NCT 7: Escape from New York

Ellicottville, NY to Clarion, PA

It’s been a while! For some reason I’ve been procrastinating on writing this section, maybe because it’s so long. In any case, we’re at the Days Inn in Lisbon, Ohio, which has a computer available for guest use, so this should go a little faster than writing on my phone. Let’s jump back in.

We’d been hoping to get an early start out of Ellicottville, but the town gravity was too strong. At 9:30am, we were still fussing around with internet chores and trying to pack our packs. It took me ages to figure out where to send Constantine’s birthday presents, and I couldn’t get them shipped in time to arrive for his actual birthday in Clarion. I sent them to Darlington instead, and then wasted more time ordering new shoes. By the time we got going, it was already past ten. No matter - we only had to do twenty miles to get to the next shelter, and we’d been in the habit of lazy days out of town. The only thing that was stressing me out was the timing. For a couple of days, we’d been texting back and forth with our friend Enigma, who’s now living and working in western New York. He doesn’t own a car, but he’d been trying to coordinate a ride to come meet us on trail and hike some miles together. The night before, we’d finally managed to settle on a tentative plan, so now Constantine and I were hiking against the clock. We had to make it to our goal tonight, or we’d keep Enigma waiting a ridiculously long time the next morning.

The western part of New York is fairly flat, but we still had one climb that day, and it came at the very beginning. After a short roadwalk out of town, the trail turned and took us up, up, up a closed ski hill. We were following the easiest possible line up the cat-track road, but it was still incredibly steep. The sun was fierce, and I sweated and puffed under my six-day load of food. It was hard to believe that we’d be out for a full six days, a real trail section in a real National Forest. After we left New York, we would walk on no roads and receive no cell signal, and would not encounter a single convenience store. I felt surprisingly nervous about it - most thru-hikes I’ve done are made entirely of sections like this, but every NCT section so far had included at least one major roadwalk. I’d forgotten what good trail was. The singletrack trails on the FLT had been such a mixed bag that I was almost dreading 160 miles of pure trail. My most recent experiences of “trails” were mainly of brushy, mowed paths rather than constructed singletrack, and I’d found myself looking forward to the roadwalks. What would a six day section even be like?

That was a problem for future-me though. Today, we would be walking straight through the little town of Salamanca, giving us one last chance to charge our batteries and pick up any forgotten necessities. Our climb topped out after three miles, and we found ourselves in a municipal park. It was a surprise to find the picnic tables there, but it seemed that the ski hill in summer was actually quite popular with locals. Though it was only 11ish, we decided to make it our lunch spot, as we were unlikely to find a better place to stop on the road and we hadn’t eaten breakfast in town. As we lazed in the sun, I idly clicked around on the maps for the section and discovered that I’d made a huge mistake. When I was organizing our meeting with Enigma, I’d forgotten to include the map we were on in my calculations. It wasn’t 20 miles to the shelter as we’d told him, it was 32! Oh, no! There was no way we would make it there now - we couldn’t hike 29 miles starting at 11:30am! Fortunately, I still had LTE service, so I sent him a message as quickly as I could, explaining the situation. Maybe it would work out for the best - we wouldn’t be getting to Salamanca today after all, so he might be able to meet us in town? Maybe it was a better place to be dropped off? I felt horribly embarrassed, and flipped my phone into airplane mode immediately afterwards so I wouldn’t have to read his response. I hoped he wasn’t mad at me.

“Magpie, he’s a thru-hiker, he knows that’s how it goes. And he still needs to finalize his ride anyway, I promise he won’t be mad.” Constantine reassured me.

“I know, I know, it’ll probably be fine…. I just get anxious. Ugh, let’s go.”

We dropped some elevation as we entered Rock City State Forest, and stopped to filter water at an old Civilian Conservation Corps camp. The CCC camp had picnic tables and stone benches, and we took another lazy break since we had less than fifteen miles left. Reluctantly, I flipped my service back on. When my Canadian phone plan connects to Verizon towers, it gets LTE data but not any calls or SMS messages, so this entire conversation with Enigma was happening over messaging apps that neither of really use. I guess I’d had the notifications turned off, because it took me a while to see his reply. He was fine with the change of location, but now his ride had possibly fallen through, and he’d have to let me know later. Since my service was so unreliable, I told him to text Constantine. We hiked on. (As an aside, this quirk of my roaming cell plan and the ubiquity of Verizon towers in the northeast means that I haven’t received a single text message or voicemail since my plane touched down in Vermont. I promise I’m not just ignoring you!)

The trail past the CCC camp was pretty mellow - a grassy climb, then good-quality singletrack through the woods. I’d noticed a weird hairpin turn in the map the day before and chalked it up to yet more FLT loopiness, but when we got there, we figured out why. Little Rock City was amazing! The trail wove us through a collection of gigantic glacial erratics, a complex of boulders so densely packed that it was like walking through a maze. White blazes painted directly on the rocks guided us through narrow chutes and around sharp corners, at one point ducking us directly under the rocks where two boulders leaned against each other. It was the first place on the whole NCT that I genuinely wanted to spend more time exploring, the only place so far that I would go out of my way to visit. The FLT route only went through a small corner of the park, and it was clear that there was way, way more cool stuff around here. We spent as much time as we could spare playing around and taking photos, and when we got to the end of the rock maze, we were astonished to discover that the boulders were completely invisible! We’d been climbing until we were level with the top of the complex, and from that vantage, it just looked like ordinary forest.

I was in the swing of things now. If this is what Allegheny National Forest would be like, I was stoked! We’d be off the Finger Lakes Trail and through to a real hiking destination, a place that people go on purpose to experience the outdoors. No more wheat fields! No more crappy trail! I was excited to finally be out of New York.

After passing an appealing new shelter (that we regrettably could not stop to enjoy), we left Little Rock City and dropped our remaining elevation on an overgrown forest road. The mosquitoes were buzzing and the sun was hot, and I was once more looking forward to the short stretch of roadwalk before the shelter. I flicked a crawling tick off my wrist and shuddered, pounding down the final stretch to the roadside parking area.

There was someone standing there. Just past the gate, a guy in hiking pants and an ElevenSkys hat was smiling up at me and waving. I stopped and said hello. “You must be Magpie!” he said, “I’m Jim. My wife and I are out here high-pointing and we thought we’d do some trail magic for you guys.” Constantine soon caught up, and he and Jim stood in the long grass and the mosquitoes, talking about how he’d been following Constantine’s quest to hike the eleven national scenic trails. High-pointing, it turns out, is a hobby that involves climbing to the highest point of all fifty states, or the highest point of any geographic category more generally, like all the highest points in Europe. Apparently, the one in Kansas is a random bump in the middle of a field. It has something in common with thru-hiking, and Jim and his wife were big fans. As fascinating as this discussion was, I was growing kind of desperate to get out the bugs and move on, and I turned the conversation to trail magic. It was pretty hilarious - Jim’s “magic” for Constantine was a giant jar of peanut butter and another packet of Spam! Constantine notoriously despises peanut butter, and enjoys complaining about eating Spam much more than actually doing so. They had real magic for us too, and I gratefully accepted some Via coffee packets and the offer of fresh water. Thirty minutes of chat later, we bid them farewell and hit the road. I was ready to get to camp, and anxious to hear about Enigma’s new plan.

The roadwalk went quickly, and we were soon back in the forest on an ATV road. We were shooting for Bucktooth Shelter in the state forest now, and I was still feeling terrible about my mileage calculation mistake. I felt bad about our poor time management too - the day had been characterized by lazy planning and long breaks, and we’d spent so little of our time actually hiking that it took us until seven pm to hike an easy twenty! We had to stop doing these short days out of town if we wanted to get through Ohio, and we had to start waking up earlier and being disciplined with our time. I ate grumpily and went to sleep, vowing to do better.

I woke up feeling sluggish and dull, and Constantine slept straight through his first alarm. As a consequence, we didn’t get going until 7:30am, and I felt even worse about our pace. I hadn’t used the time to catch up on my overdue writing, I hadn’t written any new trail notes, we hadn’t gotten very far down the trail and I didn’t even have cell service to check in with Enigma. I had no idea if he was meeting us today or not, and I paced down the trail in a frantic rush, paranoid that he’d be angry at us for keeping him waiting after I screwed up the plan. Of course, Enigma is not the kind of person who’d hold that against me, and I was fully aware that it was just my anxiety talking. Despite that, I hesitated to turn off airplane mode when I spotted a cell tower, though I did force myself to check. I haven’t seen Enigma in almost two years, and I was eager to hike some miles with him again.

He had responded, but not with good news. His ride had fallen through, and he didn’t know when he could arrange another one. I told him that he was always welcome, that he should pop in on trail any time it worked, and responded to his question about what trail magic we’d appreciate most. Afterwards, I got worried that I was too specific and seemed entitled, and started ruminating on that anxiety. Did I seem too brusque? Too presumptuous when I told him my favourite soda is Cherry Coke, and that I probably wouldn’t drink a beer? Did I come off as demanding when I asked him about possibly bringing me a birthday candle to surprise Constantine? I worried the entire way to Salamanca.

Salamanca is the capital of the Seneca Nation, a member of the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, and the purple-and-white flag was flying all over town. Or it would have been flying, had there been a wind. The air was still and dead, and I was already exhausted from the heat. We made our way to the McDonald’s on the edge of town, unpatriotically bypassing the Tim Hortons because it was 0.3mi out of our way. Constantine wanted to go to the casino, but I reminded him that a) he wasn’t vaccinated yet and b) last time we went to the casino, he lost $400 at blackjack, after being up by $800 most of the night. “After I get vaccinated, I’ll always win, right? That’s how that works?” He teased.

“No. But after you get vaccinated, you are allowed to go to the casino.” I replied

“Really? I can go to the casino? I wouldn’t think you’d be comfortable with that.”

“The vaccines work really well, babe! After you’re vaccinated, you can go sit in a smoky room next to strangers and lose money all night long if you want.” This did seem to make him more enthusiastic about the prospect of getting vaccinated. I don’t think it’d sunk in for him that vaccines mean a return to normal, and he’s pretty scared of needles. I promised him that we could even go to Vegas after we got off trail, and he seemed genuinely surprised and cheered by this news.

We spent far too long at the McDonald’s, and we both ate far too much food. Constantine crammed down five breakfast sandwiches while I ate two McMuffins and all of the hashbrowns. My period arrived while we were sitting down, which was fortuitous - their bathrooms were open, so I could pop in there to clean up. It definitely explained my anxiety over the past few days. We rolled out of the restaurant nearly an hour later, both of us asleep on our feet from the sheer quantity of grease we’d consumed. We followed a bike path for a while next to the highway, then turned at a parking lot to follow a rough ATV-track powerline road. My stomach was aching and upset after all that McDonalds, and my head pounded from the salt overdose. What had I done to myself? The overcast sky offered no relief from the heat, and there was nowhere to sit down and rest on the paved road that followed. I unbuckled my hipbelt and did some slow breathing exercises to cope, and over the next hour and a half I began to feel better, just in time for our first glimpse of Allegheny State Park.

Here it was: the beginning of our first real hiking section. We followed a dirt road from the fish hatchery into the protected wetlands area, and I began to get excited again as the hills rose into view. A little dark brown weasel streaked across my path, made eye contact halfway across the road and then zipped back to cover. A weasel! So cute. The trees rising out of the mist made me think of the Amazon rainforest - being from Canada, my platonic idea of a forest is cold and filled with pines or cedars. This was the first big, healthy Northeastern forest I’d ever seen outside of Maine, and it startled me to see an expanse that was warm and crowned with deciduous trees. To me, wet and leafy canopies signify the tropics! We came to the entrance to the State Park, and were delighted to see a gigantic NCT sign at the trailhead. We were almost out of New York, and almost off the FLT!

The New York section of the Allegheny is a State Park, while the Pennsylvania section is a National Forest, but the two parks connect and the trails are maintained to the same standard throughout. We’d been worried about the climb up from the road into the park, but the trail was so well-designed that the 600ft elevation felt like nothing at all. “It feels like this trail actually goes somewhere!” I exclaimed to Constantine. “Like, it was designed for people to actually hike it. They’re thinking about the best route over the next ten miles, not just trying to get you over the next hill. Like, they know people actually come and hike for multiple days! Over long distances even! The trail is built for actual hikers!” We were so excited about the good trail design. We couldn’t shut up about it, exclaiming back and forth all the way to the shelter. It was gorgeous, it was beautiful, it was amazing, it made sense! Five days of nothing but this wonderful, sensible, excellent trail was going to heaven. More than heaven; it was going to be hiking! The signage in the section was specific for the NCT, not the Finger Lakes Trail, and that got us excited too. This trail was maintained and signed just for us! At last, this adventure felt like a thru-hike instead of a fool’s errand.

We were cruising into the shelter, pushing the pace to avoid the incipient rain, when we came across another hiker. I immediately got a weird vibe - he was wearing Altras and had a Granite Gear ultralight pack, but his pack was stuffed to the absolute gills and he wasn’t going more than 2 miles per hour. Unfortunately, he was going the same direction as us, so we had to stop and talk. “You guys doing the Finger Lakes Trail?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “We’re thru-hiking the NCT. Vermont to North Dako-”

“Yeah, yeah, I know that one. I was thinking about doing that, got the maps, but the resupply is tough, isn’t it? Those Avenza maps suck. Yeah, I might do something on the NCT. You going to the shelter in two miles?” (This is paraphrased, but that was his general vibe)

We had to tell him that we were. It seemed like he wanted to talk more, but then he wouldn’t make eye contact and shifted his weird-fitting pack uncomfortably, as if he wanted to go. He didn’t precisely say he was going to that shelter, but it seemed like he asked because that was his destination. We set off at a fast pace, extremely creeped out. Or at least I was - Constantine wasn’t particularly enthused to share the shelter with that guy, but I was full-on paranoid about it. I’d been listening to too many survival podcasts maybe, because my mind immediately went to the 2019 murder on the AT. It wasn’t totally fair to the creepy hiker, because he hadn’t done or said anything overtly threatening and didn’t seem to be carrying a weapon - but then again, his story about where he was hiking and his weird half-knowledge about the NCT was concerning. Nothing he said made total sense, but it wasn’t total nonsense either. It was just really odd and unsettling. “Let’s get to the shelter and cook dinner, and if he shows up and it’s uncomfortable, we can leave. If we don’t set up until he gets there, we can just say we were getting here for a dinner break,” I suggested. “He’s probably not a murderer, right? What do you even do when you’re sharing a shelter with other hikers? Do you have to talk to them? I forget.”

Constantine readily agreed to this plan - he didn’t feel like making conversation with the strange guy either, and we cooked our dinners as we waited anxiously for him to show up. Then we ate our dinners. Then we sat around in the shelter and watched the rain, hoping that we wouldn’t have to set up the tent in it. By 7pm, he hadn’t yet arrived, but we gave him another half an hour to account for his slow pace. At 7:30, we felt confident that he wasn’t coming. “He must have asked if we were staying at the shelter so he could camp alone,” Constantine said. “It’s weird, he seemed like the talkative type.” I was hugely relieved. If he had shown up and given off a threatening vibe, even camping a few miles down the trail wouldn’t have been a guarantee of safety. He had the maps! He knew exactly where we were going, and with no roads and no cell service, we would have had nowhere to run to if he'd been dangerous. I still had the irrational worry that he would stalk us down the trail, but I knew that it wasn’t based on anything. I was just desocialized, unused to seeing other hikers. I realized in that moment that it had been almost two years since I’d hiked a popular trail. Constantine and I had been a team of exclusively two, and I felt frightened by the prospect of hiker company.

The rain slowed and turned to mist as the sun set, and I was given one more “first” in this first real section on the NCT. I saw, for the first time in my life, fireflies. At first I thought I must be about to faint, or hallucinating. Tiny pinpricks of light were moving in my peripheral vision. As I turned my head, I caught more and more glimpses out of the corner of my eye, and suddenly the perspective shifted and I saw them everywhere. They were little fairy lights, twinkling and swirling through the air like magic. They were so beautiful! I had been aware that fireflies were real insects, but some part of my brain had classified them as mythical, and I felt like a child meeting a real live unicorn. Constantine was amused by my wonderment - he’d grown up with them, and had seen them more summer nights than not. I couldn’t believe it. Fireflies are real! I stayed up late watching the show, peering out through drooping eyelids until I literally couldn’t hold them open.

We had yet another late start the next morning, reluctant to break our cosy quilt cuddle and head out into the fog. It was kind of cold out, which should have been good news for me, but the dampness was less than enticing.

We were only a few miles away from the NY/PA border though, and the milestone was enough to lift our moods. We pushed fast once we got going, and in a little over an hour we made our goal. We whooped and hollered when we saw the sign, and sat down on the damp earth to eat snacks and sign the trail log. Pennsylvania! We made it! We got even more excited when we saw the trail blazed in official NCT blue, and the direction signs bearing the trail initials. The feeling of being on a real thru-hike was back again, the feeling that this trail was made for us. It was routed for us, signed for us, intended to be hiked by people just like us! The elation of it carried us through the misty morning as we cruised over supremely well-maintained and cushy trail. It curved where the land curved, following the banks of the Allegheny Reservoir instead of pushing us up and over the hills as the FLT would have done. I was in love with it. We saw innumerable deer, who were wary but not overly scared of people, and even caught a glimpse of a tiny, spotted fawn.

“It feels like a trail that actually goes somewhere!” I said again. We just couldn't stop remarking on it. All throughout the Allegheny section, we marvelled at difference that good trail design makes. It was thoughtful. It was sane. It had primitive campsites situated at appropriate intervals, and though you could wild camp anywhere you wanted, the signed campsites were the places that made the most sense. Every climb was made easy by the trail placement or by generous switchbacks, and we never encountered a truly steep grade.

We ate lunch just past one of those campsites. We'd intended to eat lunch there, but it was occupied by a trio of canoe campers who had taken over the whole space. They had a bit of a weird vibe too, as two of them didn't speak to us or make eye contact. The third man walked out to the trail junction when he saw us coming, as if to head us off, and the short conversation was awkward and strained. He held one arm stiffly beneath his poncho in an unusual posture, and afterwards Constantine and I agreed that it seemed like he had a gun. We clearly weren't invited to sit down, so we pushed a mile further and found a good sitting log overlooking the lake.

It was here that I discovered that Constantine had packed out hotdogs. Again. After they’d gone bad in his pack last section and I'd warned him not to. I'd been so stressed out in the cramped, mask-optional Ellicottville grocery store that I'd failed to supervise his resupply, and he'd ended up with way too much food. His floppy dyneema food bag was the approximate size and weight of a watermelon, and I wished I'd been able to get his birthday present sooner - I'd ordered him an SWD Lunchbox in spiffy teal X-Pac, but he wouldn't get it until Darlington. A large part of the excess weight was the 1lb package of hotdogs that he'd bought but neglected to eat in the previous two days, and now they were definitely inedible. “Ewww, oh my god! You're not going to eat those, are you? They smell like roadkill!”

He was, in fact, determined to eat them. The only other thing he'd packed for lunch was string cheese, and a single cheese laid out on a tortilla just looked sad. He grimaced and groaned but managed to force two hotdogs down, above my strident protests. “You're going to get listeria, baby!” I told him.

“I've got a stomach of iron!” He replied, although he was already turning green.

Lunch accomplished, we set off once more. The foggy damp was coalescing into rain, and we heard rumbling overhead. Just as we began a short climb, the thunderclouds burst with a terrific boom and the rain came bucketing down. We were soaked within seconds, and all thoughts of hotdogs and armed canoers vanished. My legs were running the show, and they were running. Pushing, moving, crushing miles, faster faster faster so I wouldn't get cold. No thoughts, just motion and water and go, go, go. It almost felt good in a strange way; I experienced this urgent and overwhelming desire to get out of the rain as a connection to my deepest animal self. We are only intelligent primates, and it's important to remember that once in a while. That being said, my spiritual acceptance of the situation did not mean I enjoyed it.

A bruise on my hip was causing me problems. About two weeks ago, I'd put an extremely hard, stale protein bar in my hipbelt pocket next to the bone, and over the course of the day it had shifted and pressed into my flesh painfully. Not knowing this was the problem, I'd chalked up the discomfort to hip chafe and toughed it out. I didn't eat that protein bar for a couple of days, and the crush injury got so bad that it swelled into a goose egg. My right hip already has damage from a long-ago bike accident, so any injury on that side triggers chronic pain. Once I figured it out, I loosened the offending hip strap and cinched down the shoulder strap to compensate, but that meant my obliques and lower abs were carrying the full weight of my pack. After two weeks of this, the entire right side of my core was cramping and seizing up, and I now had a choice between wearing my pack properly and enduring shooting nerve pain, or wearing it slightly off-balance and dealing with knife-like cramps. Painkillers weren't helping, and I was fussing with my pack straps constantly as the rain poured down.

We left the lakeshore and dropped our elevation, now following the banks of a flat, meandering stream. The rain slackened and then faded back into a misty drizzle as the canopy deepened its embrace. Shafts of gilded sunlight filtered down through the mist, darkening the shadows and making the place seem enchanted. It felt like a secret world, like a storybook forest. We followed this stream for hours, each bend revealing a quiet wonder. Soft silence came in the wake of the rain, and was quickly filled with birdsong.

The peaceful afternoon could not last forever. Around 6:30, the pain in my hip was so bad that I had to stop and sit down. We'd been hiking non-stop since the rain started, but I felt ashamed of our late start and begrudged even this five minute break. We had planned to make camp in a mile and half, for a total of 29 on the day, but there was another campsite in four miles that I felt certain we could get to. Yes, I was in pain, and yes, I was extremely hungry, but we still had four thousand miles to do! We had to stop being so lazy!

Constantine confessed that the hotdogs had really messed him up. Ten minutes after eating them, his body responded with a high fever, and he'd half-expected the rain to sizzle when it hit his skin. He felt better after an hour, but it had taken a lot of energy to run that hot and now he was feeling fatigued. “I'm pretty sure my immune system killed it,” he said.

“Yeah,” I replied, “but that fever was a warning. Your body was saying, don't ever feed me this again! Next time you'll probably just shit yourself. Or start vomiting and not be able to stop. I don't want to push the SOS button for food poisoning, and I don't want to carry you to a hospital.”

I made him promise that he'd throw away the hotdogs at the next trashcan, and we set off. We'd decided to push for the next campsite and expected to get there around eight o'clock, but the weather had other plans. Not even ten minutes later, a tremendous crash of thunder broke the sky, and the first drops of rain sputtered down. “Shit!” I yelled back to Constantine. “First campsite?”

“One mile left, go, go, go!” He yelled in reply, and the rain was already turning up. Soon, we could barely hear each other over the wind, and as we ran down the trail the rain increased to its most furious pitch yet. We barreled into the campsite and hastily set up the tent, which Constantine unfortunately stored at the very bottom of his pack. I chucked my pack on top of his stuff to try to keep it somewhat dry, irritated by his lack of organization. I scurried around securing the fly pegs as he chucked armloads of wet gear inside, then threw myself in the tent, breathing hard. Impossibly, the rain grew even more intense. What we'd just run through had only been the leading edge of the storm, and now we were in the worst of it. The tent sounded as if a firehose were aimed at every side, a blasting roar that almost obscured the wind. The nearby creek was swollen with rage, and the leaves were in a riot. We could not hear one another unless we shouted, and we sat for a long while in stunned and soaking silence, puddles of cold water everywhere.

“Wow,” said Constantine, when we could hear again.

“Wow.” I agreed. “You've gotta start packing your tent on the outside.”

All my resolve was for nothing. The next day, our start time was even worse, and we somehow got even lazier. The first alarm went off at five thirty, but the weather was still awful and we decided that it wasn't worth getting up. When we woke again at seven, it still sounded like rain, and we were so worried about the weather that we stuck the Garmin outside to get a forecast. It took forever to connect to a sattelite under the dense trees, but we after a while we heard the signature beep and yanked it back in for the bad news. But it wasn't bad news! According to the Garmin, it wasn't really supposed to be raining right now, and it definitely wasn't supposed to rain later. The forecast called for clear skies starting at nine o'clock, with warm temperatures and partial sun all day. In other words, it was perfect hiking weather. Scarred by the GDT, I'd been tempted to take a tent day, but the promise of sun restored my motivation and we got to work packing up.

It was eight thirty by the time we started moving, but the forecast had been right. Aside from the drips off the trees, the morning was dry and blessedly sunny. We were badly behind schedule, but I also really didn't want to hike in the rain, and so the warring impulses harassed me all morning. I felt bad about being lazy, but good about being dry, but maybe we could have gotten up earlier, but also I hadn't wanted to. Back and forth, back and forth, not paying any attention to the beautiful trail, stuck in my meaningless human thoughts about meaningless human constructs, like “time”, and “miles”, and “laziness”.

A mile or so after camp, we came across a shelter. What? It wasn't marked on any of our maps, and the plaque showed it was constructed by Eagle Scouts in 2020. A secret shelter?! You've gotta be kidding me. It was such a classic NCT move, to run across an unmarked shelter one mile away from your storm-tossed campsite. If we had known it was there, we would have make a run for it when the weather got bad. Hell, if we had know it was there, we wouldn't have taken that five minute break and would have gotten there before the storm! But the NCT didn't think to tell us about it, and so now we had to deal with wet gear. It was half frustrating and half hilarious, and we said as much in the log book.

It was a truly fine day, the temperature somewhere around 25 degrees. The trail dropped us off at a trailhead, where we'd walk a few hundred metres of road over a bridge and then join the trail on the other side. We sat to eat a snack in the gravel parking lot and our wet clothes began to steam. “We've got the sun and the space here. I think we should have our drying-out party,” Constantine said. “I know it's only 11, but you've gotta take it when you can get it.” It was true - we'd planned to dry the tent out at lunch to make the most efficient use of our time, but there was no telling what our lunch spot would bring. We'd missed these opportunities before, and it always sucks when you have to set up a wet tent because you were too much in a hurry. I resented the secret shelter even more - it was the shelter’s fault that we had to waste time!

We baked ourselves dry for half an hour or so, and Constantine booked the Clarion hotel and answered emails. I hadn't downloaded a new book in town, partly to encourage myself to write during these breaks, but instead I was re-reading Villette. I idly wondered if Labassecour was a little-known historical country before I remembered that it means “farmyard” in French - Charlotte Brontë was just being snarky about Belgians.

We cruised all the rest of the day, enjoying the sunny miles and the welcoming old growth trees. I wanted to say “untouched” about the forest, but that's not actually true. The Allegheny National Forest is studded with oil derricks and natural gas pipelines, and every so often we'd encounter the incongruous scent of fossil fuels. It was a bizzare contrast to the natural beauty arounds us - I was under the impression that National Forests are wilderness areas, but apparently not all of them are protected that way. There were signs of old logging here and there too, the cutblocks still distinct to my sensitive eye. The undergrowth was thicker in those areas, the trees much younger and of a uniform size. The recovering forests weren't upsetting to walk through, but sight and smell of the derricks was an affront. How dare this landscape be defiled? It didn't make sense to me, and I couldn't figure out what ideology could reconcile extractive industry with protected wildland. One would think that they're mutual exclusive philosophies, and yet here they were in the same place. America is strange.

We didn't come across any trash cans that day, and Constantine made a joke out of offering me hotdogs. “No!” I would say, “I don't want nasty hotdogs, stop asking me!” and he would act offended and sad, then crack jokes about smelly weiners. Thru-hiking can turn you into a kid in so many different ways. On this day, we were two twelve-year-olds in the woods, laughing about poop and body parts and accusing one another of farting.

We did find another secret shelter, which was also in precisely the wrong spot. We came across it late afternoon, and it was just a bit too short of a day to consider an early stop. We really would have changed our miles out of Ellicottville if we'd known it was there, probably pushed another few miles out of town and a few more miles the next day to make it here on the third. As it was, we signed the trail log and hiked on, shooting for the campsite at Messenger Run. For some reason, all the streams in Allegheny are called “runs,” and I meant to google that when I got to Clarion but totally forgot until now. I think I'll preserve the mystery, since it’s survived this far.

The fifth day of our section went much like the fourth, with the exception of an earlier start. The weather was pleasant and the trail was immaculately groomed. It was a Saturday, and I was worried that we'd run into dayhikers out on the trail. I felt so shy; I didn't want unfamiliar humans trampling over my precious brainspace, squishing out the nascent sense of attunement I had for the natural world. I was having more and more moments of genuine peace and harmony, and often felt the unselfconcious aliveness of an animal. People would take that away. They would talk to me with their human words and look at me with their human judgments, and I would become aware of myself once more and become my own chatterbox and my own judge. It was hard enough to empty my mind when there weren't people putting thoughts back into it! Constantine didn't do that to me, because we were always together. His presence was part of my natural environment, his speech was meaningful and interesting because it was relevant to our shared experience. Sure, we talked about pop culture and made poop jokes - it wasn't like we were becoming monks out here. But underneath all the talk was the thread of understanding one another, of getting to take a peek inside the other person's brain. People, as in normal, non-thru-hiking strangers, don't talk to understand each other. They save their inner life for their partners and their close friends, if they ever show it to anyone. I didn't really want to talk in a way that was all surfaces and mirrors, and I was afraid that I didn't know how to do it anymore.

Sure enough, we soon heard voices in the woods. A man with a chainsaw was talking to a hiker over a fallen log. I quickly put together that the chainsaw man was a trail maintainer, while the hiker seemed to be out for a weekend. They were wrapping up their conversation, so I just waved hello and was set to continue on when the hiker recognized Constantine. Chatting ensued. I hung back a ways and let Constantine talk to the maintainer while the other hiker said his goodbyes, but after a few minutes I was drawn into the conversation. Jim was his name, the third Jim we've met so far, and he was the most open and friendly person you could ever hope to meet. He told us all about his hiking goals, the challenges of being a fat guy on trail, the maintenance schedule of the Pennsylvania NCTA, and anything that we could possibly want to know about the Allegheny National Forest. There were no more secret shelters, but he did tell us where to find several unmarked springs. He loved the trail, and he loved hikers, and he asked us many questions too. He was the Allegheny NCT personified, happy and honest and easy to get along with. We didn't want to cut the conversation short, but we had to get on with our hiking and he had to get on with his work, so after twenty minutes we said farewell and walked on.

We ran into more maintenance people at a road crossing a short while later. I heard their trucks pulling up from the trail and initially I was terrified. It sounded like a lot of people, and I really, really didn't want to deal with a load of dayhikers. I hurried to sign the roadside trail log before they got there, and as I approached the line of cars I could smell the laundry detergent coming off their clothes. I don't understand how people can stand to be so perfumed! You can smell daysies coming from half a mile away, although I'm sure they think the same thing about our sweat-smell. When I realized they were maintainers, I relaxed a little. They were busy organizing their work and didn't try to hold us up, and we waved hello and moved on up the trail.

The next section was lush and gorgeous, a relatively open stretch of pine carpeted with brilliant ferns. It was true summer now, fully in bloom, with none of the early bashfulness of spring. The forest scent was strong and robust, bursting with complexity with every velvety inhale. I filled my lungs and felt all the olfactory messages at once, fireworks going off in the memory centers of my brain. Pine, earth, chlorophyll, pollens, warm rocks, cut grass, the sweet honeyed scent of bees. The sun had a smell, the clouds had a smell, the lichens and the dirt and the ants had a smell, and they were all mixed up together in the great big wonderous cacophony of summer. It was a synesthetic heaven of green air, warm currents of happiness washing over my whole body.

Then I got a whiff of diesel fuel, and heard the telltale whine of a weed-whacker. Trail maintainers. They were working in a group of three, and the guy with the machinery had earmuffs on and his back to me. I walked up behind him as close as I dared, and yelled and waved my arms for him to stop. I couldn't pass by on the narrow trail, but he couldn't hear me at all. One of his colleagues waved his arms and motioned for him to stop, and finally he got the message and cut the engine. “Hi!” I said, and he jumped out of his skin. It was his first time out doing trail work, and he didn't quite know how to handle hikers. He was very apologetic for holding me up, but I waved it off and told him I'd only been there for ten seconds. I thanked them all sincerely for maintaining the trail, and went on my way.

Constantine and I were going to have lunch at a nearby shelter, and he wasn't too far behind me. We laid out our sweaty clothes on the picnic table to dry, and sprawled across the shelter floor. The maintainers were close though, and showed up ten minutes later. They mowed all around the shelter while we were eating and then there was an awkward moment when I had to ask if they wanted me to move stuff so they could sit down. One of them, a woman who hadn't talked to me when I met them before, seemed to take an instant dislike as soon as she saw our stuff laid out, as if we should have known they were planning to eat there. She didn't ask outright, but stood there staring at us in a way that felt passive-aggressive. The older guy, the first timer with the weed-whacker, plopped himself down directly in a bush and guzzled water, plainly exhausted. It raised my eyebrows a little; surely he knew about ticks? Their leader showed up a minute later after I'd cleaned up, and seemed like a seasoned outdoorsman. He made an attempt to be friendly, and I could probably have gotten along with him on his own, but the mood of the group was so ambiguous that I just felt uncomfortable. It was obvious that none of them really knew what to do with thru-hikers. Clearly, they had never encountered any before. I felt like I had to perform some specific role, like I was on a stage and had forgotten all my lines. We had wanted to rest longer at the shelter, but the pressure of their presence made me feel it was time to go

The awkward encounter broke my focus, and I walked through the rest of the day feeling blank. The trail was still lovely and the weather was still nice, but I'd lost the magic moment and I couldn't get it back. As we tromped downhill on a rare section of old forest road towards another road-bridge, a small white car pulled up into the turnoff and rolled down the window. “Hi Magpie!” He called.

“Hi! Constantine's just behind me. Who are you?” I asked. His name was Ian, and he was a fan of Constantine's. He had watermelon and salad for us at the nearby campground, if we wanted some. It was half a mile away and right on trail. Constantine pulled up mid-conversation, and and initially misunderstood. “We've got to do five more miles before dark, I don't know if we have the time.”

“He's got watermelon, babe.”

“Yeah, but … he's gonna drive us somewhere?”

It was uncomfortable to have this debate right in front of Ian, who after all was being quite generous and had driven far out of his way to get here. After we sorted the communication, Constantine was of course excited to hang out and eat salad, and Ian drove off to meet us at the campground.

I was a little antsy about the miles and the timing, as it was past six o'clock, but we could spare twenty minutes or half an hour. It was June 5th, the day before Constantine's birthday, so the timing was excellent. We told Ian as much as he fed us, and hung out for a while with him and his young daughter Brigid. She was sweet, happy to show me her Frozen dolls and excited that my pack was her favourite colour. After a quick explanation, we all mostly recovered from the initial misunderstanding, but soon enough it was time to go. We could have camped there, but we really had to get moving to make the miles work. Tomorrow we were leaving the Allegheny National Forest, and could no longer camp anywhere we wanted to.

Our camp that night was definitely on the outskirts of the park. The trail, which had been so reliable, turned a little brushy and indistinct. You could tell that most people didn't get more than three miles from the developed campground, and there wasn't great road access from the other side. It wasn't bad trail, precisely. It was just little-used, and therefore harder to maintain. The camp itself was just big enough for a single tent, parked on a weed-whacked and gravel-strewn outcrop next to a stream. Still, we found a flattish spot and settled in. The fireflies were out again, but more astonishing was the incredible number of moths attracted to our campsite. There were dozens and dozens of them, crawling on the tent and alighting on our packs, so many moths that in the morning, the tent mesh was speckled with their droppings. I'm pretty freaked out by moths, and I even find butterflies kind of unsettling when they get too close to me, so I was not an enormous fan of that. I turned my light off and closed my eyes so I wouldn't see them, not even risking a hand out the tent door to retrieve my pocket snacks.

And then it was Constantine’s birthday! I’d intended to pack out cupcakes and a birthday candle to surprise him, but our resupply run was so stressful that I just plain forgot. “Good morning, birthday boy! You want a melted breakfast Snickers?” He did not! I was secretly glad he’d turned down my improvised gift - Snickers are precious, and it was the last one I had. At least we’d be getting into Clarion tomorrow, where I’d managed to ship a new, more protective phone case as his first gift. We were only a couple of miles away from the limits of Allegheny NF, and I was sad to say goodbye. The National Forest had been so good to us! We were re-entering the patchwork NCT of state and private land, so our mileage for the day was limited to precisely 30.7 miles. We’d actually managed to wake up at a normal hour for once, so we had the entire day to bang out miles.

The brilliant trail design was lacking in this remote area of the National Forest. Part of it couldn’t be helped, as the trail had to bounce over a series of small, sharp glacial hills to stay within the forest boundary, but there were also some unnecessary steeps. As we bid the ANF a fond goodbye and crossed the boundary into State Game Land, it became obvious that this trail was mainly used in winter. It was well-blazed and had a defined tread, but the track was overgrown and rocky with a few large blowdowns. After a short gravel roadwalk on private land, we crossed into another game reserve and flopped down for a late lunch at Maple Creek Shelter. The trail to the east of the shelter was a bit of a nightmare - choked with brush, washed out and sometimes hard to follow. It seemed like pretty much nobody went there. The easiest access was from the western side, and the shelter itself was clean and well-used, so we expected the trail to improve as we got closer to Cook Forest State Park. We lazed around in the shelter and remarked on how nice it was to wake up early. It was 1pm and we only had about sixteen miles left, so we were able to spend a full hour relaxing.

Two o’clock rolled around and it was time to go! We’d used up most of our break time for the day with our long lunch, but that was fine. The trail was pretty much flat all the way to Highland Shelter, and we were ready to get serious and hike. As we thought, the western side of this little park was in much better condition, and soon we hit a little roadwalk. It was just a 0.8mi connector between Maple Creek and the larger Cook Forest, and we didn’t expect anything especially exciting. It was so small and residential that the pavement didn’t even have paint lines, but as I turned the corner to Jack’s Hollow Road, a large blue truck parked in the shoulder started to slowly reverse. Either they were trying to back into a driveway, or this was trail magic, and I was pretty sure I knew which. Oh, no. We’d literally just left the shelter! We couldn’t afford the time to take trail magic now, but these people had driven out to the middle of nowhere. We had to at least say hello.

Sure enough, a family piled out of the truck, and we were greeted with an enthusiastic chorus. “Constantine! Magpie! Oh my goodness, this is so exciting. I bet you’re wondering who we are, hello!” The mom, whose trailname was Munch, was a Constantine superfan, and she’d brought her whole crew out to meet us. Her 14 year old daughter SOS was pretty into hiking, too. Munch’s husband John was along for the ride, and a close family friend named Davy had followed with his truck-camper and adorable dogs. It was a full-on trail magic party! They had chairs, they had sodas, they had watermelon and fresh berries and a dozen donuts. Munch had packed out all the fixings for sandwiches, and SOS had thoughtfully decorated a dozen hard-boiled eggs with magic marker, in reference to Constantine’s running joke about eating an egg per mile. They had two or three coolers worth of food, and we could have all we wanted it. I’m not exaggerating when I say that we could have resupplied for an entire week out of their truckbed - they had Complete Cookies and MetRX bars and Constantine’s preferred brand of electrolytes, tons of my favourite bacon jerky, just an astonishing amount of food. It was incredible! I wished we hadn’t stopped for lunch already, because they were the friendliest, kindest people we could ever hope to meet, and we really wanted to repay their generosity with our time and attention. I hated that I had to keep an eye on my watch. I wanted to hang out and swap hiking stories, chill out in their thoughtfully-provided lawnchairs until there was no creator/fan divide and we just became friends. SOS seemed like an awesome kid, and Munch was the ultimate trail angel. John and Davy had pulled Constantine into a conversation about maps before he even reached the truck, but I could tell Munch was dying to talk to him too. When I told her it was Constantine’s birthday, she did a little jump from happiness at the good timing. At last, Constantine was able to turn his attention to the feast and Munch gave him a great big “Happy BIRTHDAY!” and a cold soda. It was trail magic beyond our wildest dreams, and I felt like a real jerk when I had to call it off after half an hour. It was almost 3pm by now, and we still had fifteen and a half miles to a legal campsite. We couldn’t even pack out food, since we’d be getting into town tomorrow. “Oh, hey, there’s a road right near the shelter,” I said, sending a meaningful glance at Constantine. He caught my drift, and continued. “Oh yeah, you guys could meet us there if you wanted to. We’d get there at… I guess around 8pm?”

“Are you sure?” said Munch. “We would absolutely love to, but we don’t wanna impose on your time, and we know you guys have to get going. But if you’re sure it would be no bother…”

It would not be a bother at all. We told them as much, and then reiterated on our side that there was absolutely no pressure for them to show up. It was a politeness showdown, Canadian & Southern vs. Midwest, but eventually we each figured out that the other party genuinely wanted to meet up, and the plan was set. We’d have to push hard through the State Forest to make it on time, but after our extended rest break we were ready to go.

Now we were really against the clock. Cook Forest Park was popular and well maintained, the trails as wide as avenues. It was gorgeous hiking, and I was glad for the shady tree cover. We had two minor climbs, refilled our water bottles at a public drinking fountain near the picnic area, then pushed up our last major elevation of the day to an old firetower viewpoint. It was steep, but we had the promise of sandwiches to keep us going, as well as the fear of being late. As we dropped from the top of the bluff, we passed dozens of families out for an afternoon, and I felt their eyes burning into me as they took in our packs and filthy clothes. This part of Cook Forest didn’t even have a campground, so we must have been a truly strange sight. The area was beautiful though, and after a set of steep stone stairs we were down to the edge of the Clarion River, which we’d follow all the way to the shelter. I was feeling fatigued, but we’d be late if we took a break, so I popped my headphones in and dug deep for a fast pace.

We stopped for just a second to sign a trail log at the park boundary/ Highland Shelter was actually just outside of Cook Forest State Park, tucked into a yet another miniature game reserve. Opening the trail register, we found a surprise: “Happy Birthday Constantine - Ian and Brigid”, dated yesterday. Aw, that was nice! We only had a moment to enjoy it though, because it was 7:53pm and we still had a mile to go. We were gonna be late! It had given me major anxiety all day and now we were really going to be late by ten minutes. “Magpie, it’s fine! They know it wasn’t an exact time, I’m sure they’re just chilling out at the shelter.” I knew he was right, but after five straight hours of hiking, I didn’t have the energy to be rational.

“You’re going faster than me, you go ahead. I’ll meet you there on my own time, my legs don’t have a higher gear right now.”

And that was that. I was miserable and exhausted, but I got to the shelter only five minutes behind Constantine. And there were our new friends! Constantine and Munch had hiked up trail a little, as we’d cut into the shelter at a sooner point than she’d expected and hadn’t seen her homemade Happy Birthday sign on trail. I said hello to Davy and SOS, who were drinking sodas, and plopped myself gratefully into a chair. A cold gatorade was pressed into my hands. “Ahhhhh, chairs. Marvelous invention.” I was too worn-out to be polite immediately, but after a moment I remembered my manners and thanked them. Munch came back with Constantine and the party got going. Once again, the sheer quantity of food was staggering, and we stuffed ourselves silly while constantly asking if they minded. “Oh yes!” said Munch. “Eat as much or as little as you want, it’s all for you! And don’t let us disrupt your routine or feel like you have to entertain us. We’re here to help so just do whatever you'd normally do.” Her attitude was so awesome. She really understood what hikers needed, and didn’t want us to feel obligated in any way. There was excellent, easy conversation and a relaxed vibe, a perfect on-trail birthday. They had to drive back an hour and a half to their farm in Ohio, so around 10pm we made moves to go to bed and helped them pack up the food. I think they would have hung out all night if we hadn’t been tired, but we were still keeping hiker’s hours, and didn’t want to keep them up too late either. Davy was staying at the trailhead in his truck-home, so we could get water from him in the morning on our way into Clarion. What a day!

We should have woken up raring to go. After all, yesterday had been spectacularly great, and today we were gonna get to go to town! We were even planning to take a zero the next day, so we should have been fired up and full of energy. Instead, we woke up at five with zero motivation. “Why doesn’t cuddling count as doing miles? Can we fix that? Can we just cuddle our way down the trail?” Constantine complained. I smooched him and snuggled deeper into his chest. It was too comfy and cosy in here! The double sleeping set-up was a wonderful mistake. Twelve miles to town was just a little bit too much to run out in a snap, and the weather was overcast and miserable. We did not have the town gravity pulling us inwards, not yet.

We did get going by six, though. After saying good morning to Davy and greeting his sweet curly dogs, we left the game reserve and started down a complex of trails on private property. Some of it was garbage, but a lot of it was well-used horse trail, so the quality was surprisingly good for privately-maintained singletrack. I got a little bit lost when we passed through an area that was all marked up for timber felling - they were using blue spray paint to indicate something other than the NCT, and I ended up on an ATV road that took me steeply uphill for no reason. I only realized my mistake when I spotted Constantine far below me, as my phone GPS couldn’t get a signal though cloud cover and dense trees. We had just nine miles to go when the town gravity kicked in. Sub-ten miles is usually when it happens, and I was more than ready to be drinking coffee in two and a half hours. Then we crossed a road and came across a trail closure. No! The land was being actively logged, and it was unsafe to walk through, so we reluctantly turned and took the 2.5 mile road detour. Now we had ten miles to go again, and both of us felt our energy take a nosedive. To make matters worse, the detour took us tantalizingly close to the main road into Clarion, but to count as an FKT, we had to take the official route and do the extra miles. The detour did take us past a farm with miniature horses, and I considered it a worthy consolation prize. They were so tame and used to people that they let me pet their silky noses, sticking their heads through the fence and snuffling in search of treats. I also learned that Constantine’s fear of horses is not solely because of their size. He was nervous even around these dog-sized little ponies and told me they were “ugly and too small”, which I find hilarious. He did not want a pony for his birthday!

It was nearly noon when we reached the highway. Clarion was a mile away on this busy thoroughfare, and there was no trailhead for a cab to park and pick us up. We had to walk. It was blazingly hot outside, and the humidity was unrelentingly brutal, the worst heat we’d had since Eastern NY. Constantine had stubbornly refused to change out of his thermal, so he was melting in the reflected heat from the asphalt. There was no shoulder and construction all over our side of the road, so the walk in was harrowing, especially as it seemed to be a trucking route. At long last, we reached the sidewalk and made our way to the post office to wait for our cab. All the motels were two miles away down the interstate, so we weren’t allowed to walk there even if we had wanted to. I ran in to the PO to check for my Amazon package, but they didn’t have it in yet, so I just took Constantine’s shoes and sat outside to wait. The cab took forever, and while we sat sweating and hungry on the benches, we were approached by no fewer than three friendly locals. One of them, a man coincidentally named Dana, would have given us a ride to the motel, but our cab was due to show up any minute so he just gave Constantine his number and told him to call if we needed anything.

And that’s that! You already know that we got our vaccines, but if you don’t follow me on Instagram, you may not know that we got knocked out for two days with side effects. We ended up double-zeroing in Clarion, and I’ve got a bunch of those details coming for you in the next post, which is already half-written. We’re on another double-zero right now, this one taken out of sheer laziness, but I still might not get the whole thing done before we hike out tomorrow morning. I’ve got a pizza in the hotel room that’s calling my name!

Best,

-Magpie