Rocky Trail

Pennsylvania's Appalachian Trail is notorious for being rocky. Sure, the whole AT has rocks, and there's rocks in the Sierras on the PCT and in the Rocky Mountains of the CDT. But Pennsylvania rocks have shifted over the eons so they all point up. Wildcat jokes that the trail maintainers rotate all the pointy ends of the rocks upward and then sharpen them.
 

Morning finds me scrambling along the Knife Edge, which is slabs of granite pointing skyward. The scramble is fun and the views open, a rare treat.

The day ends with one of the more challenging climbs in this section, a 24% grade ascent out of Lehigh Gap. Much of it is rock climbing, finding a good finger hold, placing a foot waist-high into a crevice, and pulling up to the next ledge. 

I get a lucky break. I'll meet Spirit tomorrow so my pack is light. Even better, as I cross the bridge at the bottom of Lehigh Gap, she happens to drive by. Some quick calculations and checking of the maps and I see a place we can meet up to tonight.  That lets me dump the tent, some food and other weight out of the pack. I climb Lehigh Gap with perhaps a ten pound pack. Nice! 

Over the past week or two the trail passes ruins of earlier people. There are overgrown rock walls, crumbling rock cisterns, and even rock foundations from small cabins. Many roads had been cleared, but are detectable today only by the graded ground under the overgrowth. 

Nature wins eventually. In Florida, saltworks and villages disappeared back into the mangroves. In Montana mining towns evaporated with barely a trace. Early Virginia pioneers cleared settlements that are now forest again. Many traces of man come and go, but nature persists.

But some scars need our help. One stream leaches through old coal mining country and flows with acidity stronger than even wine or tomato juice. There are no fish. This damage will take eons to repair. But local volunteers created a simple, ingenious solution. The entire stream dumps into a cauldron full of limestone, pulverizing the rock and boosting the pH by two points (the log scale means the acid is 1% of the previous strength). Fish have returned.

An old zinc smelting site is deforested, the metal herbicide killing all but a few grasses and bushes. Again, without help, this will last for eons. This time the cleanup is a large Superfund project. But not everything is dead - I pick off four ticks as I cross through! 

Nature wins, but sometimes she needs a hand, whether a local volunteer or national effort. 

Eventually even the pointy rocks will wear down. 

18.6 miles to Little Gap PA