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Saturday, July 23rd 2000 I was still not really fit for a full scale hike since my canoeing accident on Memorial Day, so I talked Lori into a quick jaunt on the Mid State Trail. The Jo Hays vista on PA Route 26 near Pine Grove Mills is a great place to start a hike, since the mountain climbing has already been done by your car. We wanted to keep the hike to about a half hour, and since we've both been on the Jackson Trail (on the opposite side of the road) we decided to head towards the high tension power line tower about a kilometer west of Jo Hays. The trail starts off as a grassy jeep trail, and then turns into the typically rocky ridge tops we're used to by now in this area. When the "real" trail begins, a trail register marks the spot. Trail registers are just notebooks kept in mail boxes around the end-points of a lot of trails. The concept is simple enough--let people jot down their thoughts on paper. The registers serve a number of purposes, and it seems to me that the most obvious is to let the government know that the trails are being used. Other purposes depend upon who is writing them, I suppose. I try to comment on the weather, my mood and anything that might serve as a warning to other hikers. I've always wanted to put some poetry in, but I never seem to be able to think of anything on the spot. Many people adopt trail names for the registers, and I've dredged up my own alias from the days of the first Wing Commander video games--Yahoo. While I have a hard time getting people to believe me, this has nothing to do with the search engine or the internet. It has to do with cowboys and a race of people in Gulliver's Travels. After about 20 minutes, we hit the power tower, and since it was a fairly clear day (albeit humid!), the views were very good. A nice bonus was the large number of blueberry and raspberry bushes that were perfectly ready for eating. I wished that I had just one handful of them on my Appalachian Trail experience a year ago. We decided to hike for another 25 minutes or so before heading back, deciding that the Indian Steps (see my earlier hike) were too far for that day.
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