25.4 miles destroyed. Crushed the old longest day record by at least three miles. About five miles into the day I crossed the Mason Dixon Line, leaving behind Maryland and entering Pennsylvania.
I was up pretty early in anticipation of the big day, but I guess I’m up early most days now. Coming down from Raven Rocks was, as the name suggests, quite rocky. These were the large boulder variety where there’s never even a glimmer of the earth below, it’s 100% stone. Here it was like that coming down off a mountain with a decent grade. At the bottom things smoothed out and it was smooth sailing the rest of the way to the state border and PenMar park. So far the parks are the defining feature of this section. Since entering Maryland there has been an awesome park or picnic area every 5 to 10 miles along the trail. PenMar had tons of picnic tables, a playground, restrooms, water etc. I took a short break there and pressed on, the day was only 20% over.
There was another park for lunch around the 12 mile mark, this one was mostly just grassy fields dotted with picnic tables, but there was a city water supply, the last water source for the next 10 miles. As I ate lunch the sky started to darken and it looked like rain was threatening. I started the second half and sure enough it started sprinkling. It was getting warm and I was kind of hoping for a nice downpour to cool off in, but light rain is all that I got. Even that was short lived, within minutes the shower ended and was rapidly replaced by the heat of the direct sun. Of course I was in the middle of what was probably the longest uphill of the day when the sun made its appearance.
While the three day break helped toughen up my feet immensely my shoulder still gets sore regularly. The best thing I can do is to stop for a short pack-off break as soon as I feel discomfort rather than letting pain build up. Just a couple minutes rest yields several miles of comfort. The final big stop of the day came at Caledonia State Park, a sprawling collection of picnic grounds accompanied by a stream, a pool, and most importantly, a snack bar. A basket of chicken strips and french fries never tasted so good as it did today 23 miles into the day. It was slightly overpriced but I made up for that by using about 1/2 the bottle of bbq sauce that they provided. As I started up the trail at the North end of the park there was a sign warning that it was “highest difficulty” and really that was pretty accurate, at least for the first 1/2 mile or so. It was pretty much straight up, and either stone stairsteps or loose rocks. I would have liked to see a stray tourist start up that trail by mistake.
I had heard a lot of good things about Quarry Gap shelter, and apparently so had other people. The actual shelter holds 8, but there’s probably about 30 people here total. Most of that is one big group of girl-scouts, but there’s some section hikers and some other thru-hikers – Lady and Eli. Landon and Miranda were planning on making it here as well but doesn’t look like they will make it.