backpacking RSS

About a 4 hour drive from where I live is the southern portion of the Green Mountain National Forest, more than 400,000 acres of of forests, mountains, streams and wilderness. Both the Appalachian Trail and the Vermont Long Trail run through this beautiful forest. On this trip we used a section where the AT and LT run together, crossing over Stratton Mountain before diverting and heading off into the Lye Brook Wilderness.

For the past few years I've done a Christmas Eve Backpacking trip, and since I was in Arizona for Christmas I decided to do a solo overnight backpacking trip on Passage 37 of the Arizona Trail. I started at the Grandview Tower in the Kaibab National Forest and hiked north to the South Rim of the Grand Canyon.

The Grand Canyon is a place I've wanted to go ever since I was a child watching Wile E. Coyote chase the roadrunner around the desert. I got to spend a few weeks visiting my friend Todd, who works at GCNP, allowing me the time to spend a few days down in the canyon itself.

The Thunder Swamp Trail System is a little less known in northeastern Pennsylvania when compared to the Pinchot Trail System. It has a reputation for being hard to follow, and under maintained. There aren't any vistas or steep climbs, and is in fact one of the "flattest" backpacking trails I've come across in the northeast of the country, let alone the state.

This trip was done on February 13th & 14th, 2018. 

Looking for another night out solo in the woods, I headed to the Delaware State Forest for a short hike from the parking lot near Lake Minisink on Bushkill Falls Rd. along the Thunder Swamp Trail towards Saw Creek and the trails namesake, Thunder Swamp.