A walk in Lehigh Gorge state park to Glen Onoko falls

I realize this post is long overdue but should be completed before @dhimmel writes about his epic Aiguille Rouge hike he took last week. So here we are! Be ready for a bunch of annoying photos of us as you read through the post.

A few weeks ago, Daniel and I spontaneously planned an easy 3-hour hike. Here’s the product of our 15 minutes of researching the area the night before:

• road map 1
• road map 2.
• a blog post with a serious typographical error: Game Lands 181 should be Game Lands 141.

As one may imagine, we still had a very blurry idea of what we wanted to do when we got to Lehigh Gorge State Park at 11 am, so we started with walking Valjeanne around. Valjeanne was initially not excited to get outside, but she quickly changed her mind after seeing many exciting things on the way to the park:

Around noon, we began our actual hike by walking up the rail road because my hiking buddy wanted to save the falls for the end. Various changes and detours like this one extended our hike to 15-mile long which took us approximately 7.5 hours. Fortunately, making up for that were many lovely beaches and this massive pile of timber sleepers along the train track:

We also saw an old pipe that was repurposed to carry fiber optic cables, which was neat! (Note the text on the orange part.)

Somewhere along the way, we stopped for a leisurely and lavish meal with steemed corns, Applegate monterey jack and roast beef on sourdough, chia chunks, peanut butter stuffed dates and chocolate covered coffee beans. Shortly after lunch, we realized that we missed our first turn because that trailhead was rather inconspicuous. After failing to find the second trailhead, we made our way up the hill anyway and found ourselves on a little trail after a while. I got excited that we started to go uphill, and Daniel was thrilled every time we stumbled upon a fire pit (see his obsession with fire in this post of the bonfire @dhimmel built to wish his brother bon voyage), especially when there’s a cool bench right next to it.

(Yes, those are Chaco®, and yes, I did get some blisters afterwards, but they held up really well!)

However, as we go deeper in the woods and the trail gets smaller, our excitement dwindled down when the mosquitos started to attack us since Daniel had left his tiny bug spray in the pink hammock pocket #ultralightproblem. We crossed some very thick area, and our legs and arms were quickly covered in bites. I even got one on my forehead. It was a difficult hour. We babbled about how we would go to REI right after to get AfterBite. After we realized that we were not even half way there, we started to walk faster. Eventually, because the trail widened up (or we walked so fast) the mosquitos stopped chasing us. We were relieved to learn that we’re on the right path back, and we have some slack time before sunset.

On this trip, I learned that my partner is quite passionate about power lines. He successfully convinced me to go off route to the end of the power lines to this fabulous lookout:

And here is us underneath one of the “danger zone” power line tower:

Daniel also saw his first ever rattle snake here (snake not pictured).

We found another lookout thanks to my colleague's preference of sticking to the trail even though the road is shorter. This is arguably the best lookout in Pennsylvania. Here's Daniel enjoying letting his legs hang off the cliff and me in awe with the gorgeous view of the river, the mountain and its sharp ridge, the railroad and the little town in the distance.

It was getting late, but if you think we were in too much of a hurry to not put up a hammock, you’re wrong. We found an incredible hammock spot real close to the Top Fall:

The downhill was tricky and I fell a couple of times, but we didn’t mind the challenge because we knew we were close to Valjeanne. Time was no longer an issue. Here's a collage of several waterfalls we got to shower in (we didn’t take any long-exposure photos so these will have to do):

I almost forgot: before leaving for Philadelphia, we stopped at the Turn Hole Tunnel as the introductory blog post recommended and ran through this dark foggy tunnel. A nice run to wrap up our trip!

Some take-home points:

• Downloading a map of the area the night before is highly recommended (don’t wait until you get there with terrible signal and having to delay your start time five minutes for ViewRanger to download a one-squared-mile map).
• When your partner asked “Can you date me?”, they meant “Can you dip a date in peanut butter and feed it to me?”
• Trust your instinct (or your partner’s instinct) when at a Y.
• Believe in ViewRanger. ViewRanger is amazing.

À plus tard!