Day: 077
Date: Monday, 10 July 2023
Start: Black Swatara Creek Campsite (AT Mile 1206.8)
Finish: The Pinnacle (AT Mile 1229.3)
Daily Kilometres: 39.6 (Ascent 3187', Descent 3245')
GPX Track: Click here for Julie’s Strava & Photos
Total Kilometres: 2068.6
Weather: Mild and overcast in the morning, warm, sunny and humid in the afternoon.
Accommodation: Tent
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Pop tarts
Lunch: Dried fruit & chocolates
Dinner: Rehydrated meals
Aches: Dave - a few niggles and very tired; Julie - nothing to report.
Highlight: Our visit to the candy store in Port Clinton for lunch was special. There's not much to the town of Port Clinton and few places to get food, especially since the only hotel in town insists that hikers shower before they are allowed into their bar/restaurant. The candy shop sold cold drinks which were, of course, very welcome, but also a vast array of candy of all sorts. It took us a while to make up our minds, but we ended up with some exotic dried fruit, chocolate and fudge. It was more than we could eat, so we have added to the weight in our packs.
Lowlight: There seemed to be a sadistic element to the trail planning along some of the trail today. Although there were places where the trail paralleled little used, or unused, forest roads and fire trails which offered easier walking, the trail instead seemed to seek out the rockiest route it could find. Three miles on the trail took us nearly two hours when we could have walked the same distance along the the firetrail in less than an hour and probably have seen more.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We woke at 5:30am and reluctantly put on all our wet clothes and shoes on a mild morning and were hiking by 6:30am. We are booked into a hostel tomorrow night and it is 40 miles away so our plan was to reduce that distance by half by the end of the day and more if we could.
Sadly, this proved tougher than we had hoped. The Pennsylvanian rocks were the culprit. We did manage our first 6.5 miles to our breakfast break, the distance chosen because it was halfway to our planned lunch stop at Port Clinton, in three hours, which wasn't bad given much of the trail was extremely rocky and slow. However, the second 6.5 miles to Port Clinton was even tougher, with a very steep descent at the end and it took over 3.5 hours with Dave looking totally exhausted. The forest was pleasant and we did see a few deer, but most of the time our eyes were glued to where we were going to place our foot next. Tiring and tiresome.
Port Clinton lies at the entrance to a gap in the mountains through which flows the Schuylkill River, several roads and several railway lines, the latter of which we had to carefully cross. We made our way to the candy store for lunch (see above), wishing we had more time but did enjoy our treats sitting on a bench watching the world go by.
After lunch, we followed the river for a while before steeply ascending to another ridge on what was now a warm and sunny day. Our (Dave's) pace was slow and it didn't look like we were going to get as far as hoped, but we plodded along, collected some water at the last opportunity, and began looking for somewhere to camp around 6:00pm, with 20 miles under our belt, as we began the ascent to Pulpit Rock. We couldn't find a spot on the way up, but did enjoy some fantastic evening views from the rock before continuing on.
We didn't find a tent site until 8:00pm, much later then we would have liked and were very late to bed.
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