Map book — This is a PDF copy (13.8 MB) of the very detailed maps and route description we used to make the trip. I also had the route highlighted in yellow, but I did that by hand after I made the printouts. The scale can be wildly inconsistent between pages, starting with Map 5.

It Begins

Brewer, Rebecca, Eight (Philip), Dan, and I met at Rebecca's house on Wilkins for breakfast at 6 a.m. — I got up at 5:15 to take a shower and get my backpack together for the trip, and then biked down there. Aside from eating banana bread and Cream of Wheat, we were able to collect any last-minute necessities and make sure everything was in order. I distributed my map booklets — packets of 10 maps, with route highlighted in yellow and written instructions given at the bottom of each page — and there was a general exchanging of useful phone numbers. After finally sorting out the food and such, we left Rebecca's at 7:11 a.m. and headed down Wilkins to Fifth Avenue, each carrying a backpack and water. Just past Morewood we came across some sort of road-construction implement that had been parked in the curb lane; it had a Pennsylvania license plate on it with the category "special mobile." The walk through Oakland, at that time of morning, was pretty quiet: I'm not even sure if we passed any buses on Fifth Avenue.

We crossed the Birmingham Bridge into the South Side at 7:58. I had never walked across the bridge before. It's a very imposing but airy structure: lots of weblike steelwork over the top of the road, made out of thin bars with lots of space between. The bridge didn't have a sidewalk, so we were forced to walk in the shoulder on the left-hand side of the road. We got used to that mode of transit for most of the trip.

I'd only passed through the South Side (further east) once on my bike, so I had no clue that it was such a long distance along Carson Street from the Birmingham Bridge to the end of Mount Washington — in fact, I never considered the possibility of the mountain having an end and us walking around it, which is what we did, instead of having to take a road up it. At 8:55 we passed the Duquesne Incline, putting it roughly five miles from our start, and a little bit after that found the road going up into a freeway-style intersection with green signs with arrows over the lanes. We got ourselves onto the first Main Street of the day, then onto Wabash Street (9:14 a.m.) in the middle of West End Valley. It didn't feel at all like Pittsburgh. With Mount Washington on one side and a similar hill on the other, I felt like we were suddenly in a small town miles out into the country. The buildings were run down enough to complete the impression.

Kearns "Avenue" turned out to be a one-lane back road going up a hill; even after it had been a single lane for a while we found one of those "Road Narrows" signs. It also had a "Road Closed" sign, which we ignored. A little way up Kearns we called our first major stop, going up a convenient gravel driveway a bit so we could sit down in the shade for perhaps 20 minutes and eat some trail mix. It was also starting to get warm and less cloudy, so we put on sunscreen as well. After taking up the trail again, we found out why the road had been closed: at the end of a longish straightaway, a section of the road bordering a ravine had eroded away and broken off from the rest of the asphalt. Near the end of the road we ran into the back end of a housing development, where we saw the first of many new subdivisions under construction.

We hit Poplar Street, on the border of the suburb of Green Tree, at 10:05, and shortly picked up Noblestown Road, our major artery for a good chunk of the trip. The talk, which all the way down Kearns had centered around backpacking and previous trips various of us had taken, changed to farmers' markets and Pittsburgh when we noticed we were back on a bus line. In Carnegie it was politics, as we walked through an area of old houses and slighlty crumbling shops near Main and Chestnut (reached at 10:48, so probably right around the 10-mile mark). More "downtown" Carnegie looked like it had undergone some kind of revitalization effort, and there was also a little train station even though it doesn't look like the T goes anywhere near Carnegie. We stopped for a few minutes while Eight made a phone call to Ross, who was planning on meeting up with us on his bike to see how we were doing and to bring fresh supplies if necessary.

Out of the City

From that point on we found ourselves mostly without a specific place to walk, so we ended up on the left shoulder of Noblestown Road heading out of Carnegie, which at that point is what people used to call a four-lane highway, even though I usually only note this word as a synonym of "freeway." The whatever-it-was went across a valley, at the bottom of which was a small creek with the remains of at least three cars (or parts thereof) visible in it. I don't recall the terrain being especially hilly until we turned off Noblestown onto Walkers Mill Road, which was a whole lot of going up. Eight said he preferred going uphill because it didn't hurt as much; by then I was feeling about the same as I did on our Smoky Mountains backpacking trip last year. We crossed a suburban bike trail somewhere in there, but I didn't mark the exact location on the map.

Six minutes after noon we turned onto Hilltop Road, looking for all the world like Hinckley, Ohio. Like in Hinckley, the most depressing thing about our 28-minute walk along Hilltop was the amount of construction going on — not even resonsible construction, which I'd be OK with, but hideous developments of sprawling mansions and signs like "Walkers Ridge: Luxury Carriage Homes." Some time before Oakdale we came across some middle-aged houses dotting a wonderful valley where you could see for miles and miles. There were a number of smaller hills stretching away to the south, and a progression of high-voltage towers ran way off into the distance. At first I thought they were ruining the scene, but after Brewer pointed out their interesting perspective I changed my mind. They kind of looked like what you might get by putting one tower between two mirrors and then looking into one of them.

Ross finally caught up with us when we were less than a mile from Oakdale. He had come from his apartment by way of the Strip District and the West End Bridge, and had measured 17 or 18 miles on his bike odometer before the cable somehow got between the front wheel and the brake and was scraped. Based on where he said it happened and the differences between his route and ours, we decided to call Oakdale the 20-mile mark. Just inside the town we crossed another bike path, which based on the map I decided was probably the same one we'd passed before. (Ross later confirmed this.) We reached the center of town at 1:08 p.m. and proceeded at once to the Oakdale Diner, the only restaurant in view. The place bills itself as the "Original Rail Car Diner" or something like that, and I definitely felt that we were out of place among the regulars sitting at the counter talking about their doctors and the teenage waitress who came over to take care of us. After we'd ordered, Dan asked me how many copy editing mistakes I'd noticed in the menu (he found six), so Rebecca and I started going over it line by line. There were definitely a lot more than six, ranging from inconsistent capitalization to missing punctuation and misspelled words. That kept us busy until the food came.

Ross wasn't quite sure about biking 20 hilly miles back home, so asked the diner people about getting a bus back to Pittsburgh — they said it didn't run on the weekends. So back by bike it was; later he called to say he probably wouldn't be able to pick us the rest of us in his car at the end of the trip because he'd had a flat on his bike and was spending time fixing it.

After lunch, which contained way more food than we could eat, we moved our home base to the gazebo at the town's central intersection and started getting ready for the afternoon. Eight discovered that he'd been walking the wrong way for 20 miles because his toenails weren't cut and he'd laced his boots up too far, and the rest of us applied sunscreen to our skin and duct tape to the pre-blister spots on our feet. Around 2:25, with a fresh load of water, the five of us continued westward on foot.

Town to Town

I had a bit of trouble getting going again after eating a fish sandwich at lunch. Physically I felt better, especially down at my feet, but I had to wait for the food to get through my system a bit before walking got comfortable again. I remember a pretty consistent density of houses and things between Oakdale and McDonald, with scads of people passing us on motorcycles in both directions. At this point we must have at least reached the predicted high of 78° for the day and it was quite sunny; Dan and I had both taken off our shirts to match the example Brewer had been setting since before the Birmingham Bridge, and I started to regret having replaced my water supply with a full glass of pink lemonade from the diner.

In McDonald, maybe 22 or 23 miles out, there was a wedding just ending at a little church on the main street. I started thinking about the interesting momentary intersection between their lives and ours. Imagine the couple, 40 years from now and in their mid-60s or whatever, at home one evening: "Forty years, dear. Do you remember our wedding day?" —"Oh yes, honey. It was such a beautiful day. Blue sky, white clouds..." —"Yeah. Look, here's that old picture of us on the front steps of the church. Saint What's-his-name's." And all the time not suspecting one bit that there were some extra people around that day, or that if the photographer's camera had been rotated 180 degrees at that instant it would have captured, on the other side of the street, five Pittsburgh college students with backpacks on their merry way to West Virigina by foot.

Just past the intersection of Noblestown Road and Route 980, a mile or two outside of McDonald, we passed another bike trail. Some of these may be worth exploring some day, because the country out that way is pretty nice for long bike rides. I was starting to list myself as "condition deteriorating" at this point: the bottoms of my feet were getting extremely sick of being landed on, and the point of my left hip started to complain about that joint rotating back and forth so much. After 25 miles we passed a place called Green's Taxi Service, and Rebecca and Eight asked me to write down its number on my map in case we needed it further on. Dan asked for a rest stop, which I was completely in agreement with, so we flopped down in the shade several meters past the taxi place. (It shared a building with an emergency ambulance service, and the rest of us felt weird about camping out on the doorstep of the ambulance garage.)

I don't think I felt much better physically when we got going again. My left hip was still bothering me, and my right foot was disagreeing with its sock over how the sock, little toe, and end of the shoe should fit together. I think our overall pace took a noticible slowdown at that point, so I started counting on only two miles per hour instead of three when figuring distance. We hit the center of Midway (27 miles?) at 4:52 and stopped at a convenience store for Dan to buy water. I should have done the same, since I was running low on pink lemonade and wanted something less sugary, but my conscience decided it didn't want to pay for something that you should be able to get for free. Dan's excellent logic, that having the bottle of water provided him with more usefulness just then than having the $1 or $2 it costs, didn't prevail upon me until later.

We dragged ourselves slowly out of Midway and started thinking about how the end of the trip would play out. The group decision was that we were still physically able to continue, but would be in need of a long rest and food stop before we could properly evaluate how much we wanted to cross the deserted wilderness of Map 9 and make it to the border. We decided to have dinner at the next town, so "Burgettstown by 7:00" became our motto.

During the entire trip we'd kept almost the exact same ordering of people: Brewer, Rebecca, and Eight all walking in a clump up front, then Dan and me either walking side-by-side or swapping each other out at fourth and fifth place. Sidewalks and country-road shoulders, we found, are just about wide enough for two people; at several points early on I was wishing that there had been six of us to make the conversations easier, but eventually people didn't feel like talking so much. That was especially true about Dan and me after Midway. I ended up going fourth, and as we walked I'd get further and further behind the front clot, and Dan would get further and further behind me, until either the two of us would jog to catch up or the front three would stop and wait. Jogging actually feels amazingly good when you've been walking for dozens of miles!

On one of the catch-up stages Dan called a halt. We were walking past a bit of a field with a steep ditch between it and the road, and we plopped straight down in the grass on the sloped edge of the ditch. I changed my socks and ate a few granola bars. We were making excruciatingly slow progress towards our dinner stop, even though Philip said our pace wasn't changing. We kept passing these little white numbered signs along the edge of the road; they were counting down by tens, and apparently we were passing them exactly 10 minutes apart by Philip's watch. When we got going again from our stop, we revised the estimate to "Burgettstown by 7:30."

The stretch between the not-quite-towns of Bulger and Joffre was the slowest going of all — it took us just over an hour to get between the two. Fortunately, by then it was past 6:00, and after a whole lot of old people in cars passed us (probably going to 6 p.m. mass at St. Ann's in Bulger) the traffic died down a lot. We reached Joffre at 6:39; after that, I stopped keeping track of the times on my map and put effort just into shuffling one foot in front of the other.

Spectacles of Ourselves

Before I finish off this account, I want to give some kind of idea about how we were received during our all-day trek. I guess it was on the far side of Carnegie that people started noticing us. Some construction was in progress on Noblestown Road at the interchange with I-79; as we walked past the flagger guy holding the reversible "Slow"/"Stop" sign, he said "Out for a little hike?" We smiled and said yes, but after we'd gone on a bit I remarked that we put quotes around "little." A bit later on, either on Walkers Mill or Hilltop Road, I'd taken off my shirt and was redistributing weight for a bit by wearing my backpack on front. We went through another construction spot, and the flagger there said something that sounded like "That's a thing you wear on your back." I don't think any of us parsed it correctly; Brewer smiled and said "Yep, it is" as if answering a remark about the weather, and we moved on. Several people we passed in the towns from Oakdale onward did make remarks about the nicness of the day and so on, which we returned in due course. Also a number of waves exchanged with people sitting on porches, working in back yards, etc.

We seemed to draw particular reaction from people in cars. We got a whole lot of friendly taps of the horn, it seemed, and a lot of younger people somehow felt the need to stick a thumbs-up, two fingers, or ASL "Y" out of the window and yell something like "Whooo!" or "Yeaaaah!" Whether this was legitimate cheering on or facetious mocking I couldn't say, but I lean towards the latter. It reminded me of those people in middle school who used to make fun of you by pretending to be congratulatory but were really just amusing themselves. Some really weird people were so moved at the sight of us that they felt the urge to yell out something like "F—in' hobos!" or "Dirty hippies!" (We had one of each.) In accordance with traffic laws we were walking along the road's left shoulder when there wasn't a sidewalk; all the same, somewhere between Oakdale and Midway someone decided to lay on the horn for several seconds as they passed us. To round things out, Rebecca and I each got hit by a lit cigarette being tossed out of a car window.

Burgettstown

The big sweeping curve that Joffre Bulger Road makes into Burgettstown is easy to recognize; we knew when we were getting close and got a lot happier. There were some curbs and uneven sidewalks that needed to be negotiated on the way into town. Going over them, I suddenly felt like I had a good idea of what it's like to be 85 and why going down the driveway to get the mail can be a decently major undertaking for my grandma. I don't think I was the only one. "Ha ha!" Brewer laughed at one point, when he was walking at the back of the group, "it looks like we're all trying to walk without landing on our feet." At the corner of Center Avenue and Bridge Street we stopped to pick a direction to look for restaurants in, eventually deciding to continue our route across the bridge and onto Main Street so we wouldn't have any extra distance to walk if we kept going after the stop.

As we crossed the bridge, a car pulled up to us and a person in it asked us a question. I don't think any of us parsed it correctly, but in the end it decoded to "Hey, who's playing up at the Starlight tonight?" Getting back nothing but our blank stares, the driver tried to make himself clear. "The Starlight; the Starlight Amphitheatre...?" (leaving the sentence hanging). "Oh!" we finally said. "We're not— we're not from here. We walked from the middle of Pittsburgh." The driver gave us a half-laugh, half "you're crazy; I'm not touching that" sort of hand gesture and drove off. The five of us laughed all the way across the bridge.

On Main Street we passed a whole line of closed and irrelevant shops ("Restaurants sometimes cater, but are there any cateries that restaurant?" — you could tell I was getting tired!) before we came across some kind of pub thing. The amount of cigarette smoke that poured onto us just from opening the door, however, was enough to convince us that we should look elsewhere. We landed at a poor unsuspecting pizza shop down the street, about the size of Valentino's back in Cleveland. Brewer sat down on the sidewalk just outside, Dan collapsed laying down onto the floor just inside, the other two took the two chairs just inside the door, and I grabbed a menu and joined Brewer on the sidewalk. At first, the guy behind the counter didn't handle the situation too suavely. "Is there a way I can get a cup of water?" I asked. "Well, we sell bottled water right back there," he answered, putting the emphasis on the verb. $1.25 transferred ownership from me to the establishment. Eventually we ordered some stuff and sprawled across the sidewalk in front of the shop to eat it. Someone told the people in the store about our quest — I think in order to find out how many miles it was to West Virginia — and the answer came with a rider that we should be careful about cell phone coverage out that way because sometimes it was difficult to get a signal.

When we stood up to leave, we all found that walking was extremely difficult. After a few steps, Dan and Rebecca decided they weren't interested in attempting the last seven miles. Eight's idea was to stop every half hour for a break, but at the rate we came into Burgettstown it would have taken us another three and a half hours, plus stops, to cover the distance — and it was already getting dark. So we pulled the plug and Brewer got out his cell phone to call for a ride. Mark Tomczak, on the other end of the line back in Pittsburgh, asked us to call him back once he worked out his evening schedule. We spent the time in hobbling over to an ice cream stand on Route 18. As we walked, I was coming more and more round to Eight's point of view (continuing), but in the end I decided not to press things too far and contented myself with the idea that we could always try again.

Tomczak arrived at least an hour later, in the middle of an interesting session of that game where someone describes a death scene and you have to find out how the person died by asking yes/no questions. ("A graph theorist is found dead in the desert, surrounded by clothes and holding a piece of wood. How did he die?") Getting up to walk to the car was almost impossible, and I guess cramming four of us into the backseat wasn't the most comfortable thing ever. Mark took Route 22 back to the city, and we found that all the place names on the exit signs looked kind of familiar. Eventually we arrived back in Pittsburgh and I was deposited at Rebecca's house and faced with the prospect of biking home.

It was surprisingly easy. I was down maybe a gear or a half a gear in terms of strength, but otherwise made it back home quite fast. The first thing I did was run hot water into the bathtub and soak my legs for a few minutes. Then, since it was after 11:30 and I'd been up since 5:15, it was off to bed.

Epilogue — After the failed attempt described here, a second attempt took place around a year later on June 9, 2007. Eight, Zach, Chris, Alan, and I followed the 2006 route up to the bike trail before Oakdale, then made use of the straight and flat trail (a converted rail line) that got us to Burgettstown after it transitioned into a dirt-bike path. After a stop of 30 minutes to recover our forces, we pressed on through the remaining estimated six miles of the trip and successfully crossed into Brooke County, West Virginia, around 1 a.m. Chris's plot of the route on Gmaps Pedometer is here, and some photos that Alan took along the way are here.