Look what arrived in the mail today. According to the customs declaration, it’s a key-chain from Hong Kong.
It wasn’t a key-chain at all, it’s a Trockenbrenstoff-Kocher!!
The kitchen scale says it weighs 3/8 of an ounce. That rocks!
The old-school esbit “trench heater” type stove weighs 3-1/8 ounces.
“Big Deal,” you say, “that’s only saving you 2.75 ounces!”
Well, that means I can bring along a whole extra pack of Ramen Noodles, smartass!
Girtong has never been backpacking before, but he’s been reading trailournals all summer, and so he wanted to try it out. We scraped together enough borrowed equipment to outfit him for adventure and headed for the Appalachian Trail.
Yesterday morning, we arrived at a very foggy Swatara State Park, where we saw some intrepid kayakers.
We climbed up the mountain, took in some scenery, and pitched the tarp near the William Penn Shelter.
It was windy and cold camped up on the ridge, but we survived the night. This morning, we fortified ourselves with some instant oatmeal and highly concentrated tar instant coffee, and pushed on to route 501.
There are lots of nice views of the Lebanon Valley to the south.
It was a nice overnighter. We had good weather, and kept the mileage very low.
There are a few more pictures in my gallery, but for some damn fool reason, my camera was in 640×480 mode the whole time, so nothing terribly high-res this time.
Did you know that if you hike all 798 miles of State Forest Hiking Trails in Pennsylvania, they give you an award?
Well, they do. You get a certificate, a patch, and a “ceremonial walking stick.”
I would really like to have my very own ceremonial walking stick.
I’d also like to finish walking all of the Appalachian trail in Pennsylvania. All together, it comes out to about a thousand miles of walking.
At the end of this, I will be a grizzled old mountain man.
With a ceremonial walking stick.
You will all, no doubt, be greatly jealous of my grizzled manliness, and of my walking stick. If you ask nicely, I will whack you in the head with it.
My walking stick, that is. Not my grizzled manliness.
This past weekend, I went with my Evil Sister and Klinutus to backpack around the West Canada Lake Wilderness in the Adirondacks.
We left immediately after work on Thursday night, as it’s a 9 hour drive from Harrisburg. We finally got to the trailhead at 3:00AM Friday morning. There was a clear sky and no light pollution there, so I flopped my bivy down right next to the car, and stared off into space and time until I fell asleep.
After a few hours, but before the sun came up, I had an intestinal emergency. I fumbled through my pack for my flashlight and poop shovel
A few hours later, I awoke to the morning sun, which revealed a perfectly good outhouse right across the parking lot. Doh!
As a public service, I have included this outhouse on the map, so that others needn’t poop into holes in the ground.
At first light, we hiked down the French Louis trail, where we encountered a filthy looking backpacker who informed us that we were the first people he’d seen in 3 days.
We were not very far into the woods, when we came upon this little fellow. I nearly sewered him with my trekking pole before my sister alerted me to his presence. It was still pretty cold outside, and he was a little slow trying to hop off into the woods. This is how I was able to get my camera right up close for a picture.
There are these little Adirondack lean-to shelters all over the place. Many of them are built right on a lake, so you have unbelievable views in them. A couple of them had cooking implements hanging from them, so you don’t have to bring your own, if you don’t mind cooking with unclean pots of indeterminate origin.
We found one of these shelters unoccupied Friday afternoon and claimed it for ourselves. It had quite a view.
Saturday morning, we futzed around in camp until quite late making breakfast and coffee and looking at the view. When we finally did get underway, we found that beavers had constructed a dam, which caused a detour of the trail, forcing us to hike around the beaver pond.
The extra walking did not dampen Klinutus’ spirits, as evidenced by his insane butt-monkey dance on the bridge over a stream crossing.
We had perfect weather for the whole endeavor. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, day or night.
Saturday night, all the lean-tos were full, so we found another spot with a nice view of the lake. Klinutus built a fire, we had dinner, watched the sun go down, and slept out under the stars.
Sunday morning we had a fairly easy 5 mile walk back to the car, where we saw (but did not photograph) a beaver and two grouse.
It was a wondrous trip, even though my legs are so sore I can barely walk a day and half after I got off the trail.
There’s a few more pictures in my Gallery, in case all these pictures didn’t do it for you.
I’m back from my weekend bike-camping trip to Pine Creek. It was a very nice trip, but I am too tired to blog about it. Here are some pictures instead.
This Weekend: 65 miles
Oct: 75 miles
2008 Utility Miles: 350
2008 Total Miles: 784 miles
The Bike Camping Trip is going down Oct 4th and 5th. If you want to come, let me know NOW. I’m calling DCNR for the camping permit this week.
It’ll be about 37 miles the first day, and 25 the second, give or take. It’s all flat, easy, rail trail riding.
Bring your fancy camera lenses; the leaves should be very pretty.
I was talking to The Sloth after critical mass the other night, and we mulled over the idea of doing an overnight bike-camping trip to do the Pine Creek Rail Trail, ideally in full leaf season (Early October maybe?).
This would be a slow, meandering ride, with many stops to take pictures, scratch our butts, and enjoy the quiet of the wilderness.
The trail is about 70 miles long, so we would ride about 35 miles each day, unless everyone wants to skip some of the less scenic southern sections.
We’ll need to secure a camping permit from DCNR, so we’re gonna need a headcount and we’ll have to pick a weekend fairly soon.
If interested, please leave a comment, or send me an email and let me know which weekend works best for you.
I did this by myself last year, and it was really nice.
Tex, Expedia says round-trip airfare from SDF to MDT is $206.00. You know you want to come.
I’ve been a little busy with some work-related stuff, but I finally got time to post pictures from my river trip.
We camped out at Black Moshannon State Park Friday night, so we’d all be packed up and ready to go first thing Saturday morning.
The weatherman was predicting rain for the whole weekend. Fortunately, he is totally incompetent.
This stretch of the river has no towns or development of any kind. There aren’t even any roads along it, only an old (abandoned?) railroad track. So, even though our choice of legal campsites was quite limited, the selection of good campsites was practically infinite.
Once we made camp, a series of thunderstorms forced me to cook dinner under my tarp, but the storms moved through quickly.
After the storms had passed, we hung out around the campfire.
While I abstained from intoxicating liquors, some of the crew imbibed deeply.
Sunday morning, those of us without hangovers went down to the riverbank, made coffee, and took panoramic photographs of the foggy river.
After the fog burned off, we had another nice, sunny day on the water
I made a google map of the trip, in case anyone wants to try to reproduce our results.
I took my new backpack out for a proper overnight camping trip this weekend.
The weather was very nice on Saturday. It was warm and sunny, and all the streams got full and gurgly from melting snow.
Gurgly stream
I had about 25 pounds in the Catalyst, and it was very comfortable. I packed a few pounds more than I needed to, but I still made an effort to stick to the ‘lightweight’ style.
I slept under a tarp, but I had a 4 pound sleeping bag, which was probably a good thing, because It got kind of cold out.
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My Campsite (before the snow)
When I woke up, everything was covered in new snow, which was all very pretty. Unfortunately, some snow blew in under the tarp, and my sleeping bag got a little wet.
The Stony Gap Trail
Calamity! My camera suffered a major technical problem, and I lost about half of the pictures from this adventure. I imagine that nobody even reads my words, since they just look at the pictures.
Since I don’t have any more pictures, I guess I don’t need any more words.
Update: You can now follow along in Google maps.
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