Saturday May 23 - Backpacking at Oil Creek State Park near Oil City PA - About 9 miles, estimate 1000 feet elevation gain
We finally did it. After having had my own backpacking gear for 8 years and only using it once on a test run we finally went on an overnight backpacking trip. It was rainy on the way and parts of the trail were muddy but it was surprisingly low on bugs. The Gerard Trail has a LOT of ups and downs. The trail is very interesting with a lot of relatively narrow foot path areas with steep slopes but also areas of broad gravel or muddy rocky road width trails. We started from the Cow Run shelter parking area and headed South for a few miles. Then we crossed down the canyon and up the other side of the creek on the VERY strenuous white connector trail. I had hoped we'd be able to just use our paper map (a 4 legal sheet tile of a PDF from the PA State Park's website) but those cross trails in particular are not as straight forward as they sound. After the crossing we went up up and away, climbing some extremely steep slopes. Some had switchbacks but some just scaled the side of a hill with no help and little traction.
We saw very few people on our walk except for the 15 minutes we were on on near the bicycle/multi use path that goes through the park. It was very busy in that little area. Even with a printed map and AllTrails, it wasn't easy (or helpful) to calculate precisely how far it was to the shelters, our home for the evening. The entire recorded trail that somebody posted on Alltrails was just over 12 miles and from the look of it I assumed they made the tightest possible loop between the two sets of shelters, one of which the hike clearly started and ended at. But the shelters themselves aren't on the Alltrails maps and as it turns out, whoever recorded their hike did NOT go to the Wolfkiel shelter we stayed at. They went to the junction where the main trail again crossed the bike trail but that left a solid mile each way (and a steep climb) to get to the shelters. Honestly we were wiped out about 2 miles before the shelters. By itself, this wouldn't have been a boundary pushing hike in terms of length or vertical but combine length, vertical, warm weather AND 2 full heavy backpacks and it was for sure in the top 10 most strenuous hikes we've done together.
Here are the pictures for the first day:
This is a very civilized form of backpacking. The shelters are reserved. They haul in really good water (limited supply though) and there is a very clean large outhouse and garbage service. Each shelter has a fireplace, picnic table and the shelter itself. All for 10 dollars a night. Dinner was Mountain House Lasagna and for desert raspberry chocolate crumb desert. We both enjoyed the food but next time I'll look more carefully at the nutrition information. The lasagna is considered 2 servings. I thought that was perfect for us. But really each serving was less than 250 calories and of course we didn't have bread, salad or vegetable as we might have at home. So that was like a snack after such a long hike. The desert somewhat made up for it. That was supposed to be 4 servings but we ate it all. Even so, those 4 servings literally fit into 1 of the backpacking mugs so it was barely 10 ounces of volume I think. I was delighted that my Jetboil stove worked instantly and dinner, clean-up, breakfast and clean-up all got done on the 1 fuel canister I bought years ago in Oregon.
More to post about for the 2nd day.
We saw very few people on our walk except for the 15 minutes we were on on near the bicycle/multi use path that goes through the park. It was very busy in that little area. Even with a printed map and AllTrails, it wasn't easy (or helpful) to calculate precisely how far it was to the shelters, our home for the evening. The entire recorded trail that somebody posted on Alltrails was just over 12 miles and from the look of it I assumed they made the tightest possible loop between the two sets of shelters, one of which the hike clearly started and ended at. But the shelters themselves aren't on the Alltrails maps and as it turns out, whoever recorded their hike did NOT go to the Wolfkiel shelter we stayed at. They went to the junction where the main trail again crossed the bike trail but that left a solid mile each way (and a steep climb) to get to the shelters. Honestly we were wiped out about 2 miles before the shelters. By itself, this wouldn't have been a boundary pushing hike in terms of length or vertical but combine length, vertical, warm weather AND 2 full heavy backpacks and it was for sure in the top 10 most strenuous hikes we've done together.
Here are the pictures for the first day:
This is a very civilized form of backpacking. The shelters are reserved. They haul in really good water (limited supply though) and there is a very clean large outhouse and garbage service. Each shelter has a fireplace, picnic table and the shelter itself. All for 10 dollars a night. Dinner was Mountain House Lasagna and for desert raspberry chocolate crumb desert. We both enjoyed the food but next time I'll look more carefully at the nutrition information. The lasagna is considered 2 servings. I thought that was perfect for us. But really each serving was less than 250 calories and of course we didn't have bread, salad or vegetable as we might have at home. So that was like a snack after such a long hike. The desert somewhat made up for it. That was supposed to be 4 servings but we ate it all. Even so, those 4 servings literally fit into 1 of the backpacking mugs so it was barely 10 ounces of volume I think. I was delighted that my Jetboil stove worked instantly and dinner, clean-up, breakfast and clean-up all got done on the 1 fuel canister I bought years ago in Oregon.
More to post about for the 2nd day.
Comments
Post a Comment