🍜 Appalachian Trail eats | Outdoorsy Newsletter

In today’s edition:

☀️ Your weekend weather outlook: Mostly clear and sunny skies, perfect for outdoor fun. Expect mild breezes, lows in the 40s and highs in the 70s.

— Paola Pérez (outdoorsy@inquirer.com)

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Whether it’s a long haul or just a short trek, food is essential for any hiking expedition.

For hikers conquering Pennsylvania’s slice of the Appalachian Trail — roughly 229 miles of “Rocksylvania” — catching up on calories can be a challenge.

Heather Anderson, a Pennsylvania resident who has hiked the trail three times, knows the struggle: “It’s a losing battle because the math never stops. You’re always burning more calories than you take in. And if you carry more food, it weighs you down, and then you need more food.”

We narrowed down five locations where you can find a good meal to help you keep going, including one rite of passage along the way: you have to stop for ice cream at Pine Grove Furnace State Park.

From the start of your journey all the way to a quaint town on the Delaware River, see our full list of essential places to go eat and what to order.

P.S. I’d love to hear from you. What’s your go-to trail snack? Email me your pro-tips here.

ICYMI, we have a county-by-county interactive that shows you when and where to expect those glorious shades of yellow, red, orange, brown, and purple from trees across the Keystone State.

You can use the color-coded map to track when the leaves are:

🟢 not yet changed

🟡 starting to change

🟠 near peak

🔴 at peak

🟤 starting to fade

Right now: Philadelphia is 🟠 near peak 🟠 ! To admire 🔴 peak colors 🔴 this weekend, consider stopping by Nocamixon State Park in Bucks County (54 mi. from Philadelphia) and Hawk Mountain in Schuylkill County (81 mi. from Philadelphia).

There are plenty more places to choose from. Check the map for the latest update. And look out for next week’s forecast, right here in Outdoorsy.

🎤 Now we’re passing the microphone to Jason. You’ll always find his work here. Here’s a feature I wanted to bring you from 2019.

Cranberry Creek is liquid glass, tumbling down hillsides into Paradise Creek, before it snakes its way into Brodhead Creek and joins the Delaware River miles away. This Poconos stream is barely as wide as a sidewalk, cool and shaded beneath a cathedral of trees. On a July afternoon, a fisherman was standing solemnly in the water, looking for the insect larvae that cling to the creek’s mossy rocks.

Rob Shane, Mid-Atlantic organizer for the nonprofit Trout Unlimited, found a caddis fly larva hiding in its strange, shell-like casing beneath a rock. He searched through his fly box for something to match it, a tiny hook wrapped in fuzz and elk hair, slightly green, to fool the discerning trout. Though fishermen in the Upper Delaware of the Catskills would protest, these waters, particularly Brodhead Creek, are hallowed, considered by many to be the birthplace of fly-fishing in the United States.

“The water quality is exceptional,” said Don Baylor, a board member of Brodhead Trout Unlimited and author of The Brodhead: An Historic Trout Fishery.

Exceptional water quality, in 2019′s Delaware River watershed, is almost never an accident, including in the Brodhead, which Shane and Trout Unlimited have fought to protect from developers. Everywhere in the watershed, not just in Philadelphia’s industrial zones, local pollution, development, and the global forces of climate change all conspire against water purity. — Jason Nark

Dive in to learn how fish are affected by fluctuations in water quality, and hear from local anglers on the subtle signals sent by three very different types of fish.

I visited Atlanta recently, and the trip wouldn’t have been complete without a stop at the famous Botanical Garden. I snapped this serene view of the Aquatic Plant Pond in the Skyline Garden.

Special thanks to Outdoorsy reader Donna Goughnour for sending in this stunning photo of last week’s northern lights over Blue Marsh Lake in Berks County. We’re still in awe over this special show.

Did you catch the supermoon or the comet this week? The comet, a rare remnant from the early days of our solar system, won’t come back for another 80,000 years. At least I had the chance to admire the Hunter’s Moon through my binoculars.

📮 Send your own photos or write a review of your outdoors experience for a chance to be featured in this newsletter. Email me back here.

Take care out there!

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