Donut Hole and Susquehannock Trails - Hyner Run SP to Ole Bull SP - PA - May 2002

Five of us with the Wilmington Trail Club did this as a 3 day, ~23 mile shuttle hike on a nice weekend in May. I camped out the night before at Hyner Run State Park so I actually wound up with three bag nights instead of two. We started out by shuttling cars to the end of the trail at Ole Bull State Park and then headed back to Hyner Run State Park to start the trip. I of course managed to forget to bring some of my food so we had to stop at a grocery store during the car shuttle so I could pick up some more fixin's for Gorp. The trip started out well during the first part of day 1. A short ways into it we came to this area where they were trying to reclaim the field into a forest. They had planted thousands of small trees in order to do this. But apparently the deer would eat the small trees before they could get established. So they put these plastic sleeves (they looked like condoms) around each and every tree to protect them. It looked really weird and for awhile all you could see was yellow things sticking up out of the ground. It had to have taken an incredible amount of time to do it all. We got to the first potential campsite at 8 miles and decided to keep going as the site was anything but level. The promise of excellent campsites yet to come was too alluring. Well after 12 miles and an uphill we shouldn't have reached, we realized that the excellent campsites that were there a few short weeks ago were pretty much over grown. So we went back, found the flattest site we could and plunked down. As I was setting up camp I started wondering why my legs were starting to burn. It turns out that our nice fluffy campsite was over grown with stinging nettles. I put on my pants legs, our excellent leaders Brad and Beth brought out the wine and cheese hour, and everything was OK from then on. Day 2 had us only needing to cover 6 miles to get to our next campsite. It was a very leisurely morning followed by a very leisurely hike to our campsite. John wasn't feeling good so the leisurely pace worked out well. It had rained overnight so we set all of our stuff out in the sun to dry. While we are lounging around, John says he's really not feeling very good and proceeds to get sick. We're not really sure what was wrong with him but it had all the symptoms of food poisoning. My thinking is that he somehow contaminated his water the night before and ingested some ugly bug from the river. We set up his tent for him and he crawled in there to "die" while we had the wine and cheese hour part two. Day 3 had us with a short 5 miles and a big hill to get back to our cars. Whatever had infected John had been purged (literally) and he was ready to go. The hike back gave us our only really good scenic view of the trip so we stopped for a picture. Back at the cars we caught a shower for a couple of bucks and then our excellent leaders laid out a spread of snack stuff and beer. Oh my goodness did I pig out on some excellent snacks and ice cold beer! This was definitely a great thing for the leaders to do and was much appreciated. Overall the trip was fun. The trail was pretty non-descript without a whole lot of significant features.

Somebody spent a ton of time planting all these trees and putting the plastic things around them.	These things were literally everywhere
A close up shot of one of the trees growing up through the plastic.	This was our tent site the first night. Seemed like a good spot until you realized that it was in a huge patch of stinging nettles.
Trail sign as we exited Spook Hollow. It actually was pretty spooky.	Group photo at the only overlook. This is within shouting distance of Ole Bull SP and the end of the trail.

Donut Hole / Susquehannock Trail Map - Hyner Run SP to Ole Bull SP

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