Cove Mountain Shelter 1145.9 to Peters Mountain Shelter 1160.9 (15 miles) (135.5 total miles)
Rebbe Mo and his friends showed up at the shelter maybe around 10:30 or so last night. They were glad to hear that I was the only one in the shelter, and there was room for everyone. I found out in the morning he was hiking with three other people who had come out to see him.
In the night, there were heavy downpours, and I was very happy to be in a shelter for the second time on trail. This one was nice and dark, so I was able to sleep well. I hadn’t even used my earplugs or buff to cover my eyes in days.
The rain loudly down poured, and it woke us up, and I tossed and turned for a while trying to get back to sleep. My feet had started to hurt and I moved around a bit trying to get comfortable. I felt bad because those air mattresses are loud when you move around on them, but that’s just part of the trail.
I was able to successfully sleep in pretty late, and got up around 7:30 or so I think, and took my time making breakfast and packing up, talking with the others. I was on the trail by about 9:20, which was good for moderation.
There is a place called Hawk Rock that was 2 miles up on the trail, and the trail followed the ridge to the view. There were only a couple people there when I arrived, but I knew on a Sunday soon this place will be packed. It is a very steep roughly mile and a half decent into Duncannon. It is basically a series of stone steps the whole time. I passed a lot of day hikers at that point, as I was going down the stairs and they were going up.
After that, I was walking into Duncannon. About a half mile of road walking took me into the center of town, and I bypassed the laundry and went to the outfitter. I had just done laundry in Carlisle, and although I’ve heard the outfitter had a great hostel, I didn’t want to stay in town again so soon.
There are a couple very sweet women running the outfitter, and I did most of my resupply there, was able to get Advil and more sunscreen from the hiker box, and mail home 1.2 pounds of extra gear. That lightened my best weight to about 16 pounds.
Fortunately the outfitter was able to mail it home for me, but the sad thing was that because it was Sunday the post office is closed and apparently there are amazing hiker boxes at the post office with tons of free food. So I ended up paying for my whole resupply, which was about another $55 or so, between a combination of the outfitter and the gas station down the road.
In town, I saw Rebbe Mo had arrived with his friends, and I also met a couple Flip Floppers around my age, Lentil and lLooseleaf, that Rebbe Mo had told me about the other day. I also met Fallout, who seemed like he liked to hike hard and play hard, and Red Squirrel, from PA who was moving cross country after the trail to Washington and wasn’t shy about his convictions about most things. And I briefly said hi to a hiker who had made it from Georgia in March without ever getting a trail name. All three of them were doing traditional NOBO hikes.
I had a couple slices of pepperoni pizza and ate and talked with everyone at the pizza shop in town. The weather looks like there was supposed to be storms, which I had a originally intended to wait out, but it looked like the rain keeps getting pushed back. There were two shelters up ahead, one was in 4.5 miles and the other was 6.7 miles after that. If I went to the second shelter it would be a 15 mile day, which I like the sound of.
I figured I would try to at least get to the first shelter and see how I felt. There was another couple miles of road walks through town, and two very large river crossings as well. I found a bowl of free apples for hikers while walking out of town, and grabbed one to pack out.
After the very long bridges along busy highways, I finally got back into the woods. Right before I entered, I looked on the horizon and saw that it was looking very stormy, and my weather app was saying there was a severe thunderstorm warning from 2-9pm, and it was about 2:30 by then, as I had spent a couple hours in town.
So before I got in the woods, I put on my hat, and took out my umbrella. I saw a couple day hikers coming down out of the woods where I knew there were some views ahead, and we told each other to be careful of the rain.
It was another good climb out of Duncannon, but this trail started easy with nice grading and lots of switchbacks at first. It got more and more gray overhead, very dark, and at first it was incredibly humid, then the breeze came, cooling everything down and signaling the start of the rain imminently.
I said prayers to the trail to get me through this safely. As the rain started to fall, wouldn’t you know it but the terrain started to get very rocky. And once it began to rain, it began to pour. The whole trail was carving up the side of a mountain, and although I was not on the ridge yet, the higher I climbed the more I was exposed.
The storm came ripping in, with gales of wind, thunderous rain, lightning, and tales of dead branches I’d been hearing about ringing in my head. My umbrella was keeping me dry from the waist up and my pack, but it would be no protection against a large limb or a tree falling down on me.
I hid under my umbrella, and I couldn’t see anything beyond it, which kept my nerves in check. I was protected for the most part except when it rain sideways here and there, and I just kept trudging forward. That is basically what this trail comes down to, no matter what’s going on, no matter what terrain you’re hiking through, whatever bugs, mud, etc., you have to just keep hiking forward one foot in front of the other, and eventually something will change.
For a moment I considered if I should go back down the trail, but the idea of going backwards made no sense to me. I took my time hiking ever upward, over the rocks, being very careful not to slip. Only one time did my trekking pole slip, and I banged my shin pretty good against a rock, but no harm was done.
There was one point that I actually did become scared, when I looked down the ridge and I just saw the storm galing down the mountain. But i ignored it and kept going.
As I was almost to the ridge, the rain finally began to let up. I hadn’t seen anyone else on the trail except one guy who was hurrying back down about halfway through the storm. He didn’t have a pack or anything, he was day hiking.
My shorts were soaked, the shoes, my socks, my legs. But my pack was dry, therefore so was my sleeping quilt. As a down quilt, if that was to get wet it would be very hard to dry. And I was a little worried because my food bag was so full that my pack liner wasn’t covering my stuff as well as I would’ve liked.
By the time I reach the view, 2 miles in from where the woods began out of town, I was able to see perfectly. It was a well earned, very nice view. I read in my Far Out guide that the half mile ahead to the next view was basically a mini Mahoosuc. Mahoosuc Notch not not as well known for being the hardest and slowest mile on the Appalachian Trail for being super rocky with enormous boulders.
I was glad I saw that warning from someone’s comment, because I knew what to expect as I traversed very large rocks and boulders, where I even had to scramble a few times and even throw my poles down the rocks at one point so I could climb down using both my hands.
The second view was also very nice, and right around then is where the NOBO hiker without a trail name caught up to me. I let him pass me by, as he was definitely faster than me, and took my time through the rocks to that first shelter.
It was only 300 feet off the trail, and by that point I was feeling really strong and really good about what I had accomplished with the story. The idea in my head was to eat dinner at the shelter, and then hike to the next one. I had read people sometimes do that, they eat dinner and then finish hiking. Also seen so many people night hiking lately, that it kind of gave me a desire for it.
I had heard from Fallout that there might be a lot of people at the next shelter, but it was normal for there to be one or two stragglers at the end of the day to any shelter. And since I was eating first, there would be less to do when I arrived.
The other hiker was at the shelter already, and said he was gonna stay for the night. I made dinner of Ramen noodles and tuna with olive oil and sun-dried tomatoes. And we chatted for a little bit. He is from Texas at the moment, and has family in South Carolina that he got to visit while hiking through there earlier this year.
He told me I didn’t look old enough to have hiked half the trail seven years ago, prefacing the comment with he wasn’t trying to be weird. I was starting to think being on the trail has some kind of anti-aging effect, because everyone seems to think I am much younger than I am.
I finished dinner, packed up my bag, packed my 2 1/2 L of water that I would be carrying to the shelter to avoid a very steep water source that was quite far away from the shelter I had read an about ahead.
My bag was now very full of food and water, I was probably carrying a good 26 or 27 pounds by this point. I had 6.7 miles to go, and my headlamp was hanging around my neck. If everything went according to plan, I figured I would be at the shelter around 9:30 PM. The sun sets at 8:24, so I would need it.
The next 3.7 miles were not bad, but at a little rocky at the end. I was tempted by the most appealing tentsite right after the shelter with a view even, but I hadn’t done all that prep to keep going only to stop after a mile.
At one point I was hiking behind a porcupine for a few hundred feet. It trundled down the trail, stopping every so often to turn and look sideways at me and prepare his quills. Finally, I yelled at it, and it scurried away into the woods.
There were some nice power line views, and I was going kind of slow when a day hiker randomly popped up behind me for .7 to a parking lot 3 miles before the shelter. I put on some speed to stay ahead, and noticed that even with my pack I’m still able to be faster than most day hikers, which is interesting. He had trekking poles, too.
Right before the parking lot, the trail crossed a little bridge, for a spectacular view of the sunset through a chain link fence. It was beautiful.
I sat on a rock in the parking lot and ate the Hersheys bar with almonds I had found in the Boiling Springs hiker box. It had been sprinkling on and off, and I was gearing up for the final 3 miles.
The chocolate appeared to have done the job, because once I was back in the woods I was zooming down the trail. It was also super easy, with nice soft ground and very flat. I needed my head lamp now that I was on the other side of the ridge.
I had never really night hiked by myself before, but I told myself I was going to channel Trouble, the woman who does it alone all the time. I used to night hike a lot with my ex on the AT last time, but the one time he went a couple miles ahead of me, I got all spooked by looking in the dark woods around me with my headlamp.
This time I had my hat on, and the headlamp on top of it, so it rather restricted my view from doing that again. My brain likes to come up with intrusive thoughts a lot, so my brain kept trying to convince me that something terrible was going to happen. I told myself that if it did I would deal with it when it happened. There was no point in wasting energy looking over my shoulder for scary things, when that was only more likely to make me trip and fall and that would be the real fear. So I told my brain to not think, just hike.
I was surprised when I reach the next powerline view at .6 after the parking lot, because I was going very fast by this point. The trail then decided to go through every bit of tall grass I could possibly find, and I must’ve gone through probably a mile of it off and on, checking my legs briefly for ticks as I went.
I made it to Table Rock, 2 miles after the parking lot, and saw there was a side trail for a view. It was full dark, so that wasn’t happening. At this point I knew there was a campsite in .2 but it was also only one more mile to the shelter. So I pushed on, and I made it.
I found some nice tent sites right before the turn off to the shelter, and I figured I would set up my tent there, because I could use my headlamp as much as I wanted, and I wouldn’t disturb anyone who was sleeping in the shelter, by trying to set up in there.
I was starving, but just wanted to brush my teeth and get into bed. It was a bit of a slog, but I finally got everything set up, tied my Ursak to a tree nearby, and finally got in my tent.
It was a very eventful day, I had survived a galing severe thunderstorm, and I had done my first night hike by myself. For some reason out here, I keep seeking out these challenges. As if being out here isn’t enough, I have to make it harder. I’m not sure why, but I’m pretty tuned into my intuition, and when it tells me to keep hiking I just keep hiking. Things could’ve gotten a lot worse, but something out there kept me safe.
The next shelter is 18 miles away, but the good news is the trail in Pennsylvania has tons of tent sites around, if I need to bail out early. The weather is supposed to break after the rain today, and I’m very much looking forward to that.