Road Trips and Hike Reports

With an intense but short warm up period coming the next day, I thought Saturday would be a good day for a relatively far away winter hike before it all gets sloppy.  We headed out pretty early and had breakfast at Cracker Barrel before heading all the way south into Pennsylvania.  It was about 2 hours 45 minutes drive (not counting the drive to breakfast) but traffic was very light on this cold day in the middle of an extended weekend.  The roads in PA weren't as well plowed or salted as in NY but it wasn't too bad. This trail starts out from a trailhead off a very quiet PA-44 highway.  Most of North Central PA is  very  sparsely populated.  The main trail led through a seemingly unending and unchanging corridor of brush and trees.      While not unpleasant, the almost completely flat and unvarying scenery wasn't very exciting.  Thankfully, the Alltrails plot we were following led to not 1 or 2 but 3 scenic overlook spur trail...

Alltrails is our trusted digital companion that we use for almost every hike and have for years.  Usually it lists a lot of different trails and in areas with a dense trail network there are often multiple combinations that people have submitted that give you different lengths, routes and elevation gains.  At this trailhead, there is only 1 trail on AllTrails and it is the No-Tan-Tako trail.  I guess in isolation it’s an ok trail.  It mostly cuts through a long scrubby field, passing through a number of cattle gates and other agricultural looking land.  But the Interlaken trail starts at exactly the same trailhead (maybe 20 feet away from the No-Tan-Tako sign) and takes you to exactly  the same place as the other trail.  This makes it a matter of picking a favorite or, as we have done here, making a loop of the 2 trails.  I’m just surprised the No-Tan-Tako trail was the one chosed to put on AllTrails.  The Interlaken trail runs through an att...

This same trailhead has been the starting and ending point for at least 6 other documented hike on this blog.  This time we followed the 'Swedish Loop' instead of the 'Spanish Loop' we have done more frequently.  It was odd looking at Alltrails.  The Swedish trail loop and the Spanish loop trail look overwhelmingly the same on the overview pages.  Yet, as our hike went on (and on) we realized that this was a substantially different and somewhat longer and harder hike than any of our previous visits to this trail network.  The Swedish trail, in reality, only makes up a certain amount of the total hike.  The first mile or so on the way into the trail network is the main Finger Lakes Trail and then the Swedish trail branched off and gained more elevation than the other trail we normally take.  I believe we did at least part of the Swedish trail (with blue blazes) before but when we popped out onto a gravel road after a long gradual climb and then had to w...