Sunset Rocks Trail, Cumberland County, PA

Dave and I did get out for a hike yesterday, and we did end up doing the Sunset Rocks Trail out beyond Gettysburg. Even though getting out there would require about a 2.5 hour drive each way, the weather was forecast to be unseasonably warm, and we had basically the whole day set aside, so we figured what the heck. The hike as planned is a counter-clockwise lollipop, with about two-thirds of the planned 8+ miles on the Appalachian Trail, and the remainder on a side trail that climbs a ridge to a rocky overlook, Sunset Rocks, the namesake landmark for the hike. Guidebooks list the hike at 8.x miles of moderate difficulty due to a few modest climbs and a section of rock hopping on the ridge top. It should take around 4 hours with stops.

To make the most of the day, I got up at 6:00am, was out the door by 6:45am, and was at Dave's house shortly before 7:30.

First bridge over Tom's Run

9:50am - The day is forecast to be in the mid-60's and sunny, but as we shoulder our daypacks and set out from the Fuller Lake Day Use parking area, it is 38 degrees. Dave and I are both wearing long sleeve fleece, which is unusual since neither of us feel the cold easily. From where we parked, the first several tenths of a mile are through the picnic areas in the park, along roads, and past buildings. This would normally be a drudge, but we did see one cool thing. The halfway point of the AT is within a few miles of here, and it is a tradition for thru-hikers to stop at the Pine Grove Furnace general store and eat a half gallon of ice cream. At this time of year the store was closed, but it was fun to see.

We are almost 7/10ths of a mile from the car by the time we finally get out of the main park grounds and turn off Pine Grove Road at the white blazes and follow the AT up the hill into the woods.

Midpoint on the AT... 5 miles down, 2176 to go.

10:47am - We reach a nice stream crossing over a little bridge near the junction of the blue blazed Sunset Trail and the Appalachian Trail. We are about 1.6 miles into our hike. This junction is the end of the "lollipop stick" portion of our route, and we will be going counterclockwise on the AT for a few miles before heading left onto the Sunset Trail and eventually ending up back here. To this point the hike has been relatively easy, with only a few minor ups and downs, and good footing with minimal rocks. It feels good to stretch the legs. Dave and I both discard the long sleeve fleece at this stop, as it is warming up nicely. We stay here for a few minutes and have a drink and take some pictures of the streams, as this is the first picturesque spot we have come to.

11:43am - After having walked for the last couple of miles along wet trails, we reach the midpoint marker for the AT. I am surprised to see it here, as the guidebook I have been using says that this marker is on the AT section that is a part of the Pole Steeple hike several miles from here, but not on this hike. I know that they move this marker around as the length of the AT changes due to rerouting and the like, and I guess they must have done so in this case since my guidebook was published only a few years ago. Dave and I take turns taking pictures of the sign and each other standing by it, as this is a famous hiker landmark. It has been slow going the last mile-plus, as the ground is very wet, with a lot of runoff from recent rains making the trail itself a small stream in many places. We spend too much time watching our feet and not the landscape. Shortly after crossing Michaux Road we would have passed the ruins of Camp Michaux, a WW2 era prisoner of war camp, but we saw nothing obvious as we sloshed by. Apparently this POW camp was set up to hold German naval officers, but was later expanded to include German Afrika Korps officers as well as Japanese officers. It was officially classified as a POW interrogation camp, one of only three in the country. More information on this area can be found here.

Tom's Run shelter on the AT

11:53am - We reach Tom's Run shelter almost exactly two hours after setting out. We have only covered about 4 miles of easy trails, so our pace is not very good, but the soggy condition of the trails and the constant little detours around puddles and marshy spots has slowed us considerably. The shelter area is very nice, with two wooden shelters in very good condition, a half a dozen tent spots, a critter pole for hanging packs, an outhouse, and a number of fire rings. All overlooking pretty little Tom's Run, which can be heard running over the rocks a short ways down the hill. This is my first sight of an AT shelter, and it seems like a very nice spot to spend the night.

A few hundred yards after leaving the shelter area, we turn left onto the blue blazed Sunset Rocks Trail. It continues to be an easy if mucky walk, with fairly run of the mill scenery. We do pass through a nice rhododendron thicket at around this juncture, which is a nice thing. Other than that, it is a lot of the same: waterlogged trails, fire access roads, and fairly ordinary terrain.

At around the 6 mile mark according to Dave's handy-dandy iPhone app, we have climbed onto the southern end of Little Rocky Ridge, and the hiking along the side slope has made me begin to feel my right knee. Typical. A little soreness but nothing bad. The climb onto the ridge is no big deal, but it was one of the few times that I have been breathing hard today. It feels good.

Dave at Sunset Rocks

The last 2 or 3 tenths of a mile approaching the overlook is as advertised; rock climbing and boulder hopping. I love this kind of hiking and this is my favorite part of the day. I would have liked it even better if my knee weren't acting up, and I felt more stable hopping from rock to rock. But it was still terrific, and reminded me of the rocky sections east of the North Lookout at Hawk Mountain. Very nice. A few hundred yards from the overlook we leave the main trail, which heads left down the ridge, and continue on a short rocky spur.

1:09pm - We reach the Sunset Rocks overlook. At first I am not 100% sure that we have reached our destination, as there still seems to be some ridgeline ahead of us, but a quick investigation shows that the blue blazes do end here, and there is no more spur trail ahead. We stop and enjoy the view across the valley. We do lament our lack of planning. It is lunchtime, we are at a nice scenic spot, and a sandwich would taste real nice right about now. If we had a sandwich, that is. Unfortunately, all we have are various protein bars, which will keep body and soul together, but that's about it.

After maybe a ten minute stop for a rest, a snack and some pictures, we head back to the trail that heads back down to the AT and will complete our loop. The descent off the ridge is very steep, and I set a very slow pace as this kind of downhill is a killer on my knee. Level ground is fine, uphill is a little sore, but downhill is rough. And this is rough. I feel old at this moment; much older than my years.

Things get better once the slope levels out, and before long we are back at the junction with the AT near the nice bridge (picture at top). We see what appears to be a family in the distance out for a walk, and note that they are all wearing blaze orange. Dave is wearing red (by coincidence) and I am wearing royal blue. We make a bunch of "I am not a deer" jokes and begin retracing our steps back along the AT to our starting point.

2:00pm (ish) - We arrive back at the car, a few minutes beyond 4 hours, and having covered 9.6 total miles according to Dave's iPhone hiking tracker app. Dave is pleased that this first test of the new app has allowed his phone to run on gps mode for a little over 4 hours and still have perhaps a third of its battery life left. I am a little tired, my feet are sore, my right knee is a little sore, but in general I feel terrific. We could hardly have expected a better day for a hike in late November.

Final thoughts - We had a fun hike on a beautiful late fall day, and it was nice to take the time to go somewhere relatively far from home. The hike, while pretty long by my standards, was not tough at all from an elevation standpoint. Other than a few moderate but brief climbs and the one very steep downhill stretch coming down off the overlook, it was mostly flat (or flat-ish). The last two or three tenths of a mile getting to the overlook was a lot of rock scrambling, but that is one of my favorite kinds of hiking, so I loved that part. As for "rating" the hike itself, I would say that it was a good solid hike but nothing spectacular, and while I am certainly glad we did it, it wouldn't go on a list of hikes worth repeating. The overlook was nice, but not "wow". The scenery was typical eastern PA hiking, with a mix of hardwoods and some pine understory, a few pretty patches of rhododendrons, and a few noisy little streams. Time of year may be influencing my opinion, as the leaves were off the trees, and the extensive soggy stretches of trail had Dave and I spending too much time looking at our feet and not enough at our surroundings. But simply put... good but not great.

I wonder as I write this if my recent experiences out west have spoiled my expectations, and in a sense I am sure that they have. But there is more to it than that. Certainly after having hiked Harney Peak, Little Devil's Tower and Teddy Roosevelt National Park, this would pale in comparison, but even by my limited Pennsylvania hiking experience, this was nothing special for Pennsylvania. Hiking around Hawk Mountain and the Pinnacle has better views and scenery in general. The Pinchot trail backpack (summer 2010) had better scenery in terms of mile after mile variety and interest (although granted it was summer). And the up and down in and out of the Port Clinton Gap was a much more vigorous hike if that is what you are looking for. So I don't think I am being too harsh. If Harney Peak was a 9.5, TRNP was a 9, Scotts Bluff and Wind Cave were 8's, and Hawk Mountain is a 7, then this would be maybe a 6. Or a 5.5. If it sounds like I didn't like it, that's absolutely not the case. It as a nice hike, and a great day out with my big brother. But this is a nice hike, not a great hike.

A Day in the Woods - 11/1/10 - Part 2

Appalachian Trail - Port Clinton, PA - West side of gap

After the morning's hike on the east side of the gap, Dave and I drove around a little bit to grab a few geocaches (we ended the day with 10, or at least I did - I found a couple that he already had from a prior hike).

Finishing that, we parked at the trail head near the scenic railroad behind Port Clinton, and headed into the woods for a cache called Hooties Cubby that was located about 1.5 miles west on the Appalachian Trail. We parked at the blue dot, made our away to the Schuylkill River Trail, headed south a tenth of a mile or two to grab a cache, and then backtracked to get the AT and head up the hill. And I do mean up the hill.

Unlike the east side of the gap, where the AT tackles the slope by switch-backing across the grain of the slope, the west side pretty much goes straight up. As Dave has pointed out to me, the AT sign should AT pointing up and to the right, not just to the right. The first part that climbs away from the SRT is steep enough that rock stairs have been built into the hillside. The stairs soon end, but the climb doesn't level out much for maybe the first half mile.

Pictures of steep slopes never seem to do them justice, but in the photo from above the scenic railroad, you can get some idea of how far above the train cars we have gotten in a pretty short distance. The east slope we hiked in the morning is in the background of that photo. The morning's hike had us gain about 650 feet of elevation. This had us gain about 950 feet, and it was steeper getting there. In the shape I am in, it was a bit of a thigh-burner, but not too horrible. Dave let me set a fairly leisurely pace, and that coupled with a short stop to grab a cache halfway up the slope allowed us to get over the brow of the slope and onto the milder slope in good shape. It felt wonderful, and was probably the steepest slope I have hiked as an adult.

Once we achieved the ridge top, it was a nice easy hike, with a somewhat different feel to it than the morning. The ridge top was much broader, so that sense of ground sloping sharply away to both sides was missing. This also made the ridge top much less exposed to the wind, and so this part of our walk was not nearly as cold. At the end of our walk, we easily found Hooties Cubby, which was in a rock covered hollow at the base of a tree. Finding this cache was very very simple, but getting there certainly wasn't. The terrain rating on this was 3.5 on a 1-5 scale (higher being harder), and we felt like we earned this one. I have done caches with higher terrain ratings that required a lot less effort than this. Another nice thing about this cache was that it was placed in March 2003, which makes it a pretty old cache. Geocaching first came into existence when the military gps network was opened for broad public use, and the first cache was published soon after this happened (May 3, 2000 near Portland Oregon - thus a hobby was born). The oldest cache I have found at this point is from April 2001. So seeing the signatures in this one dating all the way back to 2003 is cool (only 23 of my 449 cache finds at this point are 2003 or earlier).

The hike back was easier, as it was downhill all the way. At the really steep part, I could feel the usual different kind of burn - your knees, shins and quads are your brakes on a down slope, and this was a heck of a down slope. I'm not sure how much fun this would be with a 30 pound backpack, but maybe I'll find out someday.

Back at the car, we finished up the day with a few more easy geocaches (park n grabs), and made the obligatory stop at Cabela's, a huge outdoors store just south of Port Clinton. Then home in time for dinner.

Thanks to Dave for taking the day and coming out for a nice day in the outdoors.

A Day in the Woods - 11/1/10 - Part 1

Appalachian Trail - Port Clinton, PA - East side of gap

Dave and I had the opportunity to take a day off from work today and get outside and do something. We generally do a better job of planning ahead, but this jaunt came together fairly quickly, and with all the family stuff going on around Halloween, our planning amounted to something along the lines of: I'll load a bunch of caches on my GPS, take a few notes, and pick you up at around 7:45am. We can figure out what to do while we are driving. We knew we were headed to Port Clinton, PA, which is an old standby for us, with ready access to Hawk Mountain, the Appalachian Trail, part of the Schuylkill Trail, and a bunch of geocaches. The day would end up being some combination of hiking and geocaching, with a stronger emphasis on hiking.

We talked as we drove, and decided that we would tackle the east side of the Port Clinton gap on the AT, where there is a geocache about a mile away from parking. As can be seen from the picture below (taken from a few miles away, east is to the right), the ridge that the AT follows has a gap at Port Clinton, and getting back up onto the ridgeline that the AT follows necessitates a fairly steep climb out of the gap, followed by a gradual ascent the rest of the way. From prior experience, Dave knew that the slope on the west side of town was significantly steeper than the one on the east, so we planned to do the east side as a warm up, and then the west side later in the day if we felt like it.


We parked the car right next to an Appalachian Trail sign, and right next to that, Pennsylvania State Game Lands signs with all sorts of warnings. We knew that it was hunting season when we set out, and also knew that much of this whole area is hunting land. So here I am doing my best to impersonate a pumpkin. It's not much of a fashion statement I will admit, but it is very Haloween-ish, and it sure beats acquiring some extra ventilation.


It was a beautiful fall day, but a little colder than I had anticipated. When we parked the car at the foot of the ridge at about 9:30am, it was still only 37 degrees, and a persistent breeze made it feel cooler than that. We set off up the trail, which begins with a long switchback to take some of the steepness out of the slope. Still, it was uphill beginning right from the parking lot, so we didn't get a warm up, and I am glad it wasn't any steeper than it was so that my legs had a chance to get loosened up. What took a little more getting used to than the legs was the lungs. My wind isn't what it should be due to many years of sitting at a desk all day, and the cold air stung quite a bit as I huffed and puffed through the first uphill section. Fortunately, both the legs and the lungs got acclimated pretty quickly and I felt great.


This section of the AT was very typical of this part of Pennsylvania; rocky ground and deciduous forest. Once we had climbed to the top of the ridge, we were on a narrow path that really was the knife edge of the ridge. As can be seen in this picture the ridge drops off fairly steeply to both sides. There were terrific views both north and south, and one advantage of hiking at this time of the year after most of the leaves are down is that you get much better views off into the distance than you would with full foliage.

At the end of a 1.1 mile hike out - success! Dave digs out the ammo can and signs the log of the geocache that gave us a flimsy excuse to come up here in the first place (not that we needed an excuse...).

This little hike was a simple out-and-back on the same trail, so the track of our route looks like a line. This is one of the disadvantages of the AT, if you consider it a disadvantage; there is no such thing as a loop. Either you use two cars and do a shuttle hike, or you retrace your steps. Which isn't a bad thing. I have now hiked this 1.1 mile section of the AT twice, once northbound and once southbound.

Next...Part 2, Port Clinton gap west.