Date: 2005-06-21
From: Duncannon, Pa.

To: Second Mountain
Miles today: 30.6

10 am It's Summer Solstice, it's supposed to be Hike Naked Day. I think I might bypass that, I might look. Right now I'm at Peters Mountain Shelter. Looking at the register, I see people were here last night and people walked through this morning. I'm very glad about that because I have spent HOURS this morning walking through ridiculous amounts of webs. I just discovered that not all of these webs are spider webs, there are these little green caterpillars that drop down from the trees on webs. I found this out because I had stopped and looked down at my pants and gaiters and they were covered in these little green worms from walking through these webs. I then went to wipe my face off, and I looked at my hands to find patches of green slime on them. That's real nice.   The air is just saturated with bugs this morning, too. I put my bandana over my face this morning and walked like that for a couple of hours to keep from sucking them all up and getting them in my nose and down my shirt. The biggest blessing today is that it has been a fairly cool morning, so I can cover up a bit and I'm not overheating. There are no mosquitoes yet, but just about every other bug in the world is out. The bees hang suspended in the middle of the Trail, you don't even see them until you're face to face with them. They don't even seem to move.I hot a couple of patches of famous Pennsylvania rocks this morning. Little samplers of what's to come, it's going to get alot worse. So far, it's not bad, I put some extra padding on my feet in preperation for this section.I left very early this morning, I was walking by 5:20. The reason I left early is because I figured I would take my time and do a 29+ mile day today all the way to Rausch Gap Shelter. This way I can have Kevin pick me up in the morning at Pa 501.I didn't see any naked hikers today. I didn't really see many hikers at all. I did see some day hikers. As soon as I left Peters Mountain Shelter, about 20 teenagers going southbound walked up and started asking me questions. They had been on a 5 mile hike and they had all kinds of questions about how far I had walked and when I had left, all the standard questions. They were very excited about 1,200 miles.   I also passed some other guy that must have been hunting. He passed me in a big hurry had a crossbow. I'm definitely getting into the rocks of Pennsylvania. Although I know worse is coming, it definitely got a little rough today. AS a matter of fact, there's an uphill of 1,000 feet at Pa 325. Once you start that uphill, the rocks get terrible, and they continue to be terrible for a good while. I ran out of water, and there isn't much water in Pennsylvania, you're on ridges. At one point, I was getting pretty desperate. I got to the Yellow Springs Village Site, where there's only a mailbox there that's labeled Yellow Springs Village, and nothing else, not even the ruins that are said to be there. About a half mile past that point, there was a trickle of water running across the Trail coming from the side of a mountain. I scooped up some water. I wasted quite a bit of time, about an hour there. I didn't walk into Rausch Gap Shelter until 5 o'clock. Just before the shelter, I ran into Horizon and Montana Lush. They were sitting there, their feet were all trashed from the rocks. It's definitely getting bad. My feet are nowhere as bad as theirs, I'm still in pretty good shape. The callouses on the sides of my feet are working at me, but for the most part, I had a good, clean day. I only had a couple of very painful steps. When I got to the shelter, there was a father and son there, I had never met them before, the father's name was Michigan, they were both very quiet. I just ran in there to sign in in case OC1 walked in there.I had already done 29.5 miles at that point, but I really didn't want to stay at the shelter. I was thinking I might go ahead and run 39 miles off today, but being out of water for all that time really knocked me for a loop. I started looking for a place to lay my tent out. There was a really cool picnic area on a side trail just at the bottom of Rausch Gap. It's not in the book or on a map, but if you hook a left at Rausch Creek, there are remains of these huge walls on both sides of the creek. They are about 30 feet high with these huge blocks of stone that must weigh a few hundred pounds each. I was looking for a tenting area. My trekking pole took the opportunity to snap the strap, so now I have to fix that.I kept walking along, across HogBack Creek. I almost decided to camp there because of the creek and there were some flat spots there. When I stopped, there were mosquitoes and bugs everywhere. I decided to walk on, which unfortunately meant there was no more flat land.I walked to the top of Second Mountain and gave up. I found the closest thing to a flat spot I could find. I hadn't eaten all day except for candy bars. I made a double portion of freeze dried chicken and ramen noodles. I could only eat about 2/3 of it and I ended up throwing it away. i'm completely by myself here, about 30 feet from the Trail. I'm kind of curious to see if anyone else walks by. When I spoke with Horizon and Montana Lush, they said they were thinking about doing another 10 miles tonight also, but I haven't seen them pass by. I don't think they could put their shoes on fast enough to get by me when I was down there getting water at Rausch Creek. I'm a little tired, it's been a long day. It's the most mileage I've done on the Trail so far this time around. I didn't have the intention of doing 30 miles today, but I did it anyway. i'm just trying to timeit so I can meet Kevin tomorrow, and it's still going to be kind of rough to get all the miles in to be able to get to Lehigh Gap and Palmerton for Sunday to meet Mike. He said it didn't matter, but we will find out tomorrow when I get to Kevin's house. I'm going to make some calls and try to set all this stuff up. Nicki said something about not being able to be home on Sunday. That kind of complicates things. It's 8 o'clock, not even close to dark, but I think I'm going to sack out. I want to try to get a real early start tomorrow. I'm going to see Kevin and have some brews with him tomorrow.That's it, good night.