Pennsylvania’s Endless Mountains

We can confirm with 100% certainty that the Endless Mountains of Pennsylvania are indeed endless. Endlessly hilly, endlessly challenging, but also endlessly picturesque and endlessly fascinating.

Our original plan was to try and tackle a 250 miles route with about 25,000 feet of climbing in a week.

But we had second and third thoughts after the first big day of 40+ miles with over 3,000 feet of climbing in unseasonable 90F heat, with bags burdened with camping gear, several days of food, and more enthusiasm than fitness. We joked that the roads were laid out before the invention of the switchback because they would point straight up a hill – even if that meant absurd gradients.

So we reset our expectations and our route for shorter days, with more time to stop and appreciate the beautiful, rolling landscape that we were bikepacking through. We unfortunately had to cut a lot of the gravel out of the plan (the original plan had 45% gravel) but we did get some time on the gravel farm roads and other tracks that criss cross the region.

Native American tribes have called the Endless Mountains home since pre-historic times. The Munsee-Lenape, Susquehannock, and Iroquois all called this place home. Unfortunately, very little remains of their time here, just the influence on the place names.

It’s a beautiful, rugged land, a dissected plateau that was once broad plane but over the millennia has been worn away by rain and weather until deep valleys are carved out of the firmament. We followed creeks and streams through quiet valleys, saw roadside waterfalls on climbs, and wet our feet in the Loyalsock Creek at World’s End State Park.

The Endless Mountains are about three hours from New York City by car, but otherwise a world away. And unlike the Catskills and the Hudson River Valley, there doesn’t seem to be any New York vibe from people who left the city during COVID and never returned. The region is surprisingly remote. Outside of the small towns, much of the land is state forest or state game land, restricting development. The place must be popular with hunters; we passed by many hunting cabins.

We’re proud that our GenX bodies can still do this stuff though, letting us pedal to beautiful and quiet and peaceful places. With rain in the forecast, we cut the trip short by a day but we’ll carry memories of this trip with us for years to come.

On a technical note, A. was riding a Surly Ogre with Ortlieb fork mount packs and Arkel bikepacking panniers on an Old Man Mountain rack. She also had a Rockgeist frame bag and a couple of Chrome feed bags. I was riding a Bike Friday All-Packa with the same Ortlieb fork mount packs on the front, Arkel panniers on the rear, a Take A Trip frame bag, and an Ortlieb seatbag. An odd couple for sure, but one that gets along fabulously on trips like this.

We carried several days of food. It was heavy but on many of the days, the only re-supply options were gas stations. And we topped off our water bottles every chance we got, but there was a day where we had to treat stream water because the two restaurants on our route were closed.