Trail Blazers
While you may not be ready to hike all 2,179 miles of the Appalachian Trail, you can still interact with others who’ve made this their personal quest. The Appalachian Trail Museum, which opened in June 2010, makes this possible. Housed in a 200-year-old former grist mill located in Gardners, Pennsylvania — only two miles from the halfway point along the trail — the museum pays tribute to pioneer trail builders like Grandma Gatewood, Gene Espy, Ed Garvey and the legendary Earl Shaffer, the first person to thru-hike the entire trail. In addition to the exhibits, the thru-hiker photo display features 13,000 photos of 18,000 individual hikers.
A thru-hiker lounge is designed so that current long-distance hikers can mingle with visitors, sharing their trail stories on a firsthand basis. The museum also includes the Children’s Discovery Area, a kid-sized shelter where, among other things, kids hear the story of Ziggy and the Geek, a hiker who found a kitten on the Mississippi River and kept it with him throughout his entire hike.
Perhaps best of all, the museum is located inside the 696-acre Pine Grove Furnace State Park, which offers plenty of outdoor activities throughout the fall and winter months. Laurel Lake and Fuller Lake are great for swimming, fishing and boating during the warm-weather months and ice fishing in the winter. When the snow falls, bring your cross-country skis and snowmobile for some winter-weather fun. Conveniently located in south-central Pennsylvania, the park has 70 tent and trailer sites.
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