2025-05-31 40 -77

Location

Down a service road in the PA mountains.

Participants

User:Adam

Plans

Friday, office. 9:45 and the geohashes roll in. At this point most of the easily-accessible grats for my budding Minesweeper have been exhausted. At home, the bike sits in a state of relative repair, and ahead of me sits a weekend unencumbered by plans. I poke around the hashes for the following day, and the line eyes trace from home to the 5-31 hash in State College comes tantalizingly close to a hostel I had noted on my map many months ago. It's decided. I'll do an overnight hash.

Expedition

Saturday morning. As is mandatory on any great journey, I rose early and put myself through a harshly austere morning of preparation - a spartan breakfast of two slices of banana bread, a pot of coffee, an hour of sitting around, another pot of coffee, another spartan breakfast of a container of left over pasta, and about another hour of sitting around.

Mind honed through these deprivations, I threw toiletries and a change of clothes into an overnight bag and sprung at the door at the crack of 11:30am. My trusty steed fired up with no more than the usual cloud of leaking oil-smoke and we were on our way.

A reliable scouted series of doglegs and two-lane right-handers bore me through the first, hardest ring of suburbs girding the city with a minimum of gnashed teeth and wailed curses. Just as the road began to open up, however, so did the heavens. The slight drizzle that had came and went all morning turned into a hard rain. A subdivision side-street shaded by reclining pines gave me enough cover to open the waterproof bag and throw on my never-used rain suit, finally given a chance to be both present and needed.

The pants ripped at the crotch the instant I sat down. Oh well.

Luckily, the worst of the rain passed when I was fumbling and fuming over the packing and unpacking under the tree. The remaining 90% sealed surface of the rain suit worked well enough as the rest of the storm tuckered itself out -- which let me focus my ire on something else: the state of central Maryland roads.

I don't think I've ever seen so much water collect at the CREST of a hill. Each lane tended to have two shallow, long puddles form in the areas worn down by untold thousands, tens of thousands of tires over the years. I had to find a delicate balance between not making any sudden movements that could upset the wetted tire-asphalt interface while also remaining agile and paranoid enough to avoid any suspicious puddles or pools that could end up far deeper or slicker than they appeared.

Slow(ish) going as 650 shrunk blessedly from six to four to two lanes in the low steady precipitation; I, for once, grateful that the roads were full of those of advanced age who believe speed limit signs are part of a sinister traffic police plot to fool them into paying tickets, and take an extra ten off the top just in case.

I pulled into Damascus with a full bladder and empty stomach. As I started making water (into a gas station toilet), the sky stopped doing so (in general). I fixed the other issue via a ten-inch supreme pizza before taking back off on a zig-zag across the I-70 corridor, sun on my back.

There's a point - a little bit outside of Woodsboro - on MD 550 heading west where the vector of the road aligns exactly with its destination, and far off in the distance you can see the town of Thurmont tentatively climbing the slopes of Catocin Mountain. It's only six or seven miles off, but it feels like you're looking all the way to the place where the earth's curvature slopes down.

This makes it peculiarly unsatisfying when - six to seven miles later - you slowly realize you're already *in* Thurmont, and that the sprawl of the town has robbed you of having a moment where you feel like you've reached that distant glimpse and climbed inside. This is but one of the ways that Thurmont - the mountain gate - is cursed, and but one of the reasons that continuing on the northwesterly course of 550 out of town feels like you've dodged something.

550 takes you to a "T" intersection where you come face to face with the remains of Fort Ritchie - partially converted to mixed-used commercial and park, but partially left to rot - and if you're me, you turn briefly right before taking a narrow side road off of MacAfee Hill.

This turn off - announced by a bent sign as "Buena Vista Rd" - took a winding path to the Pennsylvania border about two miles away. There would usually be no reason for me to take this route, but today, I'm attempting a daring synthesis. At the point this road crosses the state line, several weeks ago, someone on a motorcycling forum took a picture of their bike parked by a sign - which, in the forum game they were participating in, is known as "dropping a tag". I'd pinpointed where they'd dropped it weeks ago, but I hadn't bothered to actually visit, replicate the photo (known as "grabbing a tag") and then "drop" it somewhere else, and I hoped to mix geohashing and tag-o-rama'ing in some sort of hybrid set up.

Unfortunately, after snapping the picture, I logged onto the forum to find that someone had beaten me by a mere two hours. Oh well. It was a nice detour anyway.

Switching back in the hills above Pen Mar brought me to a short stretch of Pennsylvania Route 16, then quickly off it and through the hamlets of Beartown and Glen Forney. This is the part where you really feel like you're leaving the central plains and going *up* the mountain instead of just carving around them. The forest changed subtly but surely to a hardier, needlier composition along Old Forge Road. I arced past South Mountain Road - and, unbeknownst to me, an absolutely massive locked youth treatment center - and hit the main vein of Catocin mountain - PA 233.

Despite looking like quite a trek on the map, this ridge road went by surprisingly quickly. 20 miles of lining pines passed before I knew it, and I found myself at the gravelly threshold of the Ironmaster's Mansion. This palatial home sits right at the midpoint of the Appalachian Trail and has long served as a hostel for hikers. Tonight, I'd be infiltrating it as a road user; while I could get to the hash and back in one day, it was going to be much, much nicer to pay the $25 for a bunk and split the trip over two days.

Nobody was in the office when I stopped in the first time, so, after buying a Dr Pepper from the attached store, I hopped back on my bike for the last little loop to the hash. PA 233 turned north and careened down the side of the mountain into the flats of the Cumberland valley. The route took me around the nearby town of Carlisle in record time, and soon I was again slaloming around mountains on the way to New Bloomfield.

The sunny weather that had emerged after the morning was once again making way for rain. By the time I leaned around the roundabout in New Bloomfield - just a few miles from the hash - it was coming down, though not as bad as it had been pre-Damascus. I slipped off Soule Road into a convenient muddy turnoff as I drew parallel with the power substation. The power line poles visible on the map made it quite easy to pinpoint my position.

To my chagrin (but not my surprise, at this point) my phone GPS just would not cut the mustard, despite seeing plenty of open sky and not being all that remote from cell towers to help it along. I did another bit of shade-tree surveying, trying to line myself up at the properly-ratioed distance from the two nearest power poles. I think I got within a few feet, at the very worst, of the point.

Hash grinned-at, I got back on the road. The return loop took me through Carlisle - where I picked up a replacement flasher module to take the place of my current one, which was on the blink (in the wrong way) - and back to the Ironmaster's Mansion, where I found someone manning the front desk.

A frozen pizza and a bottle of water was followed by a burrowing-in to the topmost bunk in the upper dormitory, and my fellow guests' (all thru-hikers preparing for another long day) insistence on an 8pm-lights out saw me drifting off to sleep soon after.

A 5am wakeup, a pile of French toast, three cups of coffee, a Seven Star laying on the back deck watching the rain-fattened creek rush by across the clearing, and I was on the way home. A fucky starter solenoid - remedied by smacking it once and then not turning the bike off until I got home - was the only mark left on a beautiful return journey, more-or-less retracing my steps on the way there. Mission accomplished.