Pennsylvania Is Not That Bad

As usual my mileage and my word count are inversely correlated. While I’ve been quiet here, in the last ten days I’ve traversed 150 miles of Pennsylvania. I’m starting to smell the barn, as they say, both literally because I am in Pennsylvania but also figuratively because I’m starting to see my finish line for this year roll up over the horizon. 

I heard your feedback from the last post that many of you are confused about exactly where Mica and I are and what we’re doing, and that’s very fair because it’s confusing and I realize that you have more compelling things of which to keep careful, if not obsessive, track. So there will be a recap and summary below. But first I want to tell you about how nice Pennsylvania is, quickly before I get to the part of the state that everyone hates.

I’m in a motel in Hamburg, PA, which is about four long days hike north of Duncannon. Duncannon is where people say the dreaded “Rocksylvania” starts, but I have found the trail north of Duncannon to be mostly a series of gorgeous ridge walks, speckled with a few rocky sections. Yes I said “gorgeous” about Pennsylvania! I’m as shocked as anyone. 

After crossing the farms and neighborhoods of the Cumberland Valley in southern PA, the trail generally climbs out of town about 800 or 1,000 vertical feet and then runs ruler-straight along high forested ridges, which are sometimes only a few dozen feet wide at the top. The mountains here are like if you took a normal mountain and stretched it out so it was 12 or 15 miles long, and flat on the summit. They’re technically part of the “Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians,” but I think of them as the mouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuntains. 

The weather couldn’t be better. Every day has been clear and sunny, cool at night—occasionally downright cold, but not below freezing yet—and warm enough for shorts by noon. The gradually waning moon has spotlighted my tent at isolated campsites perched 1,000 feet above the twinkling lights of freeways and farms spread out on the valley floors below. Up on the ridge the leaves are mostly down, giving me day-long views through bare tree branches of the pumpkin spice riot of foliage blanketing the lower hills. The freshly fallen leaves crunch constantly underfoot in a way that never gets any less acoustically satisfying, although they also hide the smaller ankle-twisting stones that litter the trail, and force me to be more careful of my footing. I want to look up and enjoy the view but every time I do I’m immediately punished with a stubbed toe or a stumble, so mostly I try to absorb the view with my peripheral vision. Occasionally I just stop to look around.

With little vertical deviation in the trail most days, even the rocky sections aren’t stopping me from reeling off a series of 18 to 20 mile hikes. The prolonged lack of rain has put the state into a drought, and only the most consistent and reliable water sources are still running. Lacking better options, I’ve scooped silty water from some very questionable springs, but I haven’t actually found myself stuck without enough water yet. The next few days north of here look to be the driest part of the trail, so I hope that holds true. I’ve been pretty careful about researching my water sources, and Mica left a lot of comments in the Far Out app on his way through here southbound which have been enormously helpful to me and the rest of the crew of SOBOs behind him.

Speaking of which, an unexpected delight of turning around and hiking northbound has been meeting SOBO hikers that I’ve lost track of, or heard about but never met. A few days ago I ran into Plum(b) and Zeb, from back in Vermont. They’re still at it, and incredibly still hiking together, which I was glad to see. Zeb (now known as Deep Dish I believe) said he’s planning to end his hike for this year at Harpers Ferry, while Plum(b) intends to keep going for a while yet. 

I reached my 1,000 mile mark at Center Point Knob, outside Boiling Springs, and who was there but a hiker and self-described “huge Washington Post fan” who goes by the trail name Re-Roll and has been reading my Post columns. Mica told me about him, after they met on the trail, so he’d been expecting to find me eventually. He tried to think of something surprising to do to ensure I’d have reason to mention him, but being there to celebrate 1,000 miles with me was plenty good enough to make him memorable. He’s also an aspiring writer so I gave him what is the least inspiring but only true writing advice, which is that the actual work of writing always sucks but you just have to do it a lot to get better. 

And I finally met Sharky again, who I don’t think I’ve mentioned yet in this newsletter. Our second day on trail, at the first shelter outside of Baxter State Park, I was talking to a longtime thru-hiker named El Flaco. He was telling me a story about running into a guy named Sharky, whom he’d hiked with years ago, at a recent thru-hiker Thanksgiving dinner. Just then, an older man with a white beard and a long wooden staff walked into camp looking exhausted, like a late-in-the-series Gandalf. El Flaco looked up and said “Holy shit. Holy shit! That’s Sharky!” Neither of them knew the other was even on trail this year, let alone that they would meet here, just south of Abol Bridge. Sharky talked to us briefly but explained that his food bag was down to “nothing but black coffee” and he was desperate to reach the Abol Bridge store before it closed. He was almost halfway through this year’s hike, which was northbound from Pine Grove Furnace here in PA up to Katahdin and then back down to Pine Grove Furnace. Last year he hiked from Pine Grove Furnace south to Springer and back, so in these two years he will have completed two full thru-hikes in an odd double-half-yo-yo pattern. 

Mica and I met Sharky again later on in Maine, when he was now also hiking southbound, and spent several nights with him at shelters and campsites. We last saw him in Bethel, Maine, where all of us were off the trail riding out the remnants of Hurricane Debby. He’s one of the people I was most disappointed to have lost track of, and I’ve spent the rest of the hike asking other hikers if they’ve met him, or know where he went. Most people on the trail have met him, but I never got much reliable news of where he was or how he was getting along.

Then yesterday morning, as I sat on a log beside the trail eating my last Little Debbie donut sticks and feeling kind of down, here comes Sharky walking out of the woods with a somewhat longer white beard, two long wooden staves, and a twinkle in his eye, like a more early-in-the-series Gandalf. I wasn’t sure he’d remember me, but he yelled “RUSTY!” and walked over and gave me a big hug, so I guess he did. I caught him up on what Mica and I had done since we last saw him in Maine, and he told me about a few other thru-hikers to keep an eye out for, and we exchanged phone numbers. He introduced me to another couple he was hiking with, and as they all walked away I heard him tell them “that was one of the guys I’ve been most disappointed to lose track of this year…” so I guess the feeling was mutual. Sharky lives on what he describes as a “hipster chicken farm” near Waynesboro, VA, close to Rockfish Gap, so when I do return to hike the rest of the southern trail, I know where I’m starting from.

A Brief Recap

I’ve named a lot of places in this post, and I promised you an orientation of some kind, so let’s do that. I know this should be a map, but I am writing on my phone and I don’t have the graphic design wherewithal to make such a thing. If you do, and you want to translate the following notes into an infographic, please send it to me and I’ll publish my favorite in a future post. But until then, a word is worth 1/1000th of a picture so let’s get to it. 

Here’s a link to a National Park map of the whole A.T., I’ll try to pin the following to places that you can find labeled on it.

• On July 2nd, Mica and I summit Katahdin, at the northern terminus of the trail. On the 3rd we proceed southbound past Abol Bridge into the hundred-mile wilderness.

• On July 5th, after I suffered three days of increasing and still unexplained nausea, we get a shuttle off the trail from Nahmakanta Lake, and go home to Peaks Island, ME.

• Nine days later, on July 14th, we return to the Nahmakanta Lake trailhead where we left off, and continue hiking south.

• On July 16th, we are shuttled out again, this time to a motel in Millinocket because I brought a case of Covid back with me from home. We are just north of Whitecap Mountain when we get off trail this time.

• On July 19th we return again to our last extraction point and resume the hundred mile wilderness. This time it sticks, and we will stay on trail together, with occasional zero days, through Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and a few miles into eastern New York.

• On September 25th, at Pawling, New York, where the trail crosses Rt. 22, Mica and I take a series of trains down to Northern Virginia for the wedding of my niece; Mica’s cousin.

• On September 29th, after the wedding, I get a ride to Harpers Ferry, W.V. from a friend who lives in Maryland. I get back on trail at Harpers Ferry, hiking southbound.

• Meanwhile, Mica has taken the same set of trains we took down to VA in reverse, and returned to Rt. 22 in New York. He gets back on trail there, near Pawling, on September 29th. He is still hiking southbound as well, but there is now a gap of some four hundredish miles between us, me ahead hiking into Virginia, and Mica behind, continuing through New York.

• Mica at this point simply continues hiking southbound according to our original plan. So we will leave him for the moment as he crosses New York, New Jersey, and hikes into Pennsylvania over the following weeks, while I hike from Harpers Ferry south into Virginia, and through Shenandoah National Park (please for the love of god don’t call it “The Shennies.” Ugh).

• On October 11th, just outside the southern entrance of Shenandoah N.P., at Rockfish Gap, I suspend my southbound hike, due to damage to the trail and the trail towns in southwest Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee from Hurricane Helene. I take a couple zero days at a friend’s house, and then ride yet still more trains from Charlottesville back north through Washington, D.C. to Harpers Ferry again.

• On October 15th, I depart Harpers Ferry for the second time, this time northbound, intending to hike back up to Pawling, New York, where I will have finished the mid-Atlantic section I tried to skip, ultimately completing 1,333 miles from Katahdin to Rockfish Gap. At that point I will call it a season and go home for the winter. So I am currently hiking northbound through Pennsylvania, on this final leg of the journey.

• Mica continues southbound, and on October 20th our paths finally cross again at the James Fry shelter in southern Pennsylvania. We spend the night together at the shelter, where Mica will write that we have “taken up our customary positions on opposite sides of the shelter and cozied up in our sleeping bags, and tomorrow morning we'll each make our customary pot of ramen.” I miss hiking with him too, I hope we will have ample time to do more of it in the future.

• That brings us to the present. I continue northbound toward Pawling, while Mica continues southbound through Virginia. He plans to hike until he has finished the trail, run out of time, or it gets too cold to continue, whichever comes first. I should be done sometime around November 13th, weather permitting. 

So that’s what has happened so far. Everyone keeps assuring me that a little further north, Pennsylvania gets unbearably rocky. I’ve seen some of that, but as a SOBO who is only temporarily NOBO, I haven’t found any of it too hard to deal with. But even if I do end up considering Pennsylvania the worst A.T. state, I’m coming to suspect that title might be akin to “ugliest supermodel.” I am a Pennsylvania hater from way back, when my sister went to college here and I was dragged sneezing on many a drive through endless cornfields, so it brings me no pleasure to report that the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania is not that bad. But Delaware Water Gap and the end of PA is just five days away, leaving only a couple hundred miles of New Jersey and New York. I’m taking what may be my last zero day today here in Hamburg to eat and resupply, and then perhaps one last push on to Pawling. This experience has been overwhelming, in all senses of the word, and I don’t regret a minute of it, but I am ready to go home.