from the hiker box at the mansion. After lunch it’s a few more hours of hiking and one more snack break, and we have made it the 17 miles! We have pretty good footing all day and a mix of sun and clouds. We are in the Michaux State Forest all day, and a beautiful forest it is with lots of yellow and orange fall colors. We pass several halfway markers today, so it is the day of making it half way. We are also on higher elevation ridges today, than we’ve been on since New Jersey’s high point! High point was around 1,800 feet and today we have surpassed that, topping out around 2,000 feet. In the afternoon we enter a cleared section of forest in which the ground cover has received ample sunlight for thriving. The ground cover is American Wintergreen! The leaves taste like wintergreen gum, that is where the flavor comes from. The plants are low growing with just a few leaves per plant and they also get a berry which is known as tea berry. We’ve been looking for the berries for a long time and now in this sunny clearing we have found them in abundance. For the last few miles we enjoy the novelty of eating berries that taste like gum! Wow it’s neat!

We stop just short of the Quarry Gap Shelter when we hear voices. It’s Friday and weekend campers will be out tonight and tomorrow too most likely. We want to avoid being interviewed and also have some peace and quiet, so we stop at a campsite just before the shelter.

The iron master mansion nicely lit in the morning.

I balanced my camera on a post, utilizing a rock to take this photo of us together. It took many tries to get it right!

Very nice facilities at Tom’s Run Shelter. There’s a covered picnic pavilion in the back and a really nice fire ring with Adirondack chairs. There used to be twin shelters here but one burnt down when someone was cooking in the shelter and toppled and spilled the fuel in their liquid their liquid gas stove.

The trail along a pleasant ridge top road

Another half way marker. I don’t think we even noticed when we past this years official half way point, there was no monument.

Wintergreen and far as the eye can see!

Beautiful clear water in the creek at Birch Run Shelter. Pennsylvania has had really nice spring fed water sources.

Birch Run shelter. It’s hard to tell, but it’s really big. There are 8 bunks lining the walls inside. It’s really nice to have a covered picnic bench too!

Winter green leaves and tea berries

Tea berries

Looks like a great side trail!

There are a few rental cabins in this area.

Thanks to the decreasing leaf cover, we now often see out of the forest and across to surrounding ridges.

Day 105

Saturday October 23rd

Fayetteville, US Route 30

1105.5 - 1108.2 = 2.7

There is a youth leadership group at the shelter in the morning when we walk over. They took up all the space in the shelters, there are two of them here! It’s a good thing we didn’t try to go over there last night, as there aren’t many tent sites around the shelter. We would have just been annoyed and had to retreat. Large groups aren’t supposed to camp in the shelters. It’s part of the leave no trace code of ethics and the idea of sharing the trail/amenities and views.

We don’t even get to look in the shelter because they are taking up all the space cooking breakfast and I don’t like forcing my way into groups. We sit at an adjacent picnic table with the only two other guys that aren’t in the group. They are really nice and it ends up being nice talking to them, just two older local guys out for the weekend. We don’t end up leaving the shelter until about 8:45. That’s pretty late for making the miles!

It’s a little stormy looking out. We walk just 2.7 miles down the trail, and off of the ridge to US highway 30 and begin walking West on the highway. We planned to go into the town of Fayetteville, to at least eat a meal and possibly to stay at a church run hostel. The hostel is close to the trail, but everything else is about almost 3 miles or more away. We try to hitchhike and no one stops for us. We make it the 3/4 of a mile to the hostel before anyone stops. We still aren’t sure up to this point if we really want to stay, we had hoped we’d get a ride to the Flamingo Family Restaurant! We know we don’t want to walk any further on the highway, so we check in at the hostel. We are waiting for the post office to open on Monday in the next town, Rouzerville, so it was either take a break here or there. Here at the hostel is cheaper than there, where the only lodging is an expensive hotel. We solved the mystery of our missing package ourselves by calling the Hamburg post office and finding out that after we attached the new address label to send the box ahead, the box somehow ended up back on the pick up shelf and never moved! Now it is again on the move and will be in the next town.

The church hostel ends up being a very nice place. They have a bunk room with 6 beds for hikers in a back room, along with a large lounge area full of tables and a kitchen for us to use to. The lounge and kitchen are full of food donations from local stores and we are told to help ourselves. The pastor’s wife also takes us and one other hiker to Dollar General in her car so that we can get hiker specific food.

The other hiker, Brian, is an older man from Texas who tried to thru hike last year and was ultimately forced off the trail during COVID. He came back this year and has hiked about halfway, going north. He’s about to go home in a few days. We end up really liking him. He’s so friendly, easy going and funny. We learn at the end that he was a Texas Ranger for 31 years! We can hardly believe it! It’s nice that we are not the only ones in the hostel because sometimes that feels strange too!

As always the day gets away from us. We always think we’re going to be bored on days off, but we aren’t. I thought I’d work on my blog and get another one posted, but I don’t. The pastors wife is a real talker and just talks our ears off. There’s also a handy man around that likes to chat too. He tells us he the the youngest of 14 kids! His father was born in 1895 and his mother 1901. He was born on a farm and taught to help out and work starting at the age of 2! Wow! Imagine kids were raised that way today without tablets in their faces! We seem to be busy all day talking. Before we know it it’s bed time and our day of rest is over. It ends up being a good day to be indoors as it rains most of the afternoon.

Quarry Gap Shelters

Our dorm room at the New Life Worship Center. The room was decorated by the pastor himself.

The lounge area with tables full of new donations waiting to be sorted.

Our snack haul from Dollar General. We have grown very fond of the peanut butter pretzels, they are the best we’ve had and the best price with the most simple ingredients too! Also some fun items like churro snacks and the bamba peanut butter puffs we love! It was the least ransacked Dollar General we’ve been in, but Brian says it was the most ransacked he’s seen! The stores down south must be more abundant and better stocked.

A look at just one of the food pantries at the church. I could have really made a feast! I end up keeping it simple with steamed frozen veggie and a can of low sodium baked beans.

You never know what you’ll find in the loaner clothes! Jeff has a fuzzy robe and I’ve found a velvety house coat!!

Day 106

Sunday October 24th

Falls Creek

1108.2 - 1125.6 = 17.4

We manage to get up early and get out the church by about 7:30, Brian too, he almost got roped into going to church but was able to escape with us. The pastor and his wife showed up much earlier than we expected them to, and without even asking us just started cooking us all breakfast. It would have been a very greasy meat heavy meal and luckily Brian figured out what they were doing and told them we were making oatmeal. So it was just the pastors and one other older couple eating when we left.

All of the rain storm passed through yesterday and there’s nothing left today. For the first few hours it’s dreary, and I feel lackluster. But in the afternoon it gets a little sunny and it wakes us up a bit. We pass several roads today, as we pass from one ridge to the next. We take a short side trail to the Chimney Rocks for our only view of the day. In the afternoon we have a nice break at the Tumbling Run Shelters, there’s two of them! I packed out a can of baked kidney beans that we heat on the stove and eat while talking to the volunteer caretaker of the shelter. They happened to be checking in on the shelter while we were there. It’s one of the nicer and well kept shelters we have seen.

We get another break a little while later at a picnic ground in Old Forge State Park. There’s a big grassy lawn, trash cans and a water spigot for us to use. Some sort of summer camp is located here, with bunk houses and dining halls. There are lots of cars in the parking lot, and it seems to be a popular place for mountain bikers. It also seems to be in a residential area, but as we came in from the forest, we as usual haven’t much clue where we are in relation to the outside world!

The last few hours of the day we are hurrying to get the miles in. We manage to reach our goal of nearly 17 and a half miles. We are just a mile from the road we will take into the town of Rouzerville tomorrow. There is just one hotel in town, a chain called the Cobblestone Hotel. We gave them a call but they wanted $125/night, and that’s the hiker discount rate, so we decided it would be better to sleep in the woods! We have a shuttle scheduled to bring us to Walmart and to the post office to finally pick up our box of warm clothes.