July 16

PA disco party

We did well, and got a pretty good start this morning.  Got a hitch back to the trail pretty quickly.  As soon as we got back into the woods again, we started climbing.  After a short distance, Slims and Apache were up ahead of me checking out a view.  At the base of the rock scramble, you could look back behind you and see Lehigh Gap.  The road, and the Lehigh River were already hundreds of feet below us.  We broke down our trekking poles and strapped them to our packs.  We wouldn't need them for this section.  I took my time here.  In several places I had to reach up and pull myself up and over a ledge.  Then shimmy sideways across another narrow, precarious rock.  Then more walking over rocks and boulders.  Ever so often, I'd stop and look back.  It was exhilarating.  I felt like a mountain goat.  I laughed.  I couldn't believe this was the trail.  It was awesome, fun, and pretty terrifying all at the same time.  The trail was blazed fairly well through the climb, white blazes just painted on the rocks.  I did lose it once though, climbing about 150 feet up the boulders before coming to a dead end and realizing that I hadn't seen a blaze in a while.  I went back down the way I came until I found a blaze again, and soon figured out where I had made a mistake, and got back on the trail.  After the summit, the trail leveled out onto a rocky, exposed ridge.  This whole area is around an area that had been a zinc mine or something.  The trees are all dead and it's nothing but rocks.  Some shrubs and trees are trying to make a recovery.  We got back into the woods eventually.  There were some nice blackberry bushes.  We were a little worried they might be polluted, but we risked it.  They were delicious.  We also saw some baby wild turkeys fly away.  We stopped at a campsite for lunch.  Rainbow Eyes was there.  He was getting a late start, trying to dry out his wet gear from the storm last night.  Tink and Samson had camped nearby too.  It was good to hear that everyone had managed to get past the climb before the storm hit.  The rest of the afternoon was nice and cool.  Relatively cool, rather.  The sun stayed hidden behind clouds.  All the way to the Delps Trail, was really nice, with lots of ferns, and open forest that you could see a long way into.  Not overgrown at all.  Sure enough though the trail brought back the rocks.  Late this afternoon I kept on walking over all kinds of rocks.  Some especially horrible ones are really small, but have just tiny, sharp, knife-like points sticking up out of the ground.  Hit a few of those in a row the wrong way and you're swearing up and down the trail.  We made it to the Leroy Smith shelter after a respectable 16 mile day.  The first water source there was dry, so it took everyone a long time to get water at the source that was about 0.4 miles away.  Regardless, we found a really great tenting area away from the shelter.  The trees were really far apart, and the woods had a open, airy feel.  There was a nice fire ring.  I realized that we were soon going to be out of Pennsylvania soon, and hadn't broken out the disco ball in this state.  So I used my bear bag rope, and hung up the ball and the motor from a couple of trees.  Once it got dark and everyone had eaten dinner, I plugged up the mp3 player to my speakers, queued up a dubstep playlist, broke out a bunch of glow sticks, and we all danced around.  The headlamp shining on the disco ball shot hundreds of spinning white lights all around us.  We set up a headlamp under a green bowl and turned it on flashing mode, so we had a cool green strobe light.  We all twirled around the glow sticks in the dark to the beat.  It was awesome.  So much fun that it made carrying this thing this far totally worth it.  Word is slowly getting around on the trail, so I hope we can start recruiting some more people to disco party it up with us later down the trail.

Apache starting the climb out of Lehigh Gap.