Since this event was posted fairly far in advance, we had up to eight people signed up or on the waitlist. For various reasons, we wound up with three of us actually doing the hike: Alex L., Chris C. and myself.
While the weather reports called for non-trivial snow and cold rain, the precipitation didn’t strike, so we lucked out. Saturday night got down to 26F and the daytime highs were only in the low 40F’s, but overall it was fairly pleasant for an early spring hike.
Since it was fairly late at night by the time we setup the car shuttle, we found a campsite about a half a mile in and camped for Friday night there. We hit the trail at dawn and made decent time down the trail. So that we would have less hiking on Sunday, we pressed on to hike until close to sunset. We wound up with 27 miles for Saturday and camped right off the trail at an established campsite to the East of I-81. That left us 11 miles on Sunday, which we finished up at around 11:30am. As I seemed to want a bit more sleep each night, we’re now not limited by the amount of daylight for the hiking time for each day.
We saw some other hikers on the trail. There was one guy who was doing a 100+ mi segment to Delaware Water Gap. There was a group of three that were close to I-81, but still in camp when we past them. There was a troupe of boy scouts, but they were likely going to hike out that night instead of dealing with mid-20F’s.
The trail was well maintained. While there were some blowdowns, they seemed to be easy to pass. And we even saw some trail maintainers on Sunday too.
Other than being rocky, this segment didn’t seem particularly notable to me. None-the-less, I hadn’t hiked it before, so I always enjoy the adventure of a new-to-me trail.
Photos: Camel’s Google photos
Andrew L. (Camel)
DC UL Backpacking 
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