Back and forth

"You can fold your sticks for the first part," John said,"you won't need them. Gloves, yes, sticks, no."

"Gloves I've got," I replied. Ha, more of Pennsylvania's signature trail features? So, I climbed.

Lehigh River

Okay, follow the blazes

Follow them where?

West side of the Gap - not today!

Raider, the SOBO hiker who got me headed the right direction, decided to leave Indy with John and his two Dobermans for a few days off trail. She asked me for a text report on how the dog was doing that evening, and I agreed to do so, with reservations. 

Personally, I would  be a bit slower to board my dog with a new acquaintance. John seems an intensely honest person, but sometimes very casual about his stewardship, My text message will, I think, only be a small fig leaf for the owner's concerns about five days of boarding with him.

As part of my preparations for the slackpacking hike from the Lehigh River back to Kunkletown, I went through my pack to weed out any unnecessary weight that I could leave with John Stempa. Tent, pad, and bag? Leave. Food? Lunch only. Emergency phone and GPS? Keep. First aid and snakebite kit? KEEP.

Water weight? A careful tradeoff decision between backpack burden and hiking with a tongue trying to stick to thr roof of one's mouth. I chose to take only 1 1/4 liter, about a third of my usual load. Part of my plan was to resupply at the spring my host had located, developed, and submitted to the AT guidebooks. 

After clawing my way up the east side of Lehigh Gap today, I followed the Trail past warning signs and aged barriers surrounding the valley-wide 1983 Superfund site near Palmerton. 

Zinc containment ridges to the north

From the top of the southern containment ridge

The production mill

More history  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmerton,_Pennsylvania

Editorial comment follows. For more travel tales, please skip ahead. 

Every generation has people who make honest tries at solving problems created by the previous one, it seems, and winds up leaving new problems behind. It seems to me that our early 70s era wave took the environmental remediation movement and to a great degree made it happen for the USA -- not to say the efforts were perfect, complete, or even parrtially reversed those efforts, but the way ahead is clear.  Similarly, the desperate use of the mutual assured destruction paradigm to hold terror weapons in balance as the world evolved to its current multilateral condition with our support at Reykjavik and elsewhere. 

Are there terrible flaws in the world we are turning over to our grandchildren? Yes -- Chernobyl comes to mind -- but there are many things we have at least temporarily put to rest. 

Okay, enough editorial rambling.

After I had walked a few miles more, the trail surface grew rocky again. That made foot placement as I was trying to keep up a reasonable pace, and the care I was taking kept me from stepping on a nonvenomous and not especially agressive black snake! 

Not the best snake photo ever taken

Not actually needed, but I was glad to have the snakebite kit along. Since it also has arrangements for suctioning spider venom, my thoughts also turned to it when one of several full facial spiderweb treatments turned out to have a live occupant. How do the trail runners doing thirty miles a day deal with this sort of thing?

Water turned into a more difficult problem, a recurring one for me. When I found the trail down to Stempa's Spring, my reserve was down to about six ounces, and half of that I sipped away during the half mile boulder strewn descent ... to another dry spring. Welcome to Pennsylvania's autumn trails.

Fortunately, John was able to guide me the rest of the way down the mountain by phone. He picked me up from a forest road, we returned to his house, and I washed the difficult parts of the day with a hot shower and another fine dinner at the Kunkeltown Pub,.

Life is unpredictable some days, but I just keep moving. Good times are always just over the hill.