Date: 2015-06-26
From: Delaware Water Gap 

To: Camp site 1315.6
Miles today: 22.2
Weather: scattered clouds

Today was a wildlife extravaganza day. Just wait to read what all we saw. But first, the boring parts. We woke in a nice, comfy, soft bed. It was hard to rub the drowsiness from our brain. But, we knew we had to. We dressed, packed our backpacks and enjoyed breakfast with our trail angel, Ken. Then, it was time to leave the comfort of a home and head to the trail.   Our trail angel drove us to Delaware Water Gap. It was about an hour drive. We had a pleasant conversation and before we knew it, our job (hiking the AT) was before us. We said goodbye and thanked Ken for his gracious hospitality. And, we were left to start the trail. We went to the church hostel first as we were to meet Outlier. Someone said she was at the Farmer's Bakery. We walked there, no Outlier. But, we ordered sandwiches to go for lunch. Then, we headed to the trail.   The first two miles were flat, level, toad walking. We walked through the outskirts of Delaware Water Gap. We crossed the Delaware River on the I80 bridge. We were told, the Delaware River was unusually high. We can attest to that as we have experienced the many rains. While crossing the bridge we finished Pennsylvania and started the next state, New Jersey.    We entered Kittatinny State Park. We started to climb, climb, climb of over 1000 feet. The trail was less rocky then previous trails. It wasn't a hard climb except for as lk the water running down the trail. Yes, all the rain has caused streams to form on the trail. And, this makes it difficult to hike. As we were climbing, Count looked up the trail. A bear was walking towards him down the trail. Count looked at the bear, the bear looked at him. Then, the bear slowly turned off the trail and meandered off the trail. It didn't seem scared of us at all. We saw a beautiful pond ahead, Sunfish Pond. The trail went around pond. We thought "wonderful, a nice trail around the pond". We thought wrong. We had to crawl over rocks around pond. The pond losed it's appeal because of this. We did hear bull frogs. The were very, very loud. Count saw a snake slither across the trail.   The trail wound through a scrub forest which included lots of rocks. No, the rocks didn't end in Pennsylvania. We saw a beautiful bluebird, a bluebird, as we climbed to Kittatinny Mountain where we had lunch. The view was spectacular from our lunch break area. There were wild blueberries. We had to pick a few to taste them. MMMM, they were goid.   We hiked in the open for awhile after lunch. Thankfully, the full sun was blocked by some clouds. We went down to a gap. Only to have to climb out of the gap. We climbed higher till we came to a fire tower. Because we didn't feel we climbed enough, we climbed to the top of the tower. As we were there, Outlier found us. We spent the rest of the day hiking with Outlier.    We continued hiking up the trail when all of a sudden we came upon a porcupine waddling down the middle of the trail. Count was looking down at the trail and probably would have run into him if Outlier hadn't seen him. The porcupine didn't seem at all concerned about us as he went about his business. He wandered off the trail and we watched him for some time before he finally went out of sight.    The rocks continued for the next section of trail and we were complaining about an upcoming boulder scramble we could see, when all of a sudden Lavender called out "bear!" Just off the trail was a very large black bear.   He was just leisurely walking through the woods and wasn't at all concerned with 3 hikers walking the trail. The bears in New Jersey don't seem to be afraid at all of people.      We scrambled up the rock climb asking why we hadn't heard about these rocks. We had heard about the rock scrambles of Pennsylvania but have heard nothing about New Jersey. Unfortunately, the brutal rocks of Pennsylvania did not stop at the New Jersey border! We hiked on passing another waddling porcupine. We haven't seen any porcupines in over 1300 miles. Yes, we went over the 1300 mile mark today. Now, we see two porcupines in one day.    We also saw some crazy looking beetles today. They are iridescent rainbow looking beetles.   We hadn't seen these before and today we saw 5 of them. They are beautiful. Well, beautiful for beetles.    We had a nice level almost rockless trail for a few miles. We were making great time hiking. But, this stopped abruptly when we came up to more boulders. Of course we climbed these. We thought we should be arriving at the place we were planning on tenting. There was to be a water source nearby. We were discussing how far we had to hike yet. We came over the top of the last boulder and saw a tent. Surely this could not be our destination. There were rocks everywhere and no water source. We checked our map. Sure enough, this was the tenting area. We did hear a stream. At least there was water. We looked around. Outlier found a semi-rockless place to tent. We went a bit further on a side trail. We found a place we thought would be big enough for our tent. It was soft as it was leaf covered. We set our tent up and it fit. We were golden for the night. We retrieved water and had dinner. We bear bagged our food since we saw bears today. We also hung our hiking poles. We have heard porcupines chew on the handles of hiking poles for the salt. We even washed up a bit in the stream. We also brought our boots into the tent. Again, porcupines like to chew on boots. It was later than normal, so we relaxed and attempted to go to sleep. Yes, attempted. The coyotes started howling. They are very eerie sounding. Pretty much got Lavender excited! They finally stopped howling. And we tried to go to sleep. You know our favorite night bird, right? Well, it started whippoorwilling. Count tried to find it with our headlight. That must have scared it as it stopped. Next and finally the last sound before we went to sleep was an owl hooting. Yes, today was a wildlife extravaganza!! Oh and the foam on Lavender's backpack seemed to cushion her. That is good news. Now, the bruising just needs to heal.