Gifford Pinchot State Park, PA to Dillsburg, PA
section miles: 14 total miles: 161
The day before we reach the AT, and the anticipation is mounting. Not that we want to get it over with, but it’s exciting to be this close and have all these miles behind us. This section brought us back onto legitimate trail and thankfully off the roads for the most part. We drove to our starting point on Pinchot lake, expecting to have the place to ourselves on a Friday, but instead found the parking lots buried in bank-to-bank trucks and trailers. Turns out that today was a Bass Masters tournament on the lake. Fascinating how much technology and horsepower it takes to outwit a fish these days. With a little manual trailer repositioning - when nobody was looking, of course - we managed to squeeze the Mini between a couple of contestants and were off.
The hike around the lake was pleasant, but very muddy in spots. Mostly it was the consistency of firm clay - as-in hey let’s stop and make some pots clay - but several sections were totally under water. Rene stopped to don her wading shoes a few times; I slobbered on as usual, log-hopping until I was sufficiently drenched to not care anymore. We paused briefly to invent soon-to-be-famous “M-DT disc golf”, using some hefty slices of tree logs found conveniently stacked around the official lakeside course. The drivers tend to land with a resounding thud a good thirty feet away, but maybe I wasn’t using the proper wrist action.
Past the lake, a brief section of road-walking through some nice farmland brought us to the State Game Lands, where it was trail the rest of the way. Much of the trail here is new, having recently been approved by the state and relocated off the roads. Which is great! Except... that means the trail doesn’t match the maps, putting you at the mercy of the blazers. Technically we had a revised trail guide to go by, typed up and printed out all nice and neat on a piece of paper from the internet, but technically we left it back in the car (I won’t mention any names). We debated: stick with the old written description (roads) or try and follow the new. A vote was held, and since women’s suffrage hasn’t reached this part of PA (according to me), the majority opted for the new trail.
It went fairly well up to about the mid-way point through the game lands, at which point the trail vanished spectacularly at a road crossing. I wandered up and down the road looking for any clue whatsoever, while Rene folded her arms and tapped her feet with her best I-told-you-so look. A couple of locals were somewhere nearby, unseen but way too close, blasting away incessantly with shotguns as if trying to melt their barrels, which wasn’t helping my case one bit. Eventually we found a questionable blue smudge that appeared to be associated with a dark hole in an otherwise impenetrable mass of underbrush, and in we went like Alice. Fortunately it was the right choice (the M-DT blazers have this maddening habit of putting a nice fresh blaze about 100 yards or more down a trail, way past the point where you need some reassurance). A few more head-scratching moments with some occasional back-tracking, and we finally popped out on the other side of the game lands where our car awaited.
Overall a beautiful, crisp and sunny day, capped off with a spicy date to a mexican restaurant and a visit to the Wegman’s grocery before retiring to our hotel. You know you’ve reached that certain age when a fine grocery store serves up hours of entertainment.
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