[at-l] Hiking anyone?

[spiriteagle99 at hotmail.com (Jim and/or Ginny Owen)]

Anyone planning any good long hikes this summer?  How did your hikes last 
weekend go?

I?ll go first ? in eight days Jim and I are hopping a plane for Anchorage.  
There we plan to rent a car and drive to the village of McCarthy (60 miles 
down a ROUGH dirt road) where we will take a three seater plane across the 
mountains to the north-east side of Wrangell St. Elias National Park.  For 
six days we will hike cross-country through the hills and tundra, where we 
will be met 35 miles later (hiking is slow in Alaska) by another small 
airplane.  Then we?ll head north for a few days and end up at Denali 
National Park where we will attempt to get a backcountry permit for a few 
days of backpacking there.  If not, we will do a day trip through the park, 
then hike the Kesugi Ridge Trail at Denali State Park (good views, no permit 
necessary, actual cairned trail).  Then we?ll continue south to the Kenai 
Peninsula and the town of Seward where we will take a boat out to Kenai 
Fjords National Park to look at sealife and glaciers.  We?ll have a couple 
of days to explore the Kenai before heading back to Anchorage and our flight 
home.  Am I excited ? YES!!!

As to last weekend ? our plans ended up changing at the last minute, thanks 
to gridlock on the beltway and a humongous thunderstorm that pretty much 
insured we weren?t going to be able to get out of Washington DC in a 
reasonable time.  With a six hour drive ahead of us, at the best of times, 
our plan to get out to the Quehanna Trail wasn?t going to work. So we went 
home for the night, then headed west to Greenridge State Forest in western 
Maryland around noon on Friday.  There is a very nice trail there which we 
were able to connect to the C&O canal for a good 43 mile loop.  We hiked 12 
½ miles in the Forest on Friday, 19 miles mostly on the canal on Saturday 
and 11 miles through the woods on Sunday.  The trail through the woods 
crosses several shallow streams which it follows through rocky canyons, has 
some very steep climbs, a few views, lots of blowdowns and no people.  I 
don?t think we?ve ever seen anyone on the trail when we?ve done dayhikes 
there, which was part of the attraction, especially on a holiday weekend.  
We saw no one on the first day and only one couple on Sunday.  Of course, 
the canal stretch was different.  The C&O follows the Potomac River and in 
that area goes through the Paw Paw Tunnel, a 3000? brick canal tunnel which 
is a popular weekend destination.  It was quite cool, in both senses of the 
word.  We met lots of bikers, daytrippers and canoists.  The C&O stretch was 
typical canal walking ? long and flat (18 miles), hard on the feet ? but 
there was a river nearby to cool off in and lots of wildlife.  All in all we 
saw seven deer, lots of turtles sunning themselves on logs and possibly an 
otter.  It was quite hot and humid, so a rainstorm Sunday morning was 
actually quite welcome. We finished early afternoon on Sunday, so had time 
to stop for a beer and a burger before watching the fireworks on television 
and then had a relaxing do nothing day on Monday to rest our feet and cool 
off.  Despite the heat, it was a good weekend.

Anyone else doing any hiking?

Ginny