Hiking McConnels Mill PA State Park Pt 1

 

Today I brought my good friend R to hike with me. Today I chose McConnell’s Mill of PA but started at Hell’s Hollow Access. This would ensure us not running into other hikers for many miles.

 This section of the trail would be challenging for the two of us. Not to the point of whether we could not do it from the perspective of we are not used to this much vertical change in topography back to back to back.

This is also a part of the North Country Trail System. It was hot, muggy, muddy, and buggy! I am convinced the bugs play a game of how annoying we can be! Lol

We did find where mother nature is carving a small natural but deep bridge out of the small mountain that’s on the trail this can be found here at these coordinates (N40° 55.571' W80° 13.368').

I don’t know how long the bridge will last due to the water erosion, but it’s interesting to see how one way a natural land bridge is created by mother nature.

The sound of the Slippery Rock Creek and her tributaries were nice to listen to throughout the hike. You could hear the creek no matter where you were on the hike.

Since it’s been an incredibly wet spring and summer the mushrooms are growing everywhere. You could see where animals tried to eat them and found them to be awful.  You would randomly see them torn to shreds as the animal tried to find a tasty part of the mushroom!

We too ka rest on some large rocks at our turn around. It was hot an humid and that’s why we started early like 0730. We had chosen to turn around at mile 6. Now, here comes the moment where we look at the map vs the six-mile waypoint. It was 0.60 miles further. Now that might not sound like a lot but in this terrain, it was a bunch.

With all the up and down we had done at this point and how much the map had been off horizontally and vertically we decided to turn around at this point.

I need to point out that I planned the trail off “AllTrails” we all know they are normally off to begin with and not to be used as gospel. It was just another example of you can not trust technology all the time and especially when you did not create the map yourself!!

We ended up hiking  12.2 miles and ascended and descended a little over 2100 feet.