Date: 2014-06-01
From: Port Clinton, PA

To: Wind Gap
Miles today: 60.8
Weather: overcast clouds

Day 81: Sunday, 1 June 2014 at Wind Gap (1272.1)We made it to Wind Gap. [That¢s where the rock gym is, correct?] Well, one of the guys checked on line to see how much it costs to climb there. It¢s a little expensive, but we also find out that it¢s closed on Mondays. I¢m not going to wait a day to go climbing. This will help me feel better about spending $25 on dinner tonight!Oh, yeah, we came out of Lehigh Gap and THAT was the rock climbing I needed! Mom, I have a confession ¢ I¢ve NEVER seen that kind of rock climb on a ¢hike¢ before. Maybe it was like one of the climbs with Connor, on one of the peaks in Oregon, where there was a sketchy rock climb/scramble at the top. The climb out of Lehigh Gap was like a Class 3 climb! There was a rock climb, then a rock scramble; another rock climb and then a rock hop! BUT the views at the top were really beautiful. You could see the river (the Lehigh River) winding through the valley below.[There was a new Guest Book entry just today from a guy named Todd.]Oh, good, he found my journal. We met him Friday night in camp, and he hiked with us for a couple days. He did a 24-mile day with us yesterday when he was only expecting to do a 17 or 18-miler. He was pretty proud of his 24-miler! He¢s a cop here in a town in Pennsylvania.I also met a guy who went to Stanford and is going on to med school. [Last year on the PCT Buffalo met people who had done outdoor-type jobs. Now, it seems, he¢s getting a sense of other types of jobs. Me thinks he¢ll still stick to the outdoor side of it.]The weather¢s been great. I¢ve cowboy camped several nights. It¢s been great.Out here on the trail, it¢s so cool that who you talk to and make friends with, are those around you. I want to bring that back home.You know that delicious chocolate you put in the box? After I ate and shared it, the caretaker of the campground, where we were staying, brought out double stuffed Oreos! I ate several double-stuffed then I created a few triple-stuff. I then put a couple layers of chocolate in a few quadruple-stuffed cookies. I don¢t know if it was the sugar or the caffeine in the chocolate, but I was up until 3am the other night with Mariposa, talking! I did OK hiking the next day, but I ought to get to bed soon tonight. (It was 10:30pm, his time, when he called!)[On a walk after Buffalo¢s call, FAHthur and I were discussing Buffalo¢s experiences on the Appalachian Trail versus the Pacific Crest Trail. Being a hydrology engineer, and having worked for the State of Maryland and now Washington, FAHthur commented that, unlike the PCT where the trail crosses one major river, the Columbia, as it creates a good portion of the Oregon-Washington border, the Appalachian Trail crosses several major rivers: the James, Shenandoah, Potomac, Susquehanna, Lehigh, Delaware, Hudson, Connecticut (through Vermont), and Kennebec (Maine). We were hard-pressed to come up with any other major rivers that the PCT crosses ¢ lots of creeks and streams forming and coming out of the mountains, but no other major rivers, and I don¢t think the California Aqua Duct counts. Just an interesting observation.]