Sunday October 22nd 2023 - Oil Creek State Park - Near Oil City PA - 7.7 miles, about 1100 feet elevation gain

This is the same park where we did one of our 2 overnight backpacking trips back in May of 2020.  We headed out Saturday after Brian's Target shift and made it to our hotel in Grove City PA by about 8:30 pm.  It was a reasonable trip.

We were at the trailhead by 9 am this morning. There were almost no other people at this sometimes busy State Park.  There is a bridge that crosses Oil Creek in the park which is very old and was recently closed.  At first it was closed completely, effectively bisecting the large state park right down the middle in a very unfortunate way since even driving between the two halves is quite a chore without the bridge.  Thankfully, they opened the bridge to pedestrian traffic a few weeks ago.

I did a solo visit to this park sometime last year I think.  I expected that today's 7 mile hike from Alltrails would be the same hike I did on my solo day trip.  It turned out not to be.  This turned out to be rather different.  Our hike today went by a LOT of old oil industry remains and had some slopes that were so steep we could barely do them standing up and in fact I did fall on my butt once.

The fall colors were very enjoyable both on the hike and on the drive back today.  The weather was crisp and cool but we found out quickly that the substantial jackets we thought we would need quickly became little convection ovens once we started walking.  This was the first hike this season that was below 50 degrees and at the car it seemed very chilly.  Most of the way we had to carefully rig my jacket to the backpack so I could strip down to just a t-shirt and sometimes I wore Brian's sweatshirt but I could only wear my own jacket for the first 30 minutes of the walk.

This was the most strenuous walk we've done in many months and also one of the farthest from home that wasn't part of a multi-day road trip.  I hope we get to have more adventures like this in the coming months, I've missed them.

























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