Date: 2018-06-11
From: Palmerton PA BertÃÂÃÂ¢ÃÂÃÂÃÂÃÂs Restaurant and Hostel 

To: Stealth mile 1,271
Miles today: 12.6
Weather: broken clouds

AT - 6/11 Day 41 Palmerton, PA Rocks and other things Well Palmerton turned out to be a pretty neat stop. As o said yesterday, the town was built around the New Jersey Zinc Company. We could see the plant from the mountain we climbed this morning. The building looked like it was about rusted through. We heard sounds coming from the yard down there and there was a semi-truck. Hard to say what was happening there. The lady that owns Bert¢s Restaurant (and hostel) was an interesting person. I got the feeling she grew up there and had family that worked at the Zinc smelter. She knew all the history of the town. She bought the restaurant from Bert years ago but never changed the name. The food was good there. The lady opened the hostel there when the jail house hostel shut down about 6 years ago. Yes, they turned the jail into a hostel many years ago. It shut down because it got a reputation of a party place and people were taking the toilet paper. Not that they couldn¢t manage those issues; they just shut it down. The lady found this out because she noticed the hikers weren¢t coming to her restaurant. So she talked to the town and told them how much money the town was losing by not being hiker friendly. She got permission to open the hostel. The bunk room really only holds 5 people; but she uses a building out back to accommodate overflow. Last night she had a record of 18 people. Before that the record was 12. It seems like the bubble of hikers are catching up to us. Anyhow, the town was laid out nicely with wide streets that had slanted pull-in parking. The place was immaculate; no trash anywhere. And there were businesses up and down the Main Street. Many were open on Sunday. They have a very nice Veterans Memorial. It was sponsored by the local grocery store  We noticed on the WW II display, there were as many as 6 people listed from the same family. Some families had both the Sr. and the Jr. listed. It really made you stop to think about what it must have been like to live in a town like that. Back to trail talk. The weather was great today. The rain stopped through the night and it appears the cold front coming down from Canada has pushed the band of rain South of us. We had cooler temperatures, partly cloudy to sunny skies today. Our hike started out with the 1000 ft ascent. That ascent included a rock boulder scramble up the mountain. I think I did very good with it today. There were only a couple of boulder sections today. The PA rocks were mostly smaller rocks all along the trail. Those rocks really slow you down. You just can¢t get in a hiking rhythm. It is like walking on legos barefoot while intoxicated. We managed to get 12.6 miles completed. We only have about 23 more miles left in PA. We hear the rocks don¢t really stop when we got to NJ. As for the superfund site, it wasn¢t all that bad. They are using a detour while they are still trying to replant the affected areas. As we got ready to make dinner tonight, 3 young deer visited us. I think we were camping in their favorite dinner spots. Soon we heard this trumpeting sound, sort of like an elephant sound. It was the momma deer telling her young to get back over by her. They just couldn¢t figure out how to do that. It took her about 15 minutes to talk them around the situation.Ascent 2,397 ftDescent 1,303~Desert Rose