Date: 2005-06-26
From: Palmerton, Pa.

To: Leroy A. Smith Shelter
Miles today: 15.7
Weather: few clouds

I tapped Mike on the shoulder at 5:15 this morning. I walked out of the shelter and put my shoes on. We walked down to the Sunocco Station for coffee and donuts. We wlaked back and sat in front of the Palmerton Borough Hall building and waited for Nicki to come and pick us up. I called Nicki to make sure she had woken up. She said she would be there in 5-10 minutes. She pulled up a little after 6 and got us back to the Trail. At 6;30 we started walking. We wanted to start early because it's an exposed walk for several miles. The weatherman said it was going to be well into the 90's and we did not want to get caught on those rocks in the sun. We did good, by 9 o'clock we were back in the shade. The walk out of Palmerton starts a really steep trail for a while and then you get into these big rocks. The rocks are about the size of a refridgerator. They are just jumbled and piled on top of each other. It was really adventurous to climb through. It was fun for me. As far as I'm concerned, it's my favorite part of Pennsylvania. It's a tremendous view, you go higher and higher and you can overlook Palmerton. We stopped and took pictures. Then you get up to the top of the ridge and it's a desolate landscape. More like a moonscape. Dead trees, rocks, a wasteland, all the poisoned land from the zinc mining. There is a sign there that tells you not to drink the water due to poisoning in a 10 mile radius of the town of Palmerton. You can actually tell, that entire valley is trashed. The trees on all the hillsides are dead. Hillsides are falling down. Mountainsides have broken away. There is nothing left to hold the soil in the heavy rain. We walked for quite a while. We stopped for about 45 minutes and I cooked. There are lots of rocks, nothing horrible, but very annoying. It slows you down. We did pretty good, about 2.5 miles an hour. Mike did a good job of going almost 16 miles on his first day out. That's pretty impressive. We had carried a ton of extra water. We knew we weren't going to have water for 16 miles. Surprisingly, at Little Gap, there were some jugs of water someone had left out there. We went ahead and took some of that. Other than that, no water. We got into the Leroy A. Smith shelter pretty early, around 2:30 or so. Mike went ahead and ate, he was already starving. I did various other things, I had repairs to do.We pretty much hung out. I went down to the water source, which is a considerable distance from the Trail. All the springs were dry, except for the very last one at the bottom. It was ice cold gushing watre, well worth it. I dragged the milk jugs from the shelter and filled them up and brought them up. At about 4:30 or 5:00, we were going to cook again. We actually had water boiling to make some freeze-dried meals, and this guy came walking up. We figured he was a through hiker. When we asked him, he said, " No, I came over to cook for you guys. I have chicken, corn, oranges, potatoes, and lemonade." It was amazing Trail Magic. His name was Sharp Shin, he's a double through hiker, once north-bound and once south-bound, in 1997 and 2000. We were very glad for his part of Trail Magic. Today is Mike's birthday, he says it was his present. We sat there and ate his food and talked to him until dark. Another couple walked in, her name was OnStar, I can't remember his name. They ate with us too. After we had enough, we went over to set up the tent and hammock, and started setting up on this nice, flat, grassy area. We passed this Trail Weirdo who was walking with 2 dogs towards the shelter. He was talking about radiation and Radon poisoning. He wouldn't let us go, we finally had to walk away from him. He said he was going to see if there was anyone with 'political consciousness' on the Trail. Whatever.We had to fix Mike's boots, we glued them together. I'm not exactly sure what was going on, but I kept getting hit in the face with water. It wasn't raining but, somehow it condensed on the trees and I finally got fed up and had to pull the tarp over me. That's it.