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Lost the trail near sunset on the Appalachian in Pennsylvania
I was hiking a section near the Lehigh Gap around 4 PM and the blazed markers just vanished. Turns out I missed a turn where the trail goes over bare rock and the spray paint was totally faded. I spent 45 minutes scrambling in the wrong direction before I pulled out my phone and checked the offline map. Has anyone else run into bad trail markings on that section or is it just me?
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ruby_lane2mo ago
Trail markers disappearing on the bare rock section, that's like the trail playing a really mean game of hide and seek. Who thought faded spray paint from 1987 was good enough for a major thru-hike route? I probably would have ended up in New Jersey before I admitted I was lost. Next time I'm packing a roll of bright duct tape to leave my own breadcrumb trail because apparently the official ones can't be trusted.
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the_julia1mo ago
My buddy Mark actually had this exact same problem two years ago in the same spot. He was hiking with his girlfriend and they spent over an hour going in circles on that big slab of rock before a local trail runner found them and pointed out the faded marker hidden behind a bush. @ruby_lane is dead on about the ice climbers messing things up, that section gets hammered every winter. Mark swore he saw a fleck of old paint on a rock that looked like it was from the 80s, maybe even older than that. He now carries a tiny orange flagging tape in his pack and says it saved him twice since then on other less traveled trails. The whole experience made him really paranoid about checking his GPS every ten minutes on rocky sections now.
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