Saturday May 11, 21.9mi/35.2km

Hamburg (1219.9) to Allentown Shelter (1241.8) (PA)

I stayed up way too late watching TV, and dragged myself out of bed for the hotel’s breakfast. Bob and I walked over to the Cabelas store, to get a shuttle ride back to the trail. We got dropped off at 10:30am, and immediately there was a huge climb.

Once we got to the top, the trail was surprisingly quite nice, and not at all rocky.

I stopped at a nice lookout point called Pulpit rock, and enjoyed the beautiful day and warm sunshine. And so did about 40 other day hikers.

Surprisingly, just two miles later, there was another view point, the Pinnacle.

And all these large predatory birds (hawks?) were circling above. So cool!

From there, it was an easy 5 miles of hiking on an old dirt road. No rocks again! A great surprise. And there were even a couple more smaller viewpoints.

The last couple of miles had some small rocks, with some sections of smooth trail.

Bob and I cruised into camp at the shelter at 7pm, much later than usual but we had a very late start. There were two other hikers there, a couple of guys from PA doing a long weekend out. They were talking about doing the Mid-state trail, a 525km trail thru Pennsylvania, from Maryland to New York. Sounds enticing!

Rain is coming tonight and all day tomorrow… bleh.