Info, questions, comments, experiences (good or bad) regarding - Leroy A. Smith Shelter

Past/Present hikers - what can future hikers expect here? Have any good stories or memories from here?

Future hikers - any questions?

Last shelter heading north bound before Pa.33 and Wind Gap Pa. a very nice area for tenting out just before you get to the shelter.There are app. 3 springs for this shelter as listed and the first two are usually dry by the time the north bound thru-hikers get there so you will have to walk down a service road for 0.5 miles to a piped spring which has never stopped flowing but it is a long walk down and an even longer walk back up the road after a loooooong day walking on the Pa. rocks.:o

Checked on it yesterday.
It has a nice hammocking/tent spot on the left side of the blue trail just past the high tension line clearing. Its one of the small built leantos with a tinned roof. No bunks, No picnic table, nor does it have a tarp over the entrance for winter. The privy was pretty good.

i stayed at this shelter in early nov 2003.was a real nice shelter with a top of the line privy:sun neo

I had stopped in a few nights here and there in the month of June between 2001 and 2003 when I used to live in the area. Wife and I carried our young son in a kid carrier (then 2) and we would hike up the mountain before dinner on the old access road past the springs and wait until dusk before heading back don. Always packed a small cooler of sodas and Snickers & Hersheys, but we only met thruhikers once.
Always meant to stay there for a night, but I always ended up at the overlook just past the Kirkridge Shelter.

I camped there last night 28degrees. The trail sobo from Wind Gap was in bad shape, lots of blow downs, missing blazes.
A blown down tree had been dragged into the site. Too large for me to break apart or drag out from under the ice and snow.
I hammocked inside the shelter. It's wide enough to do it. There's a tie down on the left side and I put an eye hook on the other, I did remove it.
In the winter it has a nice nightime view of the lights of Lehigh Valley. Park a car in the Gamelands lot- its 3\4 m straight downhill from the shelter, then get shuttled to your start point. A house across the street helps with minimal vandalism.

the first 2 springs down from the shelter are dry but the 3rd spring is flowing well. its good cold water,
left some sodas there in the spring - dont yell at me for 'litterin'.

Hey Crash, If I go by there and don't get one of those sodas i'll yell at you. Just kidding. Stillbill

I am about to camp there. Looking forward to it.

I was up last week cleaning it up.
Have fun up there.

I was up at Leroy Smith yesterday, up the Katellen trail from the SGL lot. The shelter is a beautiful old dressed timber structure, built with some very nice timber-frame/cabin joinery work. It's slightly small but very clean and very nicely maintained. I met one of the maintainers and original builders who was telling us that it's small because when they were building it some of the timbers were stolen from the drop site down by the road and they had to reduce it's size to compensate. There's also a composting privy just above and springs on the Katellen trail below. Just up toward the AT is an established tenting/hammocking area that's very large and very nice. Not many thru-hikers in the register yet, but it is still May and even most of the early starters aren't quite to northern PA.

For a quick water report while I'm at it:

Spring #1 across from the shelter is already running badly. It's actually dry in it's usual spot and comes out now as a relatively small flow somewhere in the rocks below. You can't really get to the water until the stream crosses the trail about .1 below the shelter.

Spring #2 at .2 down from the shelter is running very nicely, with a good solid flow and deep pools. Getting down to this one on the Katellen trail is quite easy, as it's not too rocky and only moderately downhill.

Spring #3 at .3 down is also running well, though it gets lost almost immediately in the flow of the stream from above right now, which is quite strong because of Spring #2.

Here are a few pics from the shelter and its surroundings. The guy standing in front of the shelter is the AMC Ridgerunner for this section, Rick. Very nice guy.

I wasn't too impressed with this shelter. It felt closed-in. There's no view at all, except for the sprawling fire pit. Water (as is usual for PA shelters) is a long walk. The shelter itself is small, obviously an old design. I was surprised to note that it was under AMC management. (Did I get that part right?) Strangely, it had a brand new, hard-bound shelter register.

It is small...really small. I'm mostly in love with the timber-framing of the shelter itself and the privy, which is a fairly nice one. I also like the open camping grove that's just up toward the AT from the shelter. It's a great hang site :D but of course that means I don't usually use the shelter itself except for secondary uses most of the time.

There are a number of shelters I think are really neat that I wouldn't prefer to sleep in over some of the good modern shelters (like Allentown or William Penn, for instance.) The really old stone shelters, for instance, like in GSMNP or Harriman SP in NY are wonderful from an architectural and historical standpoint, but they're often damp and/or drafty to sleep in.

The AMC does maintain this one, as well as the trail section from Little Gap to Wind Gap. The Ridgerunner is Rick McKenric, a very nice guy and seems pretty on the ball (he was toting about 10 extra pounds of garbage from the trail when I met him.) When I got up onto the AT itself it was pretty well kept up.

The water situation was one of the things I talked with both Rick and the maintainer about. They both said that spring #1 goes dry early now and should be viewed as unreliable. Spring #2 isn't really a bad downhill and it used to run all year according to them. It was certainly strong when I looked yesterday. Problem is that a lot of thru-hikers come through in mid-to-late July when this one has been failing in recent years. Spring #3 never fails, according to them, but that one is a steep downhill and .3 miles to boot. Unfortunately, geology is not our friend in Pennsylvania. :D

I tented nearby last weekend. There was a group of 3 or 4 that tented nearby as well. The shelter was well kept, but there are not many views in this section.

True, though if you go just north of Leroy Smith on the AT you get to the end of the powerline cut on the north side of the ridge (the same cut that's just above the shelter.) That is a pretty good north-facing vista, not something you find much along any of the PA sections from the Susquehanna northward, since most of the views are south (due to the geology, mostly.) One other good one near there is Weathering Knob at the top of the NOBO climb out of Little Gap.

I've just returned from a weekend section from Smith Gap to DWG (well, Dunnfield creek really.) I stayed the night on 7/10 at Leroy Smith shelter. The shelter was pretty full, with 2-Pound, Bugman, Turtle and Fearless Phil in that small space, myself and three others hanging/tenting just below the shelter in the overflow tent sites, and Tarzan plus six other hikers hanging/tenting in the grove above the shelter. There were also four local kids camped up on the powerline cut, along with their cooler and it's inevitable contents. Quite the full house all around.

The shelter is still in great shape, and while spring #1 is dry, Spring #2 is still flowing as well as it was when I saw it last (and that was much earlier in the year.) I didn't go down to spring #3, but given how well #2 is doing, I can't imagine it's not flowing well too.

I really liked it- it was a bit small, but there were only four of us, so it was fine. It was nice that they had a grill that could go on top of the pit, though I didn't use it. The spring felt really far away after 15 miles (and it was- half mile down hil, half mile back up), but it was really nice to soak your feet in, and ice cold.