Date: 2011-06-15
From: Raven Rock Shelter

To: Caledonia State Park
Miles today: 23.2
Weather: clear sky

I wasn't the first to rise, nor was i the last. My hike started around 7:30 am, right after the section hikers gave me a couple of cliff bars since they overpacked their food. The day started off with a steep and rocky descent, which was abit more of a climb than a hike in some places. The trail crossed me into P.A. and out of Maryland. This was also crossing the Mason-Dixon line, which means I am out of the "South". The weather was nice again, a bit cool. I stomped out the miles in the morning and had lunch at Deer Lick Shelters. Some of the shelters in P.A., for some reason, are split in pairs. In the case of Deer Lick Shelters there are two five person shelters side by side. It seems like it would be less hassle to build one ten person shelter instead. I met the local ridge runner here. He was telling me about the best water sources and tenting areas along the way. He also told me about being able to get pizza on route 30 just 0.3 miles west. Hmmm... ridge runners are seasonal employees of the ATC. They help to maintain the trail in high use areas and help keep the shelters up to snuff. They are usually past thru hikers who know their stuff, so the pizza sounded like a good idea even though it was further than I had originally planned to go. That way it would leave less mileage for tomorrow, and tomorrow was the challenge! As I was passing one of the next shelters I came upon a couple and their dogs. They had what seemed like 47 little dogs of various breeds, all of which hated me and wanted me to know it. I was bombarded on a narrow bridge over a small stream. I laughed at how random and nonsenseical it was to be badgered by so many small dogs at once on a bridge. The couple were nice and apologized for their dogs' manners. The last little section before route 30 had some large rocky boulder streches which slowed my pace for short lengths of time. It was here that I completely ran out of water. This was not a bad time to do so. I was very close to the road where I would walk to pizza and drinks. Fortunately, there happened to be a couple of fresh coolers just before the road. I found it amusing that there were also two packs of smokes on top of the coolers included in the trail magic. I grabbed a bottle and water and continued on. Even though it was only 0.3 miles to the restaurant I still hitched a ride to save my legs as much as possible. I met up with Katie and her husband who had just started their flip flop thru hike. I ordered an entire large super thick pan meat lovers pizza but could only eat three of the eight massive slices. I took the rest to go for breakfast etc. We were chatting with some nice, rich golfers in the restaurant. I asked them for a ride and they obliged, but had to take us one by one since it was a convertable BMW. They dropped us off at the campgrounds where we were planning on staying. The only problem was that he didn't drop us off at the trail. He went around and cut of another 0.4 miles. This would be cheating in my eyes. I want to walk past every white blaze so we setup our tents and I back trekked the 0.4 miles up and then back to camp just to be a purist. The campsite was supposed to be $20 per site, which I was going to split with my new friends, but the office was closed and no one came past our site asking for money. Oh well. The art of camping on paid land for free is refered to as "yogi-ing" . Great success. The campsite also had showers which made it a very nice end to the day. The showers were required to be held in the "on" position with one hand. This was a huge pain, so I managed to rig my bandana up to hold it on the entire time, leaving both hands free. Nice early bed after a nice hot shower on a full pizza belly.