Date: 2018-06-12
To: North of I-81
Miles today: 21.0
Weather: broken clouds

Day 7I looked at my new app and saw a stream 1 mike ahead, all downhill.  I decided to break camp and hike to the water to eat breakfast.  There was a great campsite near the stream and I kind of wished I had hiked another mile yesterday to camp there, but then I wouldn¢t have had this cool app.  I ate breakfast, filled my water bottles, and hiked in.The trail ascended along a gently sloping crushed gravel path.  After quite a while, I realized I hadn¢t seen a white blaze in quite a distance.  Should I hike forward and look for them or hike back and look for them. Wait!  I had a new cool app!  I looked at the map of the trail and the blue dot that was me and they were not together.  I was a long way from the trail.  I retraced my steps and the blue dot slowly moved closer to the trail.  By the time the blue dot intersected the Trail, I was almost back at my breakfast spot.  I had seen a double blaze, which means ¢Pay close attention, the trail is changing in some way,¢ but I didn¢t notice the trail veered left and the gravel path went right.  I added 2 miles to my day¢s hike.I came across Yellow Spring Village site, an abandoned mining area.  It was wooded but grassy.  Someone had set up stone ¢chairs¢ with flat seats and backs.  It was to much luxury to pass up, so I had lunch.  While I ate, three ladies stopped by.  They were section hiking the AT with day hikes.  One of the ladies husband dropped them in the morning and then dive to a road crossing ahead of them, picked them up and drove them to a hotel.  That also seemed like a great way to hike the AT.After lunch I hiked on; I passed the three lady day hikers as they were eating their lunch. Late in the afternoon I came to a small wooden bridge over a small stream.  It would have been uneventful, except a recent storm had clogged the footbridge with branches and leaves so the creek left its bed on the other side of the bridge.  In fact the stream was a couple hundred yards wide and the trail for the next couple hundred yards was under at jest a foot of water.  This was not one of those cases where you stepped from rock to rock.  I had three choices. (1) Walk through the water with my shoes on and then hike with wet shoes and socks.  (2) Take off my shoes and socks and walk through the water barefoot.  (3) Take off my shoes and socks and wear Crocks through the water.  Option 3 would have been a great option, if I had Crocks.  I took off my shoes and socks and stepped into the water.  It was cold, but not unbearable.  The trail under the water was sometimes muddy, sometimes rocky, and sometimes covered in slippery, tangled tree roots.  The biggest challenge was cleaning and drying my feet at the other end before putting on my shoes and socks.  I used my bloody bandanna for that.On the other side of the water, was a man waiting for the three lady hikers. He was hiking in to meet them but turned back at the water.  I told him they were quite a distance back but we¢re headed this way.  He was being overwhelmed by mosquitos, so I dug out my insect repellent fir him.  While I was hiking, the mosquitos didn¢t seem bad at all, but when I stopped to put on my shoes, they were swarming.  He wondered if the ladies could get through the water.  I said they really had no choice.I hiked on through a Swatara State Park, under I-81, and up a mountain to a campsite.  No one was camping there.  I set up my tent, hung my bear bag, cleaned up, and ate supper.  I like to hang the food bag before I eat because sometimes it takes a while.  Then if it is starting to get dark after I eat, I just put all the food stuff into the bag and house it up, suspended between two trees.Just as I was crawling into my tent, a group of thru hikers rolled into camp. It was the group I had run into my first couple days out.  Suddenly my wilderness campsite was transformed into a small village.  It wasn¢t too long before they had set up camp, eaten, and were preparing for bed.  They had all walked through the water with their hiking shoes and were trying to figure out the best way to dry their shoes.