Bezabor: PA Ruck + visits to churches. (posted from home)
Sunday, 29 January-
We woke late (0830!) after a blissfully-quiet and comfortable night in Mocha Joe at Pine Grove Furnace campground. The overcast sky made it look earlier—I thought it must be around 0715 before I checked the time. I had seen a reading of 27 degrees in the middle of the night on our outside thermometer but with the little electric heater our inside temp was in the low sixties. We love this heater. When we first started camping in our previous van in cold weather, we used a Pelonis-style ceramic cube heater. But it was noisy and did not distribute heat very much around it. I bought a Black and Decker heater which turned in order to solve the heat distribution problem but it didn’t do much better and was also noisy. Then I went looking for a baseboard-style 110-volt electric heater and found one after a lot of looking. It works wonderfully. It’s almost four feet long and just consists of a metal element that heats up with a protective case around it. The length takes care of heat distribution without any need for a fan so it’s almost completely silent. If you listen carefully you can hear it kick in when the built-in thermostat turns it on but that’s it. Even in sub-20-degree cold, we don’t have it turned up the whole way.
After breakfast we headed into Chambersburg. We had some time to kill so drove on to Greencastle to look for a church which Labashi’s dad had designed in the 1960’s. This was one of the family-history things we had learned about in our visit with her parents over Christmas. The church was a beauty. Labashi had been hoping to take pictures but it was raining pretty heavily so she was only able to get a brochure from the church with a so-so picture of it. But that’s probably a good thing—we’ll schedule a return visit when we can spend some time and do a good job of documenting it.
As we sat in the parking lot, Labashi mentioned that she had some partial information on another church her dad had designed but the info was a little confusing. We didn’t really have a firm agenda for the day and that location was more or less in the direction of home from Greencastle so we gave it a try. This one turned out to be an easy find after all and is a handsome little church in Blue Ridge Summit, PA. We arrived just before services so Labashi went inside and asked a woman whether there were any brochures with a picture of the church. She found a priest and the three of them talked a few minutes. They directed her to where to find a postcard of the church and invited her to bring Dad by for a visit next time he’s in the area.
We took the back way home and arrived mid-afternoon. We spent the rest of the afternoon on the web. That evening we had a couple of guys come by to look at our wood stove. We’re trying to sell it to get it out of the way. The stove was built by the previous owner in the late Seventies. It’s a massive thing with a blower pushing air through ductwork throughout the house. But Labashi can’t stand it in use; the smoke and moving air bother her. We’ve retained it for these 25 years because it would be a pain to get out and also because our other heat source is baseboard electric and a wood stove can serve as backup for the unlikely-but-possible event of a multi-day electric outage in cold weather. Our visitors took one look at it and decided it’s way too big for their purpose but then made a phone call to another guy and he says he take it later this week. We’ll see.
Saturday, 28 January-
Today we attended an Appalachian Trail hiker’s event called the “PA Ruck”. The word ‘ruck’ apparently is an old word for ‘meeting’ or ‘gathering’ and the PA refers to the fact that there are several of these and this is the Pennsylvania version. I had found out about this shortly after the new year while researching something on the web and finding SO-Ruck, the Southern Ruck coming up (at the time) in mid-January in North Carolina. Then came the surprise that there was one scheduled locally for just two weeks later.
The ruck was held at the Ironmaster’s Mansion at Pine Grove Furnace State Park. Pine Grove Furnace is generally considered the mid-point of the 2160-mile-long Appalachian Trail so it’s an appropriate gathering place. The Ironmaster’s Mansion was historically just that but today serves as a hostel, providing bunks and showers for hikers for $15 per night.
After we selected our campsite in the state park’s campground, we arrived at the ruck proper around 1130. We toured the hostel and checked out the various publications and the event schedule. We arrived just a little early for the ‘Tuckerization’. In this case, a tuckerization is a review of a prospective thru-hiker’s loaded pack. The pack is weighed and then every item is removed and reviewed by the host and the assembled group of thru-hikers and hikers-to-be. In this case, the ‘victim’ was “Cheez Whiz”, a hiker planning to start his thru-hike of the AT in just a little over a month. This was a fascinating process and very instructive. I learned, for instance, that traditional backpacking stoves are more or less a thing of the past for serious thru-hikers. Because of weight considerations, they now tend to go with either ‘pepsi-can stoves’ which burn alcohol or they use solid-fuel tablets called ‘Esbit' in a lightweight sheet-metal stove. Another example is the now-widely-accepted use of pot cozies. The idea is you shorten the time you heat your meal by heating up the meal for a short time, then allowing it to finish cooking using only the residual heat trapped in the cozy-covered pot. Meals such as uncooked rice or beans which normally take more than twenty minutes of cooking time can be done with less than ten minutes of fuel and the remainder of the time in the cozy-covered pot.
Target weights for a ‘base pack’, i.e., a pack with a tent or tarp, sleep system, cooking system, clothing and support sundries (like first aid kit, toothbrush, camera, etc) but without the variables of food, water, and fuel, are now achievable in the 12-to-15 pound range.
The tuckerization session lasted for two hours and then we went upstairs to see a DVD presentation about Earl Shaffer’s 1948 thru-hike of the AT--- the first known thru-hike of the AT. Earl, who died in 2002, was from York, PA and had attended rucks at Pine Grove Furnace in the past. After his death, the Earl Shaffer Foundation continues his legacy and this was their presentation. The DVD showed news footage of Earl’s 1998 fiftieth-anniversary thru-hike (when he was 79 years old!) as well as a live slide presentation Earl did using his 1948 slides.
Then we attended a ‘thru-hiker bull session’. This was a fantastic opportunity to ask any question you wanted about long-distance hiking. The amazing thing to me was that there were more thru-hikers who had completed the AT than there were prospective new thru-hikers. The ruck is, after all, a chance for past thru-hikers to gather with their friends so that shouldn’t be surprising, I suppose, but it was awe-inspiring to me. Over there was Bald Eagle and Spirit Walker, who have done the Triple Crown—not only the entire Appalachian Trail but also the entire Pacific Crest Trail and the entire Continental Divide Trail (and they are re-doing the CDT again this year!). And there was Wolf, who has done the AT five times, including his most recent trip, mostly in winter. And Wolf is among the elite ultra-light hikers, claiming a four-pound base pack!!!!!
In this case, the ‘bull-session’ contained no bull—just some of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, all talking about something they love so dearly. What an incredible experience for us!
By supper time we were ready to head back to the van so had supper there. Afterwards we decided to take a little walk and ended up back at the hostel, just in time for Weathercarrot’s DVD/slide presentation of the best photos taken by forty-some different people as they thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2600+mile trail from Mexico to Canada. The photos were spectacular--- and at the end Weathercarrot gave us each a CD containing the presentation. Fantastic!
We finally tired out and returned to Mocha Joe for the night, still giddy about our good luck in finding this event.
Sunday, 29 January-
We woke late (0830!) after a blissfully-quiet and comfortable night in Mocha Joe at Pine Grove Furnace campground. The overcast sky made it look earlier—I thought it must be around 0715 before I checked the time. I had seen a reading of 27 degrees in the middle of the night on our outside thermometer but with the little electric heater our inside temp was in the low sixties. We love this heater. When we first started camping in our previous van in cold weather, we used a Pelonis-style ceramic cube heater. But it was noisy and did not distribute heat very much around it. I bought a Black and Decker heater which turned in order to solve the heat distribution problem but it didn’t do much better and was also noisy. Then I went looking for a baseboard-style 110-volt electric heater and found one after a lot of looking. It works wonderfully. It’s almost four feet long and just consists of a metal element that heats up with a protective case around it. The length takes care of heat distribution without any need for a fan so it’s almost completely silent. If you listen carefully you can hear it kick in when the built-in thermostat turns it on but that’s it. Even in sub-20-degree cold, we don’t have it turned up the whole way.
After breakfast we headed into Chambersburg. We had some time to kill so drove on to Greencastle to look for a church which Labashi’s dad had designed in the 1960’s. This was one of the family-history things we had learned about in our visit with her parents over Christmas. The church was a beauty. Labashi had been hoping to take pictures but it was raining pretty heavily so she was only able to get a brochure from the church with a so-so picture of it. But that’s probably a good thing—we’ll schedule a return visit when we can spend some time and do a good job of documenting it.
As we sat in the parking lot, Labashi mentioned that she had some partial information on another church her dad had designed but the info was a little confusing. We didn’t really have a firm agenda for the day and that location was more or less in the direction of home from Greencastle so we gave it a try. This one turned out to be an easy find after all and is a handsome little church in Blue Ridge Summit, PA. We arrived just before services so Labashi went inside and asked a woman whether there were any brochures with a picture of the church. She found a priest and the three of them talked a few minutes. They directed her to where to find a postcard of the church and invited her to bring Dad by for a visit next time he’s in the area.
We took the back way home and arrived mid-afternoon. We spent the rest of the afternoon on the web. That evening we had a couple of guys come by to look at our wood stove. We’re trying to sell it to get it out of the way. The stove was built by the previous owner in the late Seventies. It’s a massive thing with a blower pushing air through ductwork throughout the house. But Labashi can’t stand it in use; the smoke and moving air bother her. We’ve retained it for these 25 years because it would be a pain to get out and also because our other heat source is baseboard electric and a wood stove can serve as backup for the unlikely-but-possible event of a multi-day electric outage in cold weather. Our visitors took one look at it and decided it’s way too big for their purpose but then made a phone call to another guy and he says he take it later this week. We’ll see.
Saturday, 28 January-
Today we attended an Appalachian Trail hiker’s event called the “PA Ruck”. The word ‘ruck’ apparently is an old word for ‘meeting’ or ‘gathering’ and the PA refers to the fact that there are several of these and this is the Pennsylvania version. I had found out about this shortly after the new year while researching something on the web and finding SO-Ruck, the Southern Ruck coming up (at the time) in mid-January in North Carolina. Then came the surprise that there was one scheduled locally for just two weeks later.
The ruck was held at the Ironmaster’s Mansion at Pine Grove Furnace State Park. Pine Grove Furnace is generally considered the mid-point of the 2160-mile-long Appalachian Trail so it’s an appropriate gathering place. The Ironmaster’s Mansion was historically just that but today serves as a hostel, providing bunks and showers for hikers for $15 per night.
After we selected our campsite in the state park’s campground, we arrived at the ruck proper around 1130. We toured the hostel and checked out the various publications and the event schedule. We arrived just a little early for the ‘Tuckerization’. In this case, a tuckerization is a review of a prospective thru-hiker’s loaded pack. The pack is weighed and then every item is removed and reviewed by the host and the assembled group of thru-hikers and hikers-to-be. In this case, the ‘victim’ was “Cheez Whiz”, a hiker planning to start his thru-hike of the AT in just a little over a month. This was a fascinating process and very instructive. I learned, for instance, that traditional backpacking stoves are more or less a thing of the past for serious thru-hikers. Because of weight considerations, they now tend to go with either ‘pepsi-can stoves’ which burn alcohol or they use solid-fuel tablets called ‘Esbit' in a lightweight sheet-metal stove. Another example is the now-widely-accepted use of pot cozies. The idea is you shorten the time you heat your meal by heating up the meal for a short time, then allowing it to finish cooking using only the residual heat trapped in the cozy-covered pot. Meals such as uncooked rice or beans which normally take more than twenty minutes of cooking time can be done with less than ten minutes of fuel and the remainder of the time in the cozy-covered pot.
Target weights for a ‘base pack’, i.e., a pack with a tent or tarp, sleep system, cooking system, clothing and support sundries (like first aid kit, toothbrush, camera, etc) but without the variables of food, water, and fuel, are now achievable in the 12-to-15 pound range.
The tuckerization session lasted for two hours and then we went upstairs to see a DVD presentation about Earl Shaffer’s 1948 thru-hike of the AT--- the first known thru-hike of the AT. Earl, who died in 2002, was from York, PA and had attended rucks at Pine Grove Furnace in the past. After his death, the Earl Shaffer Foundation continues his legacy and this was their presentation. The DVD showed news footage of Earl’s 1998 fiftieth-anniversary thru-hike (when he was 79 years old!) as well as a live slide presentation Earl did using his 1948 slides.
Then we attended a ‘thru-hiker bull session’. This was a fantastic opportunity to ask any question you wanted about long-distance hiking. The amazing thing to me was that there were more thru-hikers who had completed the AT than there were prospective new thru-hikers. The ruck is, after all, a chance for past thru-hikers to gather with their friends so that shouldn’t be surprising, I suppose, but it was awe-inspiring to me. Over there was Bald Eagle and Spirit Walker, who have done the Triple Crown—not only the entire Appalachian Trail but also the entire Pacific Crest Trail and the entire Continental Divide Trail (and they are re-doing the CDT again this year!). And there was Wolf, who has done the AT five times, including his most recent trip, mostly in winter. And Wolf is among the elite ultra-light hikers, claiming a four-pound base pack!!!!!
In this case, the ‘bull-session’ contained no bull—just some of the nicest people you’d ever want to meet, all talking about something they love so dearly. What an incredible experience for us!
By supper time we were ready to head back to the van so had supper there. Afterwards we decided to take a little walk and ended up back at the hostel, just in time for Weathercarrot’s DVD/slide presentation of the best photos taken by forty-some different people as they thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, a 2600+mile trail from Mexico to Canada. The photos were spectacular--- and at the end Weathercarrot gave us each a CD containing the presentation. Fantastic!
We finally tired out and returned to Mocha Joe for the night, still giddy about our good luck in finding this event.
posted by Bezabor&Labashi | 22:35
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