Deth

For a while now, we have both been wanting to explore Pennsylvania’s waterfalls. We figured that it could be combined with geocaching too! For various reasons which I won’t get into, it hasn’t happened until a couple of days ago. What matters is that we were able to do it now and get a shortened hike in.

We got off to a good start when we left Hope, but that quickly deteriorated when we got to Hazleton and were getting off 81 to get on 80-west. We sat in traffic. The traffic on the highway was mostly stopped, with a small bit of movement here and there. We must have wasted an hour or two of valuable daylight here. After nothing all the Penn State stickers, I googled it at home and learned that this shitshow is a regular thing when they have a football game. Talk about ridiculous.

We finally reached our destination, and the first thing I noticed as we were getting ready to hit the trails was how enjoyable the fresh mountain air was. I do miss that in my life. The air quality back home is always bad. The poor air quality is different from Philly was, but still bad. It was great to get some fresh air and hear the sounds of the mountain.

The trail began as a nice, easy hike but quickly turned rocky, as should be expected if it’s going along waterfalls. It really would have been an enjoyable hike for me if people were not so ignorant. The trail is narrow, and with my poor vision and depth perception, it was more of a feel my way along the trail type of hike. Given the waterfalls nearby and the moist air, it was wet and slippery, with many fallen leaves. It is, of course, a narrow trail with a drop-off on the side. The dark shadows in the gorge only made it harder to see.

The trail, although challenging, was fine for me. The real problem was that people were just letting their kids run wherever they wanted. That includes the narrowest parts of the trail. That and people not waiting. Some did, but most didn’t wait for the ones already on the narrow part to get through. We did get to see some falls, so that was great!fs

Here are a couple of pictures.

This one was lower and wider but there was more to come!

This was a neat view of a water fall. The trail is in a place that you could see the water flowing over the edge of the cliff.

This was tall tall waterfall with several tiers.

Despite the things that went wrong, it really made for an enjoyable day out in the woods! We will have to make it a point to return someday to really explore the park. Maybe in the summer, when the days are long, but certainly not on a day that Penn State has a game. Ideally, we could go during the week and it’d be less crowded too.