Central Pennsylvania
September 1995
The Mid State Trail runs 327 miles from the Maryland border to the New York border, through the ridge and valley system of the Appalachian Mountains and the Allegheny Plateau in Central Pennsylvania. It has been called “The Wildest Trail in Pennsylvania.”
I’m not sure why, but my guess is that it has to do with some steep hills. And by steep, I mean: What the heck! I have this vision that when the trail planners were laying out the trail, they would be down here, where they were, and they would look up there, where they wanted to be. They would turn to each other and say, “What’s the hardest, steepest, most ass-kickingest, most challenging way we can build this trail to get from here to there?” They would answer that question by building the trail in the hardest, steepest, most ass-kickingest, most challenging way. Clearly they had never heard of switchbacks and if they had, they ignored them.
My backpacking partner Martin and I did a three day section of this trail in the area of State College in the middle of Pennsylvania.
Three days. It almost killed us. What fun!