Day 13 - 20.6 Miles - Wind Gap, PA



Hallelujah, a sunny day!



Sunny weather, mid 80’s today.  Well, I wish I could say I had a good night’s sleep at the Fine Lodging Hotel but unfortunately that would be a lie.  The hotel had no air conditioning so we had to keep the windows open and the windows faced a bar that stayed open until 2am.  The bar had lively patrons along with a cooking exhaust fan that sounded like a machine gun. 





View from Lehigh Gap



Got a good breakfast and headed off to climb the trail out of Lehigh Gap.  Some say this climb is the most technical climb anywhere south of the White Mountains.  Interesting views, and a little hand-over-hand climbing, but with a nice sunny day, there was a spectacular view all the way around.  EPA Superfund has been working on this area for a number of years due to problems caused by the zinc industry.  Many areas were fenced off and hikers were not allowed to venture into them because of safety concerns.

  

The next five miles we had to go through were mostly open grasslands that were being reclaimed by Superfund.  We encountered a large number of ticks! 

Water was rather challenging today so we had to ration our consumption.  I resorted to asking day hikers for an extra bottle of water (called “yogi’ing on the trail”) which I shared with Shakin’ and The Professor.  Score one for Yogi!  

Not much in the way of animals on the trail, I scared up one turkey and one buck (deer) and hundreds of chipmunks!  Turkeys are very active right now and I could hear the guy gobbling along the trail because it’s mating season.  



A rockin' good time!

Ran into another interesting section hiker, a Navy Captain who goes by the trail name Captain Max.  He is turning 78 this weekend and he first started doing sections of the trail in 2001.  It seems every year he gets injured somewhere, for instance, last year he said he went from Harper’s Ferry to just south of Boiling Springs when an unattended cut on his leg caused his leg to swell twice its size.  After $14,000 of medical treatments, they were able to save his life from the infection in his leg.  His goal is to get to Vermont where he will hopefully have finished all the sections on the trail.  There is determination.

Looks like only two more days of the Pennsylvania rocks before we reach New Jersey.  Hurray!