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The
Keystone State hosts over 400 miles of completed GET,
so far the most of any state.
Leaving
Maryland, Great Eastern Trail's east loop enters PA on Tuscarora
Trail quickly climbing its eponymous mountain passing
numerous views and even just below a summit restaurant
on the old Lincoln Highway. A descent into Cowans
Gap State Park brings the hiker to a backwoods trail
first built in 1755 for the British attack on the French
position at today's Pittsburgh.
Finally,
after four states the GET hiker bids farewell to the well
maintained and blue blazed Tuscarora, joining orange blazed Standing
Stone Trail for over 70 miles of sweeping viewpoints
and intriguing cultural remnants such as "Thousand
Steps" near Mount Union, PA. Upon reaching Greenwood
Furnace State Park's historical remnants of early America's
iron industry, a blue blazed trail continues over high
Broad Mountain and through never-cut rhododendron crowding
pre-Columbian hemlock trees at Alan
Seeger Natural Area just before rejoining the west
loop.
GET's
west loop crosses the famed Mason-Dixon Line to orange
blazed Mid State Trail,
the longest and wildest of Pennsylvania's footpaths where
if you hike alone, you will still meet more bears than
people. Sharp boulders, knife-edge rocks, forever views,
and little water greet intrepid hikers who take on the
west loop. Friendly trail towns of Everett and Williamsburg
are oases of comfort.
Just
south of the "Happy Valley" surrounding the university
town simply called State College, GET hikers reunite to
continue north on the orange blazes of Mid
State Trail through more old growth, vistas, over many
ridges and under one, finally reaching a town named for
America's oldest woolen mill: Woolrich, Pennsylvania. GET
follows MST up and up again on the Allegheny Front and
into the depths of expanses of public woodland surrounding
America's largest "creek," Pine Creek Gorge.
After
taking a gander at Pennsylvania's Grand Canyon, MST turns
east into waterfall country passing scattered remnants
of long-past lumbermen and coal miners. Skipping around
an eight-mile unfinished section on an unmarked but mapped
roadwalk (as of summer 2008), the
northernmost completed
MST and GET section winds merrily through rural
farmland and around the heads of two reservoirs offering
tantalizing traces of life before government-paid relocations.
Continue past Cowanesque
Lake, following the orange blazes into
hilly upper New York State.
Presently
the GET is fully hikeable from the Allegheny Trail
at I-64 exit 1, just east of the VA/WV border, northward
through portions of VA, WV, all of MD, all of PA, to
Maple Street in the Village of Addison, NY.
< South
to Maryland | North to New
York >
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