darlington shelter to peter's mountain shelter

and then there were two. the morning was spent descending into duncannon. the trail wasn’t bad save a few rocky places and some treacherous stairs.

rocket and immediately headed for the outfitter / hostel and did our resupply. the resupply was sad as there was nowhere to get any fresh food, so for a few days i’ll be eating chicken packets. bleh.

maestro joined us not much later and checked in. he is staying in duncannon for a meeting. the three of us went to the doyle hotel for some burgers and fries before saying bye to maestro.

on the way out of town we passed an ice cream shop where i got some. rocket declined after some digestion overload post ice cream challenge.

we walked to the end of the street and then crossed over the susquehanna river which had some pretty gross looking water. i overheard someone advising a hiker not to get water from the river due to pollution. pretty sad.

from there we crossed the train tracks and headed up the climb out of town. there was a blue blaze that shaved off a mile that we took after reading that the AT was completely covered in massive amounts of poison ivy and rocks.

once we hit the ridge the hiking was pretty easy for the final 10 miles of the day and we made good time. i jad good service, so spent some time talking to magz. she was working on a coding problem, and at one point was literally reading me code so i could debug it.

“function send email open parens, close parens, open curly bracket . . .”

i arrived at a parking lot to find a bit of trail magic, some sorely needed fruit and mointain dew. the person giving the magic had recently had a stroke and didn’t yet have full control of his left side, but he was out making the best of it.

from there it was a quick 3 miles to the shelter, which ended up being massive and empty. i once again opted to stay in the shelter. it occurred to us that the last time we used our tents was at the rainy campsite in shenandoah a few hundred miles ago. crazy.

some images from today: