PA Horse Shoe Trail: Brecknock Loop, 5 miles

Half of today's hike followed the Horse Shoe Trail from the Adamstown, PA, public park and ride lot to follow the yellow blazes southeast towards the Berks and Lancaster County line then looping back on paved backroads for a total of five miles.  It felt good to stretch those muscles again after a week of not hiking ten or more miles a day as we did in the UK. 

Trail Post, Rt 568

West view towards Adamstown Ridge

I've said it plenty enough already, but I'm not in love with the Horse Shoe Trail. It's important enough to me, however, to want to hike sections of it when I can and work towards its completion with the AT - a hiking project that I started after completing the Camino de Santiago in 2016. Autumn colors and a confetti parade of leaves drifting non-stop across the trail (and road) made today's hike a pretty one. There was enough sedimentary stone visible above the fresh layer of leaves to tell me that I'd been hiking on an ancient river delta with all the aggregate small gravels and sand cobble. Dressed and finished as faced building stone this stone is reddish in color but in nature it weathers out as grey green.  

Time for some more road walking

Weathered aggregate red stone

Very low water level 

With deer season upon us there were lots of stands, blinds, and ladders to spot and I hope I was visible as well, dressed in my hunters orange sweat jacket and KTA orange ball cap. I stopped frequently to admire the layers of color from patchy blue sky to the yellows, orange, and reds of a Mid-Atlantic woods in October. Even on the road walk sections that completed my loop I stopped to watch the leaves cascade in blankets across the pavement and listen to the wind in the treetops. There was blessed little traffic today on those shoulderless backroads which is often not the case with the road sections on my HST loops. 

Peak color

Ammo box trail register

Recent hikers

I stopped to check a trail register and read the comments left by hikers. Kind folks left thank-you's to the trail maintainers and private property owners across whose land permission is given to use this trail. Coming down off off the hills I found a beautiful roadcut that featured an intrusion of igneous rock which is often buried in these hills except for these cuts. The pulling apart of Pangea and its rifting of sedimentary bedrock allowed magma to squeeze up into the thinned crust near the surface where it cooled and hardened in place. There are no true volcanoes in these parts although local land legends often claim the cone-shaped knobs of hills to be extinct volcanoes. 

Hunting blinds ready for deer season

Field edge corn stalk

Field edge path 

Road cut exposure of an ultramafic intrusion 

I completed my five-mile loop at the park and ride where I'd parked my truck in Adamstown then scouted by truck the next section that carries the trail northwesterly across the Adamstown Ridge and towards the iron hills of northern Lancaster County. Till next time, HST...