July 10

Shower time

We got a good start out of camp this morning.  Tink and Slims woke Apache and I up.  They always manage to get up early, so they're acting as our alarm clock now.  Early on, we crossed over a really pretty iron bridge at Swarta Gap.  We had more nice hiking this morning and soon climbed back up onto another ridge line.  As we crossed under I-81, there was some trail magic left there by Sonic, a fellow hiker who is a couple days ahead of us now.  We stopped for lunch at William Penn shelter.  Since this morning, the heat hasn't let up at all.  Not in triple digits at least, but 90s and humid, day after day.  We got to the 501 shelter in the middle of the afternoon and stopped for a long break.  This is a really nice shelter.  More like a single room house.  Fully enclosed with four walls, bunks all around the sides, picnic table in the middle of the room under a big skylight.  There's also an outdoor shower.  Basically just a garden hose stuck through a hole in the shower stall wall, but nice to have on a hot day like this.  My shorts and socks are totally saturated with sweat, and they stink like nothing else.  So I washed the salt off of my body, and rinsed out my clothes in the shower.  Surprisingly, we didn't get sucked in to staying there, even though the accommodations would have been really nice.  We kept on hiking in the late afternoon, finally stopping at the Hertline campsite.  Good idea.  This was a really great spot.  Things had started to cool off in the evening a bit, and the water source here was really good.  We all set up camp in a grove of hemlock trees, right next to a massive boulder field.  We got a nice campfire going, and cooked dinner.  Before heading to bed, we fired off the last of the fireworks we had, right in the middle of the boulder field.

AT crossing an old iron bridge, built in 1890, at Swarta Gap, Pa.