Date: 2011-06-09
From: (73) Palmerton, Jail House Hostel

To: (74) Delps Trail
Miles today: 9.6

German Shepherd, Hand-Me-Down, and I woke up and had breakfast at the subway down the street. I ate a 6 inch sub, and then a 12 inch after that, plus numerous cups of soda. Next we went to the library, where I typed up another trail journal.Hand-Me-Down¢s ¢Woman¢ was coming to visit him (he is from Tennessee, she is from Delaware, and they are meeting in northern Pennsylvania¢¦right¢¦), so we decided to stick around Palmerton for the day and go swimming at the community pool we had heard about (German Shepherd and I had gone into the Palmerton Visitor¢s Center where we met a man who could speak German and had lived in Germany for a few years, who drew us directions to the pool on the back of a post card and then gave it to us. German Shepherd and I then went outside and had a good laugh when we saw Hand-Me-Down and his ¢Woman¢ walking down the sidewalk towards us, because she was actually good looking, the last thing either of us had expected). When we got there the pool was massive in size, with three diving boards, slide, basketball courts, and trees for shade. The now four of us spent the day swimming, shooting hoops, and sitting in the shade reading. I did not get sunburned thanks to my pre-existing tan, but German Shepherd looked like a boiled lobster. None of us knew what the time was, and we did not care. When we finally left, the temperature had risen to a scorching 95 degrees; perfect hiking weather!Hand-Me-Down¢s ¢Woman¢ offered German Shepherd and I a ride back to the trail. Her car on the outside looked like several cars welded together, and the inside was covered in drawings and poems written in marker. They were all over the seats, ceiling, and even the dash. It really gave the car some personality, and I felt as though I had fallen into diary or something. After an accelerated ride narrowly avoiding several accidents (I guess they don¢t have stop signs, traffic lights, or pedestrians in Delaware), German Shepherd and I were back on the trail. Hand-Me-Down, of course, had better things to do, and so we said goodbye to our friend. The trail leading out of Palmerton was brutal. After backtracking several times through a poorly marked area, and already sweating buckets, we climbed up a mountain made of pure rock that was very steep with no shade in the baking heat. We could not have picked a worse day to do such a climb, nor a worse time of day on the worst day (at least the view was spectacular). I left German Shepherd behind almost immediately, climbing on all fours and passing scores of day hikers on my way to the summit. At the top I found a grass covered ridge line, flat and extending as far as I could see. While walking through the grass I began to feel a sensation on my legs, like something crawling over my skin (those of you with weak stomachs stop reading). I looked down to find an unfathomable number of ticks scurrying up my legs towards my shorts. I shouted in displeasure, gagged, and then began picking them off with both hands as fast as I could, trying to keep the ones that were higher up from reaching my shorts where they would be harder to find. There were maybe 20 on each leg, and I had gotten all of them at nearly the same time. I must have walked through a giant ball of the ticks like you sometimes see in National Geographic, and the thought of it made me shiver. For the rest of the day I was paranoid as hell, and it was a good thing too because I kept finding more.Around 6:30pm I was ready to call it quits and camp, but the ridge line contained no water for a ten mile stretch, so I had little choice but to continue. Then to my surprise a breeze picked up, the air cooled, and it began to thunder and rain (luckily I had just left the exposed part of the grassy ridge line and had tree cover). I was hiking shirtless, so at first the rain was refreshing as it washed the sweat off of my body, but then it began to hail. Chunks of ice pelted and stung my body, sticking to my hair or falling between my pack and my back where they collected into snowballs. I had gone from intolerably hot to teeth chattering cold in minutes, and I loved every second of the miserable nonsense. (You have to have a sense of humor to survive the AT)Soaking wet and having fallen down for the third time ever on the trail, I decided to make camp. I pulled out my rectangular tarp and made a shelter between two trees. The ground was saturated, so I lined the edges of the tarp with rocks instead of relying on my stakes to hold. When I got inside I discovered that I had tied the thing too low to the ground, and could not roll over without scraping the ceiling. I stripped my wet clothes off in what little space I had, and then lied there, hot and being attacked by mosquitoes. I fell asleep crooked because of the rocks that dug into my side. Today was 50/50. Half of it was a fairy tale, and the other was a slap in the face.