Date: 2019-07-01
From: PA 309 Trailhead

To: George W. Outerbridge Shelter
Miles today: 13.0

Got a ride to the trail, skipping a small section to see if I can catch up with GipCGirl.  On the trail at 7:30 AM and expected a casual 12 mile hike along the mountain ridge. The total grade is low so there¢s no ups and downs. This seemed most doable with a sore left foot. What I didn¢t know is that this is a stretch known as the  Knife¢s Edge.  This is a section in PA where the rocks are vertically squeezed to produce the ridge, an edge where you can have 1 foot on one side of the mountain and the other foot on the other side!. The trail does not go around the boulders, rather it goes over them. It is so interesting!!  I am so grateful that it is not raining today. I¢d hate to fall off the mountain. These boulders scrambles went on for miles!. Spanked once again.  Hello my brothers. Several hikers past me and everyone of them complained about ¢them rocks¢. PA is notorious for all things that sting, snakes, ants, wasps, spiders and rocks.  There are a lot of hiker injuries reported in PA, largely because hikers don¢t slow down a bit. In PA I have seen wasps and wasp nest at shelters. Gnats dive bomb my eyes, flies buzz my ears and mosquitoes snack on my neck. I¢ve heard a rattlesnake and today I saw a black snake moving slowly across the path where a fresh pile of bear scat lay.  I am doing fine. I talk to everything in the forest, even the rocks. There was a thru hiker I pass the other day called Stone Turtle because she moves so slow. I thought I saw moss growing on her back. I¢m just one step ahead of her.I continue to hike by myself.  After the knife¢s edge I was lying down in the forest on a rock my feet elevated against the tree when Tiger Lily came along. Tiger Lily took a couple days off to visit with her children. She is trying to catch up with Shock Top, a fast hiker. We chatted for 15 minutes. There is something sad about her.I continued on the trail and stopped at the first shelter for lunch. There were more wasp and no water. I looked at the registry and saw that GipCGirl passed by earlier this morning!  With any luck I will catch up with her. I continued on the hike, and eat some peanut butter down the trail.  Water is in short supply so I need to get to the next shelter. Arrived at the next Shelter around 5:30 PM.  The shelter was small but had running water from a spring. Several hikers were hunkered down already. And, there was GipCGirl! It was great to see her. She said she left messages at another shelter asking me to call her but I never saw those messages. If the shelter is too far off the trail, I¢ll just pass it up and continue walking. We caught up in conversation. I filled up my bottle and bladder with water from the spring that I didn¢t feel the need to filter and drank freely.  As the shelter was right off the trail and in a steep bank, there were no trees for me to hang my hammock so I hiked back up to the ridge and found a campsite off the trail. There was an interesting thru hiker, Back Track. Last year he threw hiked New Zealand, the north and south island, and this year he is thru hiking the AT. He said he worked in his 20s and now he¢s hiking in his 30s. He had a bowl of fresh blueberries that he picked along the trail, right at the spot where I spotted the black snake and the bear scat. No wonder I didn¢t see the berries. He had a picture on his phone of a big rattlesnake that he saw the other day. I asked him if there was anything that frightened him on his hikes and he said only people who are not in their right mind. He smiled softly when I asked if he was afraid of me.  He normally stays away from the shelters and camps In the woods. We shared the campsite. He ate his blueberries and I ate my tuna. Then we called it a good night. I will catch up with GipCGirl at the shelter in the morning. We plan to hike out together.