Shingletown Gap

Hiking on the day after squats and legs is rough. But it was a blast. This week I decided to head out to Shingletown Gap. There are tons of trails over there, but I decided to hike up to the top of the ridge. Link to my route is here.

Unfortunately, Mikey went to Florida this weekend and Kirk went back to Philly, so I was without hiking buddies. When I arrived at the trailhead, the parking lot was empty. This made me a bit worried about something going wrong and not having anyone around for help, but I went on anyway. Luckily, nothing bad happened and I stayed safe.

The start of the hike was not so good. Plenty of people appeared to have been on the trail over the winter, packing the snow down into a nice sheet of ice. The main parts of the trail on the way up were super slippery. If I stayed to the edge, I could walk on some crusty snow, or I would occasionally step off the trail just so that I'd have snow to walk in. I really wish I had a set of crampons and/or trekking poles. I might look into getting a set if I keep up with this hiking. The hike up was killer on my already sore legs, but with that good burning feeling to let you know that you're working!

Once at the ridge, I intersected the Mid-State Trail and headed southwest for a while. I came across my first wide open vista and took this panoramic.

Unfortunately, I can't find the software for panoramic stitching that came with my camera (and it appears it wouldn't work anyway with OS X), so I used a 3rd party software to do the stitching. It is a great product, but I don't really need to pay for it right now. So, I'll make due with the little watermark on the bottom of the image.

Eventually, I turned around and headed northeast and came to a sign for the Roman Tower. I was intrigued, so I followed the signed trail to check it out. Turns out, this is where Mark took me back in May when he visited. I hadn't paid much attention when we hiked it back then, too busy talking and being exhausted (was just after I was mobile again following my knee injury). This was one of the few spots where I had a clear view to the North. Unfortunately, it was cloudy at this point, so the pictures weren't so great. I did get a couple of shots of State College though, check them out in the album (click on any of the pictures).

All in all it was a pretty nice hike. Unfortunately, my new backpack hadn't arrived yet, sorta. I was torn between the Osprey Kode 30L Pack and the Osprey Kode 22. Amazon had the 22 for Free 2-Day shipping AND free return shipping, while the 30 was available from another seller through Amazon. I thought that I'd get the 22 and see how I liked it. It arrived in 1 day on Thursday of this past week (WOOO AMAZON and UPS!) and I really like it, but decided that I would like the 30L more (hey, more features and more space). So I looked online and amazon was now selling the 30L directly through them, free 2-day shipping woo! Also, they were having a President's Day sale where if you spent more than $100 (on certain items of clothing) you'd get $25 off your order. Apparently, this counted in the sale. So, I ordered the Osprey Kode 30 Pack in Alpenglow Orange. The coupon didn't work, but a really nice amazon chat employee fixed my order so that I got the promotion! The new pack should be here on Monday, not in time for me to have used it today. I'm pretty pumped to use it this coming weekend to break it in.

Hiking

Today started one of my Non-New Year's-New Year's Resolutions. I'm sure that sounds like it makes no sense, but it does. Basically, I didn't make any New Year's resolutions because I either never have any good ideas or I never seem to follow through with them. This past week, I decided that I wanted to go hiking more.  Today, I decided that I would try to go hiking at least once every week.

In central PA, there are dozens of trails around, from short hour long hikes to all day (or multi-day) hikes. As part of my plan to keep from getting into (or possibly get out of) a sedentary lifestyle, hiking seems to fit the bill. Sure, I'm back to going to the gym during the week and I still help out with SCUBA on Thursdays (and the occasional Tuesday as necessary), but I've also noticed that the weekends are usually filled with sitting around the house mostly doing nothing.

I had decided on Friday that I wanted to hike the Indian Steps trail this weekend. I don't really need to do a full write-up on the hike, you can find much more information than I feel like typing here. I did post a couple of pictures to my album that you can find by clicking on the picture to the right. The drive in was interesting. From where we started the hike, you turn of PA-26 onto a dirt road. Because of the snow we've been having, it was a packed snow covered dirt road... through the woods... up and down hills. It was an awesome drive. I *almost* got the snow chains from the trunk just to put them on, but the SAAB wound up handling just fine without them.

After finding the start of the trail, we found a large enough area off the road where we could park (see picture). Mike and I loaded up and headed out up the trail. The steps were not created by Indians (as the name would suggest) but they are old and steep. The hike starts off going right up the mountain, so its a good kick in the pants. Once up, you follow the ridge westward for a while before looping back to where we'd parked. There were a couple of nice flat spots on the ridge with some picnic tables and a couple of fire pits. As the top of the ridge is along the Mid-State Trail, I assume they are places for overnight campers (as we also saw a trail sign that just said 'H20'). We were afforded some pretty nice views from the top; unfortunately, both Mike and my cameras' batteries had died so we didn't get many pictures. I did bring my GPS along with me (as I like to do for my travels) so you can see the track/stats here.

On the way back to the car, Mike and I got talking about various meats that we'd eaten or desired to eat: bison, kangaroo, alligator, rabbit, etc. After all this talk about meat on top of a good hike, we both were craving some steak. With no great steakhouses in State College (that I know of), and my talking about cooking some good steaks over the summer while at the beach, we decided to make steaks for dinner. After getting home, I headed out to Wegmans for my weekly grocery run and picked up a sirloin steak and some potatoes, also. Cut up the sirloin into a couple of steaks and hit them with the dry-rub I'd picked up over the summer. We fired up the grill and roasted the cut up potatoes and grilled the steaks to near perfection. He, Justin, and I feasted while watching some football and then parts of Transformers on TV. Truely a "manly" day.