Day 12: The 501

Just as about every entry in every trail register leading up to Pine Grove Furnace is all about the half gallon challenge and ice cream, a ton of entries before the 501 shelter sing the glories of pizza.

That's because the 501 is one of the very few shelters where you can order pizza and they'll deliver it to the shelter.

However, I started noticing things were amiss when I arrived there, after a 17.4 mile hike, and found that I was only the third person signing the register. There was a phone number for the pizza place on the page. Mississippi, who arrived earlier, had written it there. There was a sign on the wall about how hikers can no longer order pizza to the shelter.

Rubbish.



T-Suds, Mississippi and Goof, the 501. A pizza for each hiker.

A small group of Eagle scouts and their two scoutmasters arrived, as did Mr. Buffalo Man.

We were sitting there talking and eating when a man who identified himself as the shelter's caretaker strode into camp wearing camo pants. He launched into a spiel about how the National Park Service forbids him from selling items to hikers, and that somehow had something to do with hikers not being able to have pizza delivered directly to the shelter or dispose of the boxes afterwards. He told us we would have to pack out the trash, and that he had removed trash bins because people had left boxes out.

He also said he'd been removing pages from the trail register that have numbers for the pizza places on them. When Mississippi asked if he could see previous entries in case friends had left messages for him, the caretaker said, all insouciance, "I'm not going to give it to ya."

I still can't tell if he was pissed at some truly bad seeds that came before us or if he was itching for a fight with Uncle Sam over his vending rights. Regardless, I've heard that the pizza fest continues to this day. I burned up my pizza box at the next campsite on the trail the next morning.