The Blasphemous Bicycler

Juniata, River of Sorrows is two stories in one. One of them is about the author’s 100 mile fishing trip, where he floated the whole length of the Juniata River in a Jonboat. The other story is about all the grizzy conflicts between white settlers and the Indians who lived along the river in colonial times.

The stories are interwoven every other chapter, so you don’t get too bored. I personally don’t much care about how many bass the author caught on his fishing trip, but it helps to cut away to the fish stories when you can’t stand anymore talk about the Indians disemboweling settlers and burning people alive.

I think it’s really cool to hear about how much crazy stuff went on around here, where most people think nothing exciting ever happens. I grew up not far from Sunbury, so I had heard about Shikellamy, but I didn’t know he was such a badass.

I live only about 10 miles from the confluence of the Juniata and Susquehanna rivers, so this book is perhaps of more interest to locals than to the general public, but if you like to hear exciting stories about Indians and stuff, you might like it even if you live way out someplace in the Louisiana Purchase.

I give Juniata, River of Sorrows 4 Jihadis out of 5

You can read a free chapter online, if you want to get a feel for how it goes.

Look what arrived in the mail today. According to the customs declaration, it’s a key-chain from Hong Kong.

It wasn’t a key-chain at all, it’s a Trockenbrenstoff-Kocher!!

The kitchen scale says it weighs 3/8 of an ounce. That rocks!

The old-school esbit “trench heater” type stove weighs 3-1/8 ounces.

“Big Deal,” you say, “that’s only saving you 2.75 ounces!”

Well, that means I can bring along a whole extra pack of Ramen Noodles, smartass!

http://www.abearvotes.org/

I’ve been a little busy with some work-related stuff, but I finally got time to post pictures from my river trip.

We camped out at Black Moshannon State Park Friday night, so we’d all be packed up and ready to go first thing Saturday morning.

The weatherman was predicting rain for the whole weekend. Fortunately, he is totally incompetent.

This stretch of the river has no towns or development of any kind. There aren’t even any roads along it, only an old (abandoned?) railroad track. So, even though our choice of legal campsites was quite limited, the selection of good campsites was practically infinite.

Once we made camp, a series of thunderstorms forced me to cook dinner under my tarp, but the storms moved through quickly.

After the storms had passed, we hung out around the campfire.

While I abstained from intoxicating liquors, some of the crew imbibed deeply.

Sunday morning, those of us without hangovers went down to the riverbank, made coffee, and took panoramic photographs of the foggy river.

_{The view from our campsite — Click for big}

After the fog burned off, we had another nice, sunny day on the water

I made a google map of the trip, in case anyone wants to try to reproduce our results.

View Larger Map