Mountain Streams Trail, PA

Note: This trail is stupid, and not recommended.

Mountain Streams Trail, PA

Date: May 7, 2006

Length: 7.35 miles (elevation gain ~800 feet)

With: n/a

GPS Coordinates of region: N40°06.377' W79°15.754'

The first segment of the hike was on a wide grassy ex-jeep trail, but there were large heaps of debris.

A hidden swamp.

Yay, fiddleheads

Don't know what kind of bug this was. Real size, it's almost 2 inches long.

Jack in the pulpit

The wide grassy jeep trail ended at these things. Natural gas pipes?

Trillium

? (These things were all about knee high, and each leaf was about a foot long.)

Not sure what the point of this little wooden spillway was.

Sweet White Violet

Common Yellow Violet (?)

Hairy Solomon's Seal

Common Blue Violet

A destroyed beech tree

About a mile of trail was tiptoeing through skunk cabbages

About three miles of the trail was through crap like this on another old jeep trail.

Prettiest spot on the trail... noisy stream and rhododendrons

Pennsylvania sandstone & rhododendrons

Fuzzy!

The 3-4 miles of uphill, luckily, was on the clearest section of trail. This part is actually named "Mountain Streams Trail". However, the trail still sucks in typical Pennsylvania fashion... there are many loose ankle-turning rocks on it.

This part even had red blazes. Of course, you'd have to be completely stupid to accidentally wander off this part of the trail.

Note: I DO NOT recommend any portion of this hike. I only did it because I had something to prove. This hike is published in many books, but has long been in disrepair. The first time I hiked this trail, I was also alone. However, at that time I had very little experience with hiking or with hiking books, reading maps, using a compass, or knowing approximately how far one has hiked based on elapsed time or number of footsteps, and got thoroughly lost, doubling the length of this hike to 16 miles. This hike has always been looming over me as my biggest failure. So I finally re-did it, using a topo map, compass, and pace-counting to keep more accurate track of where I was than the GPS (which I had as backup) could figure out. So there, you bastard trail. Now you can die.