TRAIL DAY 138

Thu, July 7, 2016 A zero day in Cherry Valley.  Not much to report except that I had a very comfortable day in bright sunshine.  The wife went off to work in Stroudsburg and the husband at his office.  I went down to see him in the late morning or early afternoon and enjoyed the many Life Magazine  covers he had hanging on his walls.  I enjoyed, too, hearing about his international business and about Pennsylvania rocks.  My host told me that he had learned from a friend knowledgeable in geology that the ice age glaciers stopped at Cherry Valley and the ridge just south of there – the ridge the AT crosses.  I guess it doesn’t take a rock scientist to put 2 and 2 together to realize that the ice age transported a boatload of the earth’s crust from way up north all the way to PA.  All the way to what would become the AT when Benton MacKaye’s 1921 vision of a trail on the ridge of the Appalachian Mountains was fulfilled in 1937.

The mountain range is old and relatively low from ages of erosion some doubtless from the glaciers that rubbed them raw with their cosmic “sandpaper.”  Pennsylvania’s rocks are just an “accident” of nature and Mother knows it is her world and we are just visitors.  MacKaye envisioned a trail on the mountains – they happened to be rocky in Pennsylvania – so be it.  It is nice that Theo’s and my footsteps have become even a tiny part of that ancient yet in-a-flash geological history.

Day #138  Wind Gap (Cherry Valley) 0 miles