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The Rhythm of the Path

The Rhythm of the Path

Last updated on: August 31, 2026 at 9:34 pm by Rob Giannamore

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The Rhythm of the Path 2026-08-31T21:34:10-04:00 Rob Giannamore

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The Art of Backpacking

It was several years in the making, but two weekends ago, I finally took a small group from my private counseling practice backpacking. We had two clients, my boss, and a second staff member accompanying me on a roughly 26-mile backpacking trip at Oil Creek State Park. Wilderness therapy was all the rage back in the day and is still popular through programs like Outward Bound. However, many of these programs have used questionable and, at times, unethical or even criminal practices. These concerns were heavy on my mind as I began planning this expedition years ago. One of my previous coworkers took a group to the Boundary Waters a few years ago, and I’ve wanted to run a program like this ever since.

This trip would bookend my season. I started my backpacking season with a shakeout hike of a little over 30 miles in April with my wife at Oil Creek State Park. There, we retraced our first steps as a couple on a backpacking trip we took there in college.

Everyone arrived at our office Thursday afternoon, and after a brief shakeout, we traveled to Petroleum Center to start. The shakeout did not entirely go as planned. My boss jokingly said prior to the meeting that she had a fifty-pound pack. When she arrived, she literally had a fifty-pound pack and was squirrely about me going through it. Me being the kind of person that will let one fafo, I let her do so and after our first 5.6 miles on Thursday, she was hurting. Today’s lesson was beginning to dawn on her, don’t pack your fears.

On Friday, she managed around 4 miles before I had someone in our group take her pack and exchange it to lighten her load. Much laughter and good fun abounded around my boss’s big pack. We would arrive at camp, after a 12 ish mile day, tired but in good spirits. My wife and another friend of my boss met us at our camp with trail magic (hot dogs, cookies, potato salad, fruit and sodas) and made for a great end to a big day. My boss did go rogue for about 45 minutes before joining us for dinner, she was definitely feeling the trail. When she finally joined us, she came to dinner with about 20lbs of her backpack to give to my wife to take out of the trail. She decided she was not carrying all that stuff for the last day. Her pack still weighed around 30 pounds on Saturday.

Saturday, our last day saw us completing around 7ish miles to finish the trip. Celebrating our success, we headed into town to grab some real food, pee over water and tell stories about the trip.

It was an amazing experience and went off well some lots of room for improvement.

We fear more in our mind than our reality

Lessons Learned from the Season

I have been slowly transitioning away from ultra-distance running and realizing that even shorter stuff is hard on me, endurance running. I decided that this season was going to be devoted to backpacking. I would complete three sections of the Appalachian Trail this year. I completed the southern New York section on a rainy Memorial Day Weekend; I did the Triple Crown in Virginia in June with my daughter and did the northern 30-ish miles of the New Jersey Section with my wife in July. I would also complete two backpacking trips at Oil Creek State Park and several section hikes on the North Country Trail, totaling 237.5 miles as of today. Over 125 of those miles were backpacking miles. I made a small attempt at a bikepacking trip a few weeks ago, but it fell apart because I wasn’t ready and had a wardrobe malfunction/equipment failure.

The main lesson I learned this year was be flexible. The weather has been awful this year. I had torrential rain on the second day of my New York trip, and a lack of water derailed plans both in June and July. Hiking with my wife and hiking with some of my staff last weekend also showed me that I need to tap more into my beginner mind. What seems like an easy hike to me is or can be infinitely more difficult for others. This really bore itself out not only in this weekend’s hike but also my hike with my wife in New Jersey. Originally planned as a thru-hike of the state, I decided to do half because of my wife’s lack of readiness and my concern for her safety. This turned out to be a good call.

I also really nailed nutrition and found equipment that really worked for me.

Prayer and Mindful Walking

In a previous post a couple of weeks ago, I offered these thoughts: “Backpacking is a different kind of fun, Type II fun mostly, especially as I have found in New York, Pennsylvania, and now, New Jersey. If I think about it too much, I find myself getting annoyed at the trail planners, the rocks and generally everything. If, however, one can see that there is a rhythm to the movement, it all becomes very contemplative.”

I am preaching on lament this morning, and a line from my message reflecting on the story of David mourning the loss of Jonathan talks about the loneliness and solitude that come with it. Leaving the business of the world and stepping onto the trail for several days has similar feelings. There is for me a profound awakening as I watch my ride leave and know it is now up to me to figure things out (of course I can always call said ride to pick me up if things go sideways – and this is where we learn to lean into God, but that is a topic for another post). The awareness of loneliness and the cutting of the umbilical cord to the organized world I left back home can be very anxiety-provoking. But, turning to prayer and mindful walking, I find my way.

When focusing on the rhythm of the path, I am also reminded of another post I wrote a while back where I reflect on prayer as the rhythm of life. Here I offer that we need to “embrace the rhythm of prayer as a vibrant source of life, not merely a duty. As my daughter often says, “it is not that deep”; keep it simple, just talk to God. God is forever present in every moment of our lives. We must step into ongoing, honest, and grateful dialogue with God—allowing prayer to transform our days and deepen our spiritual walk.”

The Lesson I am Learning

I can’t say that I have fully transitioned, but I feel that I have definitely closed the chapter on running ultras. I turn 50 next year, and for a while, I mulled turning on the training machine and training for the JFK 50 miler, a historic 50-mile race in Maryland next November. Whatever COVID did to my endurance, though, has made me realize I really don’t want to suffer through 50-mile weeks and multiple 8+ hour-long runs to get ready. The brain fog and fatigue make other projects too taxing. For now, smaller park races and approachable half marathons scratch the running itch for me. Focusing on longer bike packing and backpacking seems to be the chapter going into my fifties.

I think ultimately I learned how to live and fall in love again with my wife (not that we ever fell out of love). Learning how to have an adult parent relationship with my adult children. And learning to say goodbye to my youth and learn how to say hello to elderhood if I am granted permission to be seen as an elder by the younger folks.

Putting the Gear Away and Looking Ahead

Last week, I came home, and my wife had nicely organized all our camping gear, which at some point throughout the season had been strewn about our front room in various stages of being packed or repacked. There was a joy in seeing it all put away neatly, and a melancholic bitterness in knowing the season was over.

While things are put away now, plans are either set or in the works for next year’s adventures.

On tap is for me to finish the New Jersey Section of the Appalachian Trail over the Memorial Day holiday. This will be a shakeout hike for my thru-hike of the Laurel Highlands Hiking Trail (LHHT) in June. August is a big hiking trip to the Adirondacks High Peaks region to celebrate my 50th birthday. We are more than likely going to vacation as a family in Rhode Island next year. I would like to throw in a couple of bike packs in the mix somewhere. I will keep my running to shorter park runs. The path goes on for a little while longer. Unaware of the days ahead, all we can do is just live and live for the moment.

It has not looked this neat since May

As an addendum to this post, I want to share the thoughts of one of the participants in our office hike. Stephanie Schneider offered these thoughts from her hike at Oil Creek State Park:

O U T D O O R TH ER A P U T I C A C T I V I T I ES : N O T ES F R O M T H E O I L C R EE K A D V EN T U R E

August 2026
Distance = 26.5 miles
Duration = 2 nights and 3 days

Oil Creek is unusually rewarding because it is not just a forest with a creek running through it. It is a deeply dissected stream valley, a meeting place between glacial and nonglacial landscape history, a riparian migration corridor, a cold-water tributary network, a recovering nineteenth-
century industrial landscape, and a mosaic of hemlock ravines, oak-maple woods, wetlands, old fields, floodplain, and former oil settlements. DCNR describes the roughly 7,244-acre park as a landscape of deep hollows, steep hillsides and wetlands; its own bird inventory further distinguishes deciduous lowlands, steep hemlock ravines, brushy fields and thickets, mixed oak- maple forest, cattail wetlands, and about 12 miles of Oil Creek. [1]

T H E L A N D S C A P E B E N E A T H E V E R Y T H I N G Y O U S E E

Oil Creek belongs broadly to Pennsylvania’s Appalachian Plateau landscape, but the ecologically important detail is the transition from glacially modified headwaters to a deeply incised downstream valley. The Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program describes an especially interesting piece of drainage history around the East Branch: before the last glacial episode, drainage north of Titusville flowed toward Lake Erie through the Muddy Creek system while streams to the south flowed toward the Allegheny. Glacial blockage and subsequent drainage rearrangement produced the modern Oil Creek headwater configuration around Lake Canadohta. The result is a watershed whose present biological connections are partly products of relatively recent geological history. [2] The rocks visible in the Oil Creek valley are overwhelmingly siliciclastic sedimentary rocks rather than limestone. Pennsylvania Geological Survey work describes exposed strata ranging from the Lower Mississippian Corry Sandstone down through Upper Devonian units including the Riceville Formation. Beneath these are shale, siltstone and sandstone of the Venango Group; porous sandstone bodies became the famous shallow petroleum reservoirs. That geology is one reason Oil Creek is a landscape of steep eroded hollows, sandstone ledges, groundwater seeps and acidic-to-mesic forest soils rather than a classic limestone-rich wildflower landscape. [3] Natural petroleum was part of the ecosystem long before commercial drilling. Oil seeps and springs gave Oil Creek its name, and Pennsylvania’s Geological Survey notes that Indigenous people used crude oil from seeps along Oil Creek centuries before industrial extraction. Many of the historically conspicuous seeps later diminished as thousands of wells reduced pressure in the shallow reservoirs. [4]

BIRDS

Woodland Songbirds

- Eastern Wood-Pewee
- Red-eyed Vireo
- Blue-headed Vireo
- Hooded Warbler
- Black-capped Chickadee
- White-breasted Nuthatch
- Brown Creeper

Woodpeckers

- Pileated Woodpecker
- Red-bellied Woodpecker
- Northern Flicker

Common Large Songbirds

- Blue Jay
- American Crow
- American Robin
- Northern Cardinal
- Gray Catbird

Open-Area & Fruit/Seed Birds

- American Goldfinch
- Eastern Bluebird
- Cedar Waxwing

MUSHROOMS

Chanterelles & relatives — Order Cantharellales

- Chanterelles — Cantharellus spp.
  - Usually edible, but only after confident identification

Gilled mushrooms — Order Agaricales

- Amanitas — Amanita spp. — some deadly
- Waxcaps — Hygrocybe and relatives — mixed/uncertain edibility
- Oyster mushrooms — Pleurotus spp. — edible when correctly identified
- Jack-o’-Lantern — Omphalotus illudens — toxic, bioluminescent
- Honey mushrooms — Armillaria spp. — edible with caution
- Ramariopsis — small coral fungi — generally not recommended
- Golden spindles — Clavulinopsis spp. — generally not recommended
- Puffballs — several genera — some edible when young, but dangerous lookalikes exist

Boletes — Order Boletales

- Old Man of the Woods — Strobilomyces
- Boletes — many genera
  - Some boletes are excellent edible mushrooms; others are bitter or toxic

Jelly fungi — Order Auriculariales

- Jelly tooth — Pseudohydnum gelatinosum
  - Gelatinous fungus with little “teeth” underneath
  - Sometimes listed as edible but not especially desirable

Coral fungi — Order Gomphales

- Phaeoclavulina myceliosa
  - Branched, coral-like mushroom
  - Edibility uncertain/not recommended

Shelf & bracket fungi — mostly Order Polyporales

- Chicken of the Woods — Laetiporus spp. — edible with caution
- Hemlock varnish shelf — Ganoderma tsugae — too woody to eat normally
- Turkey tail — Trametes versicolor — too tough to eat normally
- Bracket fungi — many different species; most are woody