I am a person needing a purpose. If you give me a plan, I’ll execute it. If I don’t have one, I become aimless. My final day at Worlds End State Park is a study in aimlessness.
My backpacking trip was planned for three days. By reducing it to two, I had an unplanned day. And in addition, I was tired from the past two day’s exertions. So I drifted here and there in the park, looking at this, looking at that, and not getting anything ‘major’ accomplished. Yes, some will argue I was on vacation, but for me this aimlessness is a throwback to my 400 pound days. The difference between sitting on a couch doing nothing and sitting on a park bench doing nothing is the latter gives you a better tan. But that’s it.
The first place I wandered is Sones Pond, a small body of water along the Loyalsock Trail above Rock Run Bridge. The pond was a mile or so from where my backpacking trip with Ian started two days before. Since Ian couldn’t show me the pond, I drove up there.
After a few minutes walking around the edge of the pond, I changed into my hiking gear for a descent along Coal Run. Jeff Mitchell in his book Hiking The Endless Mountains wrote about the Coal Run bushwhack hike, making it seem like another of his wonderful waterfall discoveries. But a tenth of a mile in I discovered the hike involved a lot of scrambling up and down the sides of the run, and while it might be fun to do that I’d prefer to attempt it with another person. So after meeting one of the local residents…
…. I drove back to the Visitor Center.