Passing over the Lehigh River, our departure from Sayre Mansion in Bethlehem is accompanied by the whistle and clacking wheels of an empty freight train below. Another cloudy day greets us for our 40 mile trip to Jim Thorpe, the area where anthracite coal was discovered in the 1800s. The morning ride along side the Lehigh River is quiet though freight trains slowly creep along an adjacent track while a lone fisherman casts for fish next to a stand of Joe-Pye weed.
Today is more buggy than the prior days making us not want to linger when we stop. While there are many wildflowers about, large numbers of flowering hostas line the canal mysteriously in a place they should not be.
Cresting our first big hill in Allentown, we are afforded a lovely panoramic view of the old industrial city. Small buildings are spread on the other side of the river as far as the eye can see. Coasting down the hill, we are forced to take a 5 mile detour through residential and business neighborhoods. The roads are sparsely travelled and we soon find our way back to the D&L trail, which is no longer along the Lehigh Canal but is across the river following an old railroad bed.
This part of the trail is superb in both condition and ambiance, which may be why we see more bicyclists in an hour than we have for the last 2.5 days. The Lehigh River is on our right and carved out dark cliffs of shale rise on our left composed of countess thin wafers stacked onto each other. Piles of razor sharp pieces having the appearance and texture of tree bark rest at their base.
The rail trail is a bit steeper than that of the canal trail and as we push on, a concrete phone booth used by railway workers suddenly appears. It no longer has a phone but seems to be recently painted.
For the first time on our trip, it feels as if we are entering an area of untouched wilderness (though that can’t be true given its industrial past). Unlike our prior miles, invasive foreign plants are hard to find as our sides are flanked with many species of native trees and shrubs. In less than a minute’s pedal I pass white, black and yellow birch trees nestled within a collection of red and black chokeberry bushes. A lone monstrous mushroom appears, attached to a rotting log.
But the most spectacular sight are walls of native Rosebay rhododendrons (appropriately named Rhododendron maximum in Latin). Their white and pale pink flowers appear as would slightly lit Christmas decorations. These massive evergreen bushes blanket the steep rocky cliffs with their roots anchoring themselves in crevasses and spots having thin layers of soil.
Stopping for lunch in Slatington, appropriately named, we fix our first flat of the trip not of our misfortune but that of a fellow cyclist who did not have a patch kit. We hope the good karma will travel with us for the remainder of our ride and minimize mishaps.
After lunch we enter new terrain as the foothills of the Pocono mountains emerge. They are full of randomly shaped and placed boulders and rocks appearing on increasingly large and steep hillsides. Some areas of the trail are protected by steel mesh fencing to prevent accidents.
We come across another expanse of native rhododendrons that is even more spectacular than before. The temperature suddenly drops by at least 10 degrees as we pedal through a green grotto with the river to our immediate right and a soaring wall of plants to our left.
Crossing over the Lehigh River, we rejoin the Lehigh Canal for our final few miles to Jim Thorpe, where we will sleep for the next few nights. The trail is more familiar, being more narrow and less maintained than what we have just been on. And like other sections of our trip, the canal fills and then empties of water leaving a ditch of plants and occasional pieces of trash.
But the difference is that we are next to a river that appears wilder and more narrow than what we are used to. It has carved out an undulating path between the hills and mountains that we will travel toward tomorrow.
