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Joe and I wanted to redo the section of the AT that caused us so much misery the year before, so we drove up to Bake Oven Knob, and arranged for our Dad to pick us up in Slatington. The hike is much nicer without a 65lb pack on your shoulders :-) I brought 164 ounces of Gatorade, which I've found to work extremely well. Hydration has consistently been my number one problem on hikes, and the year before on the AT might not have been so bad if we had enough water. The hike varies quite a bit, and it's a very nice section of trail. It has a lot of the stuff you see on Pennsylvania trails, all within a 9 mile hike. Directly after Bake Oven Knob (that name is very popular for hills in PA, and someday I'll find out what it means!) there is a few hundred yard long pile of rocks about the size of your dining room table and chairs, and I've always liked scrambling around stuff like that. The first photo is of Joe on top of them. After the rocky section, the trail turns to soft grass, and it is a pleasure to walk on. Passing the trail shelter where I searched in vain for a spring the year before, the trail descends partly to the north side of the Blue Ridge, and it turns into a nice walk in the woods. This goes on for a few miles, and although you pass some power lines to break up the monotony, it starts to get boring. Below, you'll see the panorama overlooking the Lehigh Valley Tunnel, Lehighton and the Lehigh River. The views here were incredible, and the fall colors and lightning-struck trees were truly inspiring. Sadly, photos can almost never relate the images you see when hiking, since there is no depth perception. I've toyed around with taking 3-D pictures, but I have no way of rendering them so that people who are "Magic Eye impaired" can view them. This vista is worth the hike, all by itself. There is a road fairly close by that leads to an antenna farm. so if you don't want to do the all day thing, you could just drive up. I'd like to do that at some point to see the Devil's Pulpit. Maybe next year . . . We wanted to get to the Devil's Pulpit, overlooking the barren, zinc-killed hills of Palmerton, but we had to make time, so we took a shortcut past another trail shelter. Two hobos were having a football tailgate of sorts, and we chatted about the Penn State game for a few minutes before making the incredibly long descent to the valley below. For some reason, the trail takes an angled descent to Slatington that goes on forever. I would much rather have gone straight down the hill . . . it's not that steep. The problem, as many hikers know, is that if your boots don't fit PERFECTLY, then you'll lose your toenails on something like that. I did. Arriving at the pickup spot precisely at the time arrived at, we took off with some sore feet, and a little redemption, have failed so miserably the last time we tried this section of the AT.
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