Rothrock State Forest
Pennsylvania, United States of America
We interrupt your regularly scheduled National Park stories to bring you pictures from my backpacking trip this weekend! I had the amazing opportunity to go backpacking in Rothrock State Forest this past weekend with the Newman Club. The Newman Club is the Catholic student organization on campus and it is amazing! I’ve met some of my best friends through Newman!
One of them, who shall not be named, is an amazingly crazy wilderness guy. He is certified in edible mushroom identification, led Orion backpacking trips through Penn State’s Aurora orientation program, and is Wilderness First Aid certified. I had the opportunity to participate in Orion this past August and it was my first backpacking experience!
On this trip we loaded up in our cars (the girl car was the best!) and drove out to Rothrock. We hiked about a half mile on the trail and got to our first campsite. It was on the top of a hill and overlooked Bear Meadow Valley and we had a great view of the sunset. The spring we were supposed to drink from was dry so we had to boil water from a stagnant pool filled with leave, live bugs, dead bugs, and frogs.
The next morning, we woke up around 6:00 am and hiked to a collection of boulders at the top of the hill to watch the sunrise! The colors were fantastic and two of our group members were making films, so we got some awesome go-pro shots and time lapses of the sunrise! It only took twenty minutes to watch the whole sun rise over the mountains.
We hiked back to our campsite and roasted bagels for breakfast! I learned that the best bagel roasting sticks are the ones shaped like a Y because they have a handle and keep the bagel steady as opposed to the marshmallow spear technique.
After breakfast we loaded up and headed off to the next site. Along the way we found an awesome spring by a hunting lodge. We had to trek aka slide down a really step hill of slippery leaves to get there, but the fresh water tasted amazing and we drank straight from the pipe. We also found a secret look out spot and built cairns with flat boulders.
We also found a rickety, rusty fire tower that we just HAD to climb! The view at the top was amazing because the leaves are just starting to change colors! One of our group members is from Florida and he had never seen the leaves change color! The look on his face was priceless when he got to the top!
After our 7-mile hike, we reached our last campsite and had a rough time stringing the bear bag, but had a great time building the fire!
We all had a wonderful backpacking trip full of fun, excitement, lots of prayer, and quite a bit of danger (aka one guy burning his hair while trying to get the fire started.)
This blog post expands on your national parks theme by giving a more narrow view on a recent experience in a state park. This particular post takes advantage of the fact that you were there a week ago and so the experience is still fresh in your mind and relevant. The page also looks nice/is a good example of a blog post, my only recommendation would be to change the picture formatting as the left-alignment looks a little off. Overall this was funny and relatable to someone who has gone backpacking before and touches on experiences that a lot of people would share.