My father and uncle grew up in central Pennsylvania, and I’ve been going there, every once and a while, for nearly 40 years.  There is still much that remains unchanged about that part of the world, much of it incomprehensible to me, but some of it perfectly so.  For instance, the people continue to be hardworking and steadfast; entire towns shut down in hunting season; food is hearty and filling; all my favorite 80s songs are always on the radio; and it has some of the most inspiring hardwood forests on the east coast.  It also has, as I now know, some really good, brutal trail running.

For the last couple of years, I’ve vaguely attended to the fact that there is a 60 mile long trail called the Loyalsock.  It starts north of Montoursville and ends north of Laport.  According to Wikipedia - and this is important – it “has many climbs and offers many vistas” (emphasis mine).  The key thing to understand here is that I’ve been on part of the Loyalsock, and it was nothing more than a pleasant, fairly well graded, old lumber road.  It wound slowly down to the creek and then meandered along it, gentling undulating between feeder streams.  It was with these pleasant experiences that I jumped at the chance this last weekend to run “15 or so miles” on it, starting at the eastern terminus and ending up at World’s End State Park.

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The foot or so of snow the region had received the previous week had mostly melted off by Saturday.  The problem, as anyone with a very basic grasp of physics will appreciate, is that when snow melts, it turns into very cold liquid water, which then – as a liquid – seeks the lowest point.  And, as any even mildly experienced hiker will know, a well-traveled trail often happens to be… the lowest point.  By the end of the first quarter mile, I was moving through ankle deep water.  This kept up for the next 13 miles, although, as a change of pace, it occasionally lapped up over my calves.

The great benefit of all this snow melt?  Numb feet.  These, by the way, actually helped.

The Loyalsock is rocky.  It’s not rocky like the ridiculous Catoctin course, in that all the rocks weren’t standing upright threatening to amputate your face if you fell.  Rather, the Loyalsock rocks are very large, boulder-like masses, that weren’t in on the conversations with the Boy Scout troop that laid much of the original trail.  I can tell this, because while much of the trail is – in fact – a trail, there are parts – not insignificant parts – that are not trail-like at all, and instead resemble what one might imagine a trail to look like if all the three ton boulders in the area felt left out of the planning process and decided they were going to be part of the fun, regardless.  So, while Catoctin was spent gingerly dancing around sharp rocks in an effort not to die, the Loyalsock was an exercise in vertical exhaustion.  That so many of these rocks happened to be at the top of 1000′ climbs seemed only to add insult to injury.

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None of this is to say that it wasn’t a gorgeous run.  It was.  But as is often the case, when running a rough course like Loyalsock, much of the time is spent watching where you put your feet.  This does cut down on the number of times you’re likely to pitch – dramatically – through open space, arching ever so gracefully over a slightly confused chicken hawk, but it does absolutely nothing for navigation.

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Most of the Loyalsock was blazed by a Boy Scout troop and then by the extraordinarily named Alpine Club of Williamsport.  They all clearly drank heavily whenever the monotany of walking on a straight vector got to them.  This discovery came only after I’d been moving along the trail at a good clip, and noticed two things simultaneously: first, I hadn’t seen the ubiquitous LT blaze for a while (despite the very clear trail I was on), and second, that I was suddenly quite out of trail and was on my way over the bank into the water.  Squishing back a quarter of a mile, I saw the blaze (timidly marked, I thought), heading off into the trees, and so off I went.

Only to come to a complete and dumbfounded stop 30 seconds later.

The trail went straight up.  Not 30 degrees straight up; but like 60 degrees straight up.  And, every time there after, when the trail would (without logic) veer off, it was to go straight up.  It was, as if, from his small woodshed behind the perpetually rowdy feasting hall on Mt. Olympus, the lonely and misunderstood god of ultrarunning – Perpetuas – and gotten a glimmer in his eye.  And instead of impregnating some wayward maiden while disguised as a swan, he had built the most hellish course he could, and then disguised it as something not all that bad.

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Which gets me to the final descent from the ridge line to the creek.  The stars of this little vignette we’ve met before: big boulder-like rocks, dazed, confused, and laying about wherever they ended up during their last migration; steep inclines approaching – uncomfortably so – 90 degrees; and snow melt wetted surfaces, many with slowly decaying leaves.  However, there are two new players: quads that are already so hammered they can hardly move, and gravity.

Oh, also 4 hours of running.

In other words, one of the longest, and I’m sure if you were to ask those poor souls within hearing distance, profane descents of my life.

I’m probably going back soon.