The Blasphemous Bicycler

Girtong has never been backpacking before, but he’s been reading trailournals all summer, and so he wanted to try it out. We scraped together enough borrowed equipment to outfit him for adventure and headed for the Appalachian Trail.

Yesterday morning, we arrived at a very foggy Swatara State Park, where we saw some intrepid kayakers.

We climbed up the mountain, took in some scenery, and pitched the tarp near the William Penn Shelter.

It was windy and cold camped up on the ridge, but we survived the night. This morning, we fortified ourselves with some instant oatmeal and highly concentrated tar instant coffee, and pushed on to route 501.

There are lots of nice views of the Lebanon Valley to the south.

It was a nice overnighter. We had good weather, and kept the mileage very low.

There are a few more pictures in my gallery, but for some damn fool reason, my camera was in 640×480 mode the whole time, so nothing terribly high-res this time.

Did you know that if you hike all 798 miles of State Forest Hiking Trails in Pennsylvania, they give you an award?

Well, they do. You get a certificate, a patch, and a “ceremonial walking stick.”

I would really like to have my very own ceremonial walking stick.

I’d also like to finish walking all of the Appalachian trail in Pennsylvania. All together, it comes out to about a thousand miles of walking.

At the end of this, I will be a grizzled old mountain man.

With a ceremonial walking stick.

You will all, no doubt, be greatly jealous of my grizzled manliness, and of my walking stick. If you ask nicely, I will whack you in the head with it.

My walking stick, that is. Not my grizzled manliness.

So, I’m looking through the German version of the Esbit catalog (pdf), and look what I find.

That’s right, bitches. It’s a Trockenbrenstoff-Kocher. For those of you who don’t sprechen the Deutsch, that means super-bad-ass esbit stove.

It weighs .4 ounces.
It folds up eensy-weensy, teeny-tiny.

I can’t seem to find any for sale here in America, and the minimum import order is 300 pieces.

Anyone know of somebody who’s importing these things?
Anyone know how hard it is to setup an import business? Esbit makes all sorts of cool stuff that I’ve never even seen before!

Ist das nicht süß?!

Update: It looks like backpackinglite.com used to carry them, but now they are out-of stock… grr..

Update 2: I spoke with a sales rep at AGS, which is evidently the only Esbit distributor in the US. She says that they don’t carry this particular stove, but will start carrying it early next year.
I’ll check back in a few months.

This past weekend, I went with my Evil Sister and Klinutus to backpack around the West Canada Lake Wilderness in the Adirondacks.

We left immediately after work on Thursday night, as it’s a 9 hour drive from Harrisburg. We finally got to the trailhead at 3:00AM Friday morning. There was a clear sky and no light pollution there, so I flopped my bivy down right next to the car, and stared off into space and time until I fell asleep.

After a few hours, but before the sun came up, I had an intestinal emergency. I fumbled through my pack for my flashlight and poop shovel and ran off into the forest to dig a hole and unburden myself.

A few hours later, I awoke to the morning sun, which revealed a perfectly good outhouse right across the parking lot. Doh!

As a public service, I have included this outhouse on the map, so that others needn’t poop into holes in the ground.

At first light, we hiked down the French Louis trail, where we encountered a filthy looking backpacker who informed us that we were the first people he’d seen in 3 days.

We were not very far into the woods, when we came upon this little fellow. I nearly sewered him with my trekking pole before my sister alerted me to his presence. It was still pretty cold outside, and he was a little slow trying to hop off into the woods. This is how I was able to get my camera right up close for a picture.

There are these little Adirondack lean-to shelters all over the place. Many of them are built right on a lake, so you have unbelievable views in them. A couple of them had cooking implements hanging from them, so you don’t have to bring your own, if you don’t mind cooking with unclean pots of indeterminate origin.

We found one of these shelters unoccupied Friday afternoon and claimed it for ourselves. It had quite a view.

Saturday morning, we futzed around in camp until quite late making breakfast and coffee and looking at the view. When we finally did get underway, we found that beavers had constructed a dam, which caused a detour of the trail, forcing us to hike around the beaver pond.

The extra walking did not dampen Klinutus’ spirits, as evidenced by his insane butt-monkey dance on the bridge over a stream crossing.

We had perfect weather for the whole endeavor. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, day or night.

Saturday night, all the lean-tos were full, so we found another spot with a nice view of the lake. Klinutus built a fire, we had dinner, watched the sun go down, and slept out under the stars.

Sunday morning we had a fairly easy 5 mile walk back to the car, where we saw (but did not photograph) a beaver and two grouse.

It was a wondrous trip, even though my legs are so sore I can barely walk a day and half after I got off the trail.

There’s a few more pictures in my Gallery, in case all these pictures didn’t do it for you.

So, I did a little digging in the TIGER data and the Yahoo Satellite images, and I was able to figure out where the proposed extension to the LVRT will be.

You can see it as a dashed blue line heading north out of Lebanon. In reality, it would get much closer to the eastern end of the SCRT, but I lost the railway in the satellite imagery after it crosses interstate 81.

In any event, it will be awesome to be able to ride all the way from Elizabethtown to the mountains without having to worry about traffic!

Click the map for an interactive version.