Up, Across and Down

Apparition

I’ve been going to Ricketts Glen since I was a small boy, but until last week, I had never done the whole loop.  I’ve done the full length of Falls Trail quite a few times, but always with a shuttle involved, wherein you take two cars, leave one at the top (or bottom), drive the second one to the other end, hike back to the first, then drive to the other one.  It sounds more complicated than it is, but you do need at least two people, and I only had one.

An aerial view of the full circuit would resemble a martini glass.  If you park at the lower end, you walk up Falls Trail to Waters Meet, then you angle either right or left.  When you get to the top, you are about a mile from the top of the other branch you could have chosen at Waters Meet.  That mile is about the only part of the 7+ miles that is reasonably level.

Seven miles is a long walk when most of it is pretty steep either up or down.  The latter, oddly enough, is not much easier than the former – it’s just a different set of muscles.  But it’s worth it – at least once.  So now I can cross that item off my list of things to do before I die.

The problem is that I can take a LOT of pictures in seven miles – 197, to be exact. Having played with the collection for a week or so, I got it down to 28, or about four per mile.  You might notice that the first image of the tree across the stream taken at 1:27pm is the same tree as the last shot, taken at 6:28pm, which would mean my average speed was a sorry 1.4mph.  But there were a lot of distractions along the way.

Hope you enjoy.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 11th, 2012 at 10:31 pm. It is filed under Awareness, Ice and Water, Landscape, Nature, Northeastern Pennsylvania, Photography, Places, Ricketts Glen, Seeing, Woods and tagged with Light, Nature, Photography, reflections, Ricketts Glen, Seeing, spring, Thoreau, Water, woods. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.