Happy Fourth of July!

July 4, 2011

Start:  1111.4 South side of Cumberland Valley.
End:   1134.6 Ridge just pass side trail to Cove mtn.  shelter.
Total:   23.2

Last night it barely rained, and I stayed very dry, my bag was soaked with sweat though when I woke up.   Also, a friendly frog came by to visit with me.  Walking around then hanging just outside my tent screen, chilling with me.  A spider really liked my shoes, umbrella and tent too.  Miss spider, decided to make a huge thick web around all of them.  She hates me now.

I want to hit the buffet at the Allenbury Playhouse, that I saw in my guidebook last night, early.  Then charge my phone, and engorge my belly to a whole new level of full.  Then use that to fuel me throughout the day. 

I make it to the backpacker campsite side trail, surrounded by farms, in twenty quick minutes after a pleasant though shoe soaking walk down a grassy trail between fields of strange plants growing, I can't identify them, but I'll assume that they are soy plants.  Next its corn, knee high by the fourth of July.  Some is already head high.  I prepare for town just before getting to my road walk through town, and make my pack better for a restaurant by placing my stanky socks inside my pack. 

The trail passes a misty resevoir, Children's lake, just after the ruins of another old furnace.  Then the regional ATC office.  I calculate that the trail goes a half a mile further just to hit the office, and make it convenient to hit the hikers up for a donation.  If it went the logical way, down Butcher rd., it would still be on pavement, but much more convenient and sensible.  I am able to snag two breakfasts and more tp from the hiker box outside of it and get hose water though.

Allenbury Playhouse has a great breakfast for the $6.83 price.  It's a resort centered around a theater, and has a great hiker rate of $40 a room.  That's where I'm writing this entry.

Now I'm back in my tent, and it's after ten at night.  The food was great this morning and I was way to full to even hike the fifteen flat miles crossing Cumberland Valley fast.  I thought that I would fly across level trail, but to full of a belly really can slow a hiker down.  I was looking and walking rather Penguin like afterwards. 

The trail tendered between farms most of the day, never gaining more then a few dozen feet in elevation until it climbed roughly seven hundred feet out of the valley to a ridge that the guide describes as really rocky.  It is rocky, but I believe now they meant this whole mountain is just a big pile of rocks.  The trail itself is a little rocky, but not bad at all considering the scrambling that I have been occasionally required to do.

I decide to camp right after the Cove mountain shelters side trail.  The shelter itself would be a bug feast and add .4 miles round trip.  I'm happy to see a large enough spot just after, and set up camp.  I decide not to cook a meal tonight, instead I eat bagels and pepperjack cheese, which have both been in my pack since Harper's Ferry.  I have to get rid of my oldest food first, there is a resupply opportunity tomorrow in Duncannon, Pa.  There are more and louder fireworks tonight, then the last few combined.