In our official 90 Cones planning spreadsheet, we have a category called “walkable” for neighborhoods that we can get to without a car. These are neighborhoods adjacent to East Liberty, reachable from home via a comfortable after dinner walk. On September 20th, we officially broke that category. We walked 12.5 miles and crossed all three rivers.

Edmund is working on Hiking merit badge for Scouts, which involves doing a bunch of 10 mile hikes. The weather was beautiful, Mom was gone all weekend, and so, in an attempt to kill two birds with one stone, we took an ice cream hike. We had a few criteria: walk at least 10 miles, start from home and take the bus back, and get ice cream a few times along the way in some less than “walkable” neighborhoods.

We decided we’d walk down Negley Avenue over to Centre Avenue and follow that all the way Downtown. Then, we’d go over the Smithfield Street Bridge, up one incline and down the other, across the West End Bridge, through the North Side, and back Downtown to catch the bus home.

We started at around 11 in the morning with packed lunches, snacks and plenty of water. After giving Edmund a one joke per mile rule (One can only hear his hit song “Hot Dog Juice” so many times) we got on our way. The first tricky bit was climbing Centre Avenue up into the Hill, but we made it. We passed the site of the snow cones we shared in Terrace Village and continued up Centre Avenue. When we’d finished our climb, we sat down at Kennard Playground for lunch and a water refill. Once we were rested, we walked the few blocks over to stop one in Middle Hill.

Back on the road, we walked all the way to Frankie Pace Park where a spooky craft fair was happening. We took a well deserved rest and prepared ourselves for our first river crossing of the day. After crossing the Monongahela on the Smithfield Street Bridge, we took the Monongahela Incline up to our second neighborhood destination, Mount Washington.

After ice cream on Shiloh Street, we walked down Grandview Avenue to the Duquesne Incline, which we rode down to the lower station. We followed Carson Street to the West End Bridge, and passed through some somewhat sketchy areas before arriving at our third destination, Allegheny West.

To get back to our bus stop, we passed through Allegheny Center and North Shore (both previous 90 Cones adventures), briefly considered catching the Pirates’ penultimate home game before crossing the Roberto Clemente Bridge, then caught the P1 to East Liberty station, passing the East Liberty Milkshake Factory as we staggered home.

Watch the blog in the next few days for details about each of our hiking stops!