Pennsylvania Rocks
J: And I left Eckville with a longing to make distance up the trail. I headed out with Indiana Jean. We made the register/mailbox up just north of Hawk Mountain Reserve. Sad: a dead hawk with a leg band was on the Eckville road - a victim of our automotive ways.
I made the first shelter by lunch. Indy came in minutes later. We talked of the heat - so high for so early in the a.m. And of the rocks that now are evident, painfully every so often in stretches on the trail.
Some are small cobblestones of pain, jagged edges upright for every footfall. Others protrude large enough to lose your sense of trail by their jumbled masses. Blazes mark the trail along their congregations - sometimes knife-edges along the ridge line - sometimes boulder fields scattered as if avalanched across the Trail some geological epoch ago. Blazes on the rocks themselves mark sections as long as a couple hundred meters long over which my boots must pass. My toes curled in horror. Whimpering as only toes can.