Date: 2014-06-10
From: Doyle Hotel, Duncannon, PA

To: Spring in Clark Valley
Miles today: 17.3

Day 27: We didn't plan it that way, but it sure worked out. It rained over a inch during the night and we were snug in our hotel room. We were supposed to go to the town's campground last night, but decided to stay in the funky hotel instead, even though it added an extra mile to today's hike.We were up at 6am, packed up and headed across the street to a cafe that opened at 6am for breakfast. We had a hearty breakfast to start our big hike day. The cafe also had a little area of "goodies" for hikers to replace some of their supplies. It was a good thing too because we realized we were short a lunch. 2 days ago on our hike from Boiling Springs to Darlington Shelter, we were suppose to stop at a cafe for lunch. In our haste to beat the rains, we forgot and blew right passed the cafe and ate one our regular lunches. (This complicated plan of eating out so we don't have to carry the food, doesn't work if we forget to look at the plan!) So it was a Snickers bars and Pop-tarts for lunch today...Mmmm.We finally hit the trail at 7:15am. After a walk through Duncannon, we crossed 2 massive bridges over the Juniata and Susquehanna Rivers. Next was a 1000-foot climb. Unfortunately, the temperature was already 70 degrees, with high humidity due to the rains, so the sweat was soon rolling off of us.By the end of our climb we were happy to see the top...that was until we saw that the ridge we next had to traverse was made up of large slabs of rock on edge. To negotiate these, we had to climb up, jump from rock to rock, climb down., then repeat it on the next group of rocks. It was tiring, rough on the knees and slow going. To add to the "fun" the rocks were still wet and slippery from the previous night's rain. In fact, as we proceeded this way for almost a mile, we became concerned that we weren't going to make our goal of 17+ miles. Fortunately, after a while our trail turned to something more trail-like, although with a lot of inbedded rocks. We pushed ourselves to do three 2-hour stints, and then a couple shorter ones. We finally reached the trail junction with the trail to our destination spring.To our surpise, there was a note to us at the junction from a young man, Treebeard, letting us know there were campsites by the spring, but better campsites 0.3 miles furture by an upcoming creek. This was great info since the book we use to guide us on this hike gave no indication of campsites in either place. We had come here on a "wing and a prayer" because Spider thought there HAD to be places to camp based on how flat the topo map indicated the area was.We had first met Treebeard about 2 weeks ago as he headed south on the AT. His plan was to head south from the Mason-Dixon line to the southern terminous of the AT, then flip back to the Mason-Dixon line and head north to the northern terminous. As I've said before, there are lots of ways to do this hike. After heading south for 300 miles, Treebeard changed his mind and decided to head north early. So he got a ride back to the Mason-Dixon line and headed north. He caught up with us at Darlington Shelter, 2 nights ago. He was one of the drenched latecomers. He also joined us for a break on the trail the next day and at the Doyle Hotel. He is an Eagle Scout and has just graduated from college. When he passed us today, we discussed possible places to camp, thus the note to us.We decided to camp near the spring, so finally stumbled into camp at 6:45pm. After 11.5 hours of hiking, we're going to sleep well tonight!!Animal sighting: a black and yellow racer snake crossed the trail in front of Spider