Hiker Number Six
All right. It’s July 4th today, and when I woke up this morning, I was at the Marriott Courtyard in Reading, Pennsylvania, with my friend Scott. We were up and out by about 7:30 or 8, but we weren't in any huge hurry. The first order of business was hitting the grocery store for some resupply. In the parking lot, I sorted all my food and repacked my food bag and did a pretty miserable job of packing my backpack. But I did the best I could, considering I was in the middle of a parking lot.
Next, we made our way to a diner. I’m quite delighted that the trail is moving into a part of the United States where the diner is a very popular restaurant concept. Diners are great. It seemed like a good opportunity to try to pack as much food into myself as humanly possible since I had a decent hike ahead of me. So I got an egg sandwich on a croissant and some French toast with strawberries. After that, I was absolutely stuffed.
Scott drove me back to the trail and dropped me off at about 11 o'clock. I was feeling fueled from my great visit with him, plus the ridiculous number of calories I’d just ingested from the French toast, but for whatever reason, I was nervous about heading back out. This happens literally every time I take a break from the trail, even a short one. You'd think that after more than 1,200 miles, I'd lose the nerves, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
It was already very hot out, and the first thing I had to tackle on the trail was a nice, big, steep climb. As I've mentioned a few times already, leaving town always means a big uphill right off the bat, and leaving Port Clinton was no exception. A not insignificant climb combined with some toasty weather made for a bit of a rude welcome back to the trail.
As I was approaching the top of the climb, I could hear some very strange footsteps, or at least what I thought were footsteps of some kind — kind of a clomping, maybe? Not sure how to describe them. Anyway, they kept getting louder and closer, and then some guy appears riding a horse and pulling another horse behind him.
Technically, the Appalachian Trail is a horse-free zone. I didn't want to say anything too directly about that, though, so I was just like, “Hey, that’s the first horse I've seen on the AT,” and he shot back, “Well, it's okay because we’re on state game land,” which was a bit rude, but it gave me the information I was after.
An interesting thing about hiking through Pennsylvania is that there are lots of signs around stating that the trail passes through state game lands and to be aware that there might be active hunters around. I don't think we’re in the middle of any kind of hunting season right now, but it’s still a little alarming, or concerning, to know that people could be in the area, shooting at deer when hikers are passing through. They tell you to wear neon orange, but I don't know how many hikers are going to pack neon orange clothing just to get through Pennsylvania.
Not long after that, I bumped into Karaoke and Sleepwalker, who were hiking together. I had been thinking about stopping for the day at the Windsor Furnace shelter, which was coming up soon, because there were some heavy storms predicted for the afternoon, and I didn't want to get caught in them. This was roughly around 2 o'clock, and I’d done about 12 miles by then. I figured I’d rather stop a little early for the day than get slammed by a storm.
But Karaoke said that he’d been talking with a friend of his, who is an avid amateur meteorologist, and the friend had said that the storms wouldn't move in until a lot later in the day. So based on that information, I decided to hike an additional 9 miles, which would get me to the Eckville Shelter.
Just past the Windsor Furnace shelter, there was another big climb, which I hadn't anticipating doing. But there's always the “pay now or pay later” dynamic on the trail, and I'm usually happy whenever I go ahead and hike extra miles in a day, if I can. Even though it was really hot, and the climb was really steep, in the end, I was happy to have done it.
Near the top, there's an outcropping called the Pinnacle, and there are a couple different trails you can take to get up there. And today, there were a lot of day hikers out, which I think was because it’s the Fourth of July. While I was there, I bumped into Big Tuna, who is another thru-hiker. Really nice guy. The last time I’d seen him was at the Bear's Den, which is toward the end of the roller coaster, more than 200 miles ago. It was nice to cross paths with him again.
The hike from where I’d seen Karaoke and Sleepwalker just before the shelter up to the Pinnacle had been very rocky. Rocksylvania was definitely living up to its name, so the miles had been pretty slow going up to that point. But thankfully, after I left the Pinnacle area, the trail started following an access road, and it was just beautifully smooth. I mean, it wasn't paved or anything, but it was a dirt road. And relative to what the trail had been like for the previous 4 miles or so, it was just delightful and exactly what I needed.
At about 6:30, I got to the Eckville shelter, which is a free shelter on someone’s private property. I don't really know the story behind it. [Wife note: I couldn’t find any info about its history or anything, just a bunch of hiker posts mentioning it.] It has six bunks in a shed, and when I showed up, I was a hiker number six, so I got a bed. I was pretty excited about that. The forecast is for heavy rain overnight, so I wanted to get a spot inside.
The other five hikers here are all incredibly nice. And the way that the shelter is set up is very conducive to socializing, so we all sat around for a bit chatting and had a good conversation. Two of the guys here are No Rush the Elder and Chopstix, who are both in their 60s. They’re hiking together and taking their sweet time, which is great. Good for them.
No Rush the Elder & Chopstix [Credit: Christopher Marshburn]
[Wife note: Both of these guys have vlogs, if anyone is interested: No Rush the Elder and Chopstix.]
There are also two other guys, Pickup and Strider, and a woman who’s from Germany. Her trail name is You Did. Her Americanized name is Judith, but she of course has a German accent, and when she was trying to tell someone her name, they said it sounded like “you did.” And that’s how she got her hiker name.
All of us were talking about how the springs and small, seasonal streams that are within a couple miles of the Eckfield shelter — probably more like within 8 miles of the shelter — are all dry right now. I feel bad for any hikers who might be counting on that water, but if you look at the comments on Far Out, you’d know that everything is dry. I made a joke to You Did that I was going to post a comment that they're all “the number three in German,” and she thought that was funny.
The caretaker for the shelter lives in a house on the property that has the bunkhouse I’m staying in, and there's another shed that has a shower and a bathroom in it with a flush toilet. It's very rudimentary, but to a hiker, it feels really luxurious. At one point, the caretaker came out, and he's this sort of older, gruff guy, but he brought us all Pop-Ice freezer pops, which tasted great on such a hot day. That was really nice of him.
Everyone ate dinner and was cleaning up when the storms started moving in. I had been hoping to take a shower after dinner, but the weather obviously had different plans. We all rushed to get our stuff inside the bunkhouse, and then the skies just opened up. It was some crazy rain. We had to shut the doors to the bunkhouse because the wind was so strong that it was raining inside.
After a while, it all settled out a bit. It was still raining, but very lightly. The caretaker came out again to check his rain gauge and told us that it had rained an inch and a half in 90 minutes. So, that was a huge storm. But the upside was that it cooled things off a bit, and now it feels surprisingly comfortable in the shed. I have a spot on a top bunk, I’ve set up my air mattress, and I’m about to listen to the episode of the Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend podcast with Jack McBrayer.
Not sure what my plan is for tomorrow, exactly. I think it’ll depend a lot on the temperature. These super hot days are really brutal, and I’m a bit concerned about how limited the water sources are getting in this section of the trail.
