A Sad Day when the AT Eckville Shelter is No Longer

I remember when I received the phone call from Len Reed, the president of the Blue Mountain Climbing Club, asking if Todd and I wanted to be caretakers on a newly acquired property that the national park service had just purchased. At the time, we were living in a 500 sq. ft. cabin outside Kutztown with no running water or central heat. We didn’t mind, we were long distance backpackers,  and we knew how to live without creature comforts. Todd and I were in the process of building a handmade log home on a 12 acre plot that we purchased on the Schuylkill side of Hawk Mountain. Living at the park service property rent free, in exchange for converting one of the out buildings into a shelter hostel for long distance backpackers, seemed like a dream come true. Todd watched me as I talked to Len with big wide eyes and an open mouth like I was in shock. What a stroke of good fortune. The property was located right on the other side of the mountain from our land and would enable us to build while we were living rent-free and save money and have a very short commute to the building site. We would also stay closely connected to the long distance hiking community which had become our tribe after we both completed the entire 2,100 mile Appalachian and the 2,600-mile Pacific Crest National Scenic Trails. We were thrilled!

It wasn’t like we were living in a high rent cabin when we received the phone call. We only paid $50 a month for the tiny place outside Kutztown. We laughed and said we thought $50 a month was too high so we looked for a place for free! Of course, at that time, the Eckville house also did not contain plumbing nor central heat but like I said, we knew how to do it. 

The “bathroom” was an outhouse, located on the other side of Hawk Mountain’s road. It was sometimes inconvenient to do #2 in all types of weather at all hours of the day, and I once got knocked off by a speeding cyclist who made no sound as he raced down the mountain and nearly ran me over. We kept a portable potty upstairs by our bedroom whose contents used to freeze in the night, that’s how cold it would get. Todd and I loved winter camping before this but decided we lived with those conditions in our home and stopped winter camping. We had had enough.

We ran the hostel for three summers while we built our log home. We purchased half gallons of ice cream and soda and sold it to the hikers. We put up a solar shower for us and the hikers and bathed after we spent the day building. We hosted about a few hundred hikers a year and enjoyed the early ones, the late ones and the southbound hikers the best as they were not into partying and embedded in the wave or hiking bubble. Over the few years that we ran the hostel, we made some good friends that have been in our lives for decades. 

We left The Eckville Shelter in 1989 when we moved into our own log home. The Blue Mountain Climbing Club put a bunch of money into the home, insulating and plumbing it, making it quite comfortable, and the elders of the club did all the work! The caretaking job was handed to Mick Charowsky and he has been the caretaker for decades. It has been a haven for hikers to avoid bad weather and take a break from the rocks and the hardship of their long distance hike and it will be a sad day when that roof and refuge is no longer there. The National Park Service plans to demolish the shelter and the house next year and folks who love the place are trying to draw awareness to it and somehow save it.

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