Rock ’N The Knob: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Blue Knob
Updated: 7 days ago
My story with Blue Knob started on two wheels.
This was back in the mid-1980s, when mountain biking was rapidly evolving from a West Coast countercultural garage hobby into a legitimate commercial industry. There were still plenty of traditional cyclists who regarded it as a passing fad, much like rollerblades, hacky sack and the notion that someday everyone would carry a telephone in their pocket. We didn't know any better.
Mountain bikes were gloriously primitive. The frames were heavy chromoly steel, the bikes were entirely rigid because front suspension had not yet become a thing, and rear suspension belonged somewhere between science fiction and witchcraft. Fat, knobby 26-inch tires were considered cutting edge. Bullmoose handlebars made you feel like you were piloting a farm implement, while Shimano caliper brakes provided just enough stopping power to give you confidence immediately before taking it away again.
My dad and I decided this equipment was perfectly suitable for riding down Mountain View Trail and Beaverdam Run. The downhill portion was terrifying. Eventually, we arrived at the park office, which was where we discovered one of the fundamental laws of mountain geography: if you ride down a mountain, eventually you have to ride back up it. We began the long, slow grind toward the ski resort at the top. It was my first real taste of Blue Knob and my first introduction to the particular kind of suffering the mountain specializes in. I didn't know it at the time, but this was merely the beginning.
Blue Knob: The Mountain That Doesn't Make Sense
Blue Knob has always seemed strange to me. Even on a map, it looks like somebody took the Allegheny Mountains, poked a finger into them and then forgot to smooth out the dent. The mountain juts roughly five miles east of the Allegheny Plateau Escarpment, standing apart from the surrounding terrain in a way that makes it feel less like a mountain and more like a geographical clerical error.
"What is this place?"
I still ask myself that.
Blue Knob isn't Pennsylvania's highest point. That honor went to Mount Davis, which is perfectly happy sitting there as a smooth, rounded dome in Somerset County, wearing the crown and minding its own business. But elevation isn't the only way to measure a mountain. There's also prominence, which is essentially a measure of how much a summit rises above the lowest contour that encircles it without enclosing a higher summit. It is a way of measuring how independently a mountain stands above the surrounding landscape.
And Blue Knob has plenty of it.
You notice that independence when you're climbing it. You notice it even more when you're climbing it for the fourth time. If you're directing a trail race there, you eventually develop a complicated relationship with it that can only be described as Stockholm syndrome with aid stations.
The Ski Club Years
By the early 1990s, I had developed another way to experience Blue Knob: skiing. I was only a couple of steps above novice skier status when, while I was in college, I somehow became a chaperone for my local high school's ski club. This sounds like an impressive responsibility until you understand that it mostly involved making sure teenagers didn't disappear into the woods while I tried not to disappear down a black diamond myself.
And yes, sounding like an old-timer, there was more snow back then. There was. I'm not saying Blue Knob used to have glaciers, but if you were to look at historical records, you could probably find evidence that at one time we had actual winter. That was back in the early Anthropocene, before we ruined everything.
By the mid-to-late 1990s, I was moonlighting as a wedding videographer on weekends and ended up videotaping a few events at Blue Knob. "WTF, why is there a French restaurant here?!" So, over the course of a decade or so, I had experienced the mountain by bicycle, by ski and by camcorder. I still hadn't learned my lesson.
Then We Had an Idea
Fifthteen years ago, the original crew of Allegheny Trailrunners had been developing the concept that eventually became Rock ’N The Knob. This was our second act of questionable judgment. With Dirty Kiln, we had at least been smart enough to create one race and see how it went. At Blue Knob, we apparently decided that one race wasn't sufficiently complicated, so we created two on a mountain we were already slightly afraid of in our inaugural year.
The first Rock ’N The Knob consisted of a 20-mile challenge and a 10K. The 10K was not the 10K we have today. Instead of heading northeast toward Spruce Knob, the course went toward the state park, including an ascent up the ski slopes followed by the Pavia Overlook Loop. The 20-miler incorporated the Rock ’N Ridge Trails, climbing from the bottom of Pavia all the way to the top near the group camp before descending again.
And because we apparently wanted to make this as difficult as possible for everyone involved, we scheduled the race for mid-October. The upside was autumn in Pennsylvania, when the leaves were spectacular and the mountain looked like something painted for a tourism brochure. The downside was that those same spectacular leaves were now lying on the trail, concealing every root, rock, hole and other opportunity for orthopedic experimentation. It was beautiful, colorful and occasionally treacherous. In other words, it was perfect.
Why "Rock ’N The Knob?"
There's another bit of trivia from those early days. When we were sitting around trying to name the race, we kicked around a number of possibilities before landing on Rock ’N The Knob. People have subsequently assumed the name contains some sort of double entendre. It doesn't. Well, not intentionally.
"Knob" was obviously Blue Knob. "Rock" had two origins. The first was Rock ’N Ridge Trail, which was incorporated into the course. The second was rock ’n roll, because our original intention was to have a live band playing after the race. That part didn't work out. Although, if anybody reading this happens to have a band, we should probably talk. We're still waiting.
Fifteen Years of "Minor" Course Corrections
Since that first race, Rock ’N The Knob has undergone the normal evolutionary process of any trail race. We've made incremental changes, moved things around, changed sections because of logistics and altered other sections because of trail conditions. We've also changed things because somebody apparently thought the original course wasn't sufficiently cruel.
The current 10K heads toward Spruce Knob. The first third runs along the ridge on mountain-bike trails such as Black Bear and Lost Porcupine. Then it hugs the precipice along Tree-ode. Yes, Tree-ode. Get it? Triage. Tree-ode. I love puns, and fortunately the runners have largely tolerated them.
The terrain along this section doesn't even feel particularly southern Pennsylvania. It reminds me more of the PA Wilds or the Catskills. Then we go downhill in a zig-zag when looking at a map is like a hairpin (Devil's Hairpin), which is where the course briefly allows runners to believe that perhaps the race director isn't such a terrible person after all.
I remember doing a group run on the course one day. When we reached the bottom, one of the women in the group looked around and asked, "Where are we?" I pointed toward the bottom of the mountain and asked if she knew the Blue Knob Resort sign down there. She looked, realized what that meant and exclaimed, "You motherfucker! We need to climb back to the top!" (That same person, Janice has now succumbed to the Dark Side and is my co-race director.)
The evil genius in me smirked.
Because Throat Punch Hill was waiting. An aside, because apparently the reputation of Rock ’N The Knob has traveled farther than I have.
A friend of mine was running a race somewhere up north when she overheard two women talking about races they had done. Eventually, the conversation turned to Rock ’N The Knob, and one of the women said, with what I assume was the appropriate level of horror, "That race director for Rock ’N The Knob! He's sadistic."
My friend turned around and said, "You know that race director is a good friend of mine."
Both women immediately developed what my friend later described as a "stranger danger" look.
Apparently, there is a certain amount of social calculation that takes place when you discover the person standing next to you is friends with the individual you have just publicly characterized as a sadist.
My friend, sensing the situation was deteriorating, added, "I said he was a friend. And yes, he is sadistic."
I'm not sure whether that made things better or worse.
But I have to admit, it's nice to know the race has developed a reputation.
The Middle Child
After the original 20-mile and 10K format had been around for a while, the course began to evolve, and so did our ideas about what Rock ’N The Knob could become. Working with my then co-race director Marc Lauber, we decided that we were missing something in the middle. We had the shorter 10K for people looking for a substantial trail run and the marathon challenge for those who wanted to venture considerably deeper into the Blue Knob experience, but there was a rather conspicuous gap between the two.
So we created a middle-distance course, roughly half-marathon length. It was intended to be the intermediary, the compromise, the Goldilocks option for runners who looked at the 10K and thought they could handle more, but looked at the marathon distance and thought there was no reason to make a perfectly good weekend that miserable.
Of course, this was Blue Knob, so even our idea of a reasonable middle ground wasn't particularly reasonable. The course gave runners enough distance and elevation to experience the mountain properly without committing themselves to the full mountain marathon adventure. Looking back, it was another important step in the evolution of the event because we were beginning to understand that the mountain offered enough terrain, trails and suffering to support something much larger than the race we had originally envisioned.
And that's when the idea of a 50K started to take hold.
The 50K Arms Race
At the time, there were relatively few trail ultramarathons in Pennsylvania that had developed a real reputation for being difficult. There were some renowned courses, certainly, but the state wasn't exactly overflowing with 50Ks. The distance was becoming more popular, but there was still something distinctive about putting together a genuinely hard trail ultramarathon.
If we were going to create a 50K at Blue Knob, we didn't want to simply take a marathon, add 6 miles to the course, call it a 50K and pat ourselves on the back. If we were going to put "ultramarathon" on the race application, it needed to earn the name. It needed to be tough. It needed to take advantage of the mountain. It needed to be the kind of race where runners finished and had to spend a few minutes deciding whether they were proud of themselves or simply angry with us.
There was also, if I'm being completely honest, a fair amount of boasting involved.
We started salivating over the idea of creating the biggest and baddest 50K in the Mid-Atlantic. That was the sort of ambition that seemed perfectly reasonable when discussed among a group of trail runners sitting around a table, with maps spread out in front of us and very little consideration given to the physical and logistical consequences of what we were proposing. We looked at Blue Knob and saw the ingredients: steep ski slopes, rugged mountain-bike trails, rocky singletrack, long climbs, long descents and a mountain that had already spent decades demonstrating that it was not particularly interested in accommodating humans.
So why not make the hardest 50K around?
Was it objectively the biggest and baddest 50K in the Mid-Atlantic? That's probably a question better left to historians and people with considerably more time on their hands. But the aspiration mattered. We weren't simply trying to put on another trail race. We wanted to build a course with an identity, something that felt worthy of the mountain and worthy of being called an ultramarathon.
The 50K became an experiment in just how much Blue Knob we could reasonably fit into one race while still getting people back to the finish line before dark. We wanted runners to remember the course. We wanted them to talk about it afterward. Ideally, we wanted them to tell their friends about it in the slightly exaggerated way that ultrarunners tend to describe difficult races.
And, perhaps most importantly, we wanted people to look at the Rock ’N The Knob 50K and think, That's a bad idea.
Then sign up anyway.
A Brief Dictionary of Blue Knob Suffering
One of the things I enjoy most about Rock ’N The Knob is that the course isn't simply a line on a map. It has developed its own vocabulary over the years. The names have stories. Some are historical, some are geographical, some are descriptive, and some were apparently created after somebody had been awake too long.
Lost Turkey Trail is named after the 26.3-mile Lost Turkey Trail, which was built by the Youth Conservation Corps in 1976. The name is a playful tribute to the original trailblazers who built it, and it is also a reminder that these trails have histories of their own long before we come along and put race arrows on them.
Throat Punch Hill requires considerably less explanation. It comes at you suddenly and with such violence that it feels like being punched in the throat. There are hills that gradually announce their intentions and then there is Throat Punch Hill, which apparently believes in surprise attacks.
Stoehr Climb was named after a longtime Blue Knob resident who told me about the rock formation in this section. Unlike some of the other names, this one actually has a legitimate local connection, proving that occasionally we do things with some historical basis.
Not Fairway is, naturally, a pun: Not Fair Way. It parallels the golf course, and I have never been able to resist a terrible play on words when one presents itself.
Blister Blaster and Teal Is Real were already assigned as segments on Strava, so rather than reinvent the wheel, we simply borrowed them. Sometimes race-course naming is the result of extensive historical research. Sometimes you look at Strava and say, "Sure. That's awesome."
I'll Nettle Do This Again came from a race report I read, and it was too good a pun to ignore. Again, I love puns, as the evidence throughout this race should make painfully clear.
I Need A Sherpa comes from an inside joke between friends. Any time we encounter a ridiculously steep hill, staircase or climb, someone eventually says, "I need a Sherpa." At Blue Knob, the phrase has evolved from an inside joke into something approaching a legitimate request for assistance.
Then there's Eurus, The East Wind, which is probably my favorite. Eurus is the Greek personification of the east wind, but the name also comes from Sherlock, specifically Season 3, Episode 3. In the series, Sherlock's brother Mycroft describes the East Wind as a terrifying force that "...seeks out the unworthy and plucks them from the earth".
That seemed appropriate.
This section of the course heads directly up a sheer ski slope, it faces east and forms a formidable wall. The name was basically inevitable. Eurus, the East Wind. Or, as runners might call it, "Oh, come on!"
The Mountain Keeps Winning
I've now gone on to direct races considerably larger and, arguably, more prestigious than that original Rock ’N The Knob. There's Eastern States 100, a 100-mile race through the Pine Creek watershed, and Ironstone 100K, a point-to-point race through the ridge and valleys of south central PA. Those races involve hundreds of runners, enormous logistical challenges, permits, communications systems, aid stations, volunteers, emergency plans, tracking systems and enough spreadsheets to qualify as a minor federal agency.
And yet Blue Knob keeps pulling me back.
Maybe it's because this was one of my first real experiments in race directing. Maybe it's because the mountain has been part of my life for more than four decades. Maybe it's because every time I think I've figured the place out, Blue Knob reminds me that I haven't.
That's probably the real reason.
There is something magical about a place that can be beautiful, frustrating, intimidating, ridiculous and completely captivating at the same time. Blue Knob has been a mountain-bike climb, a ski slope, a wedding-video backdrop, a trail-running playground, a race course, a source of stories and a source of profanity. It has also become a place where I have voluntarily convinced thousands of other people to suffer. (According to my spreadsheets, our 1500th unique participant signed up just a few days ago.)
Which, when you think about it, may be the clearest definition of a race director.
You find a place that you love. You discover all the terrible things about it. You spend an unreasonable amount of time figuring out how to connect those terrible things with trails, doubletrack and a few strategically placed aid stations. Then you convince other people that experiencing all of it will somehow be rewarding. You realize the history before you.
You put up some arrows, recruit some volunteers, order some shirts and invite people to come climb the mountain.
And then you wait for them to discover what you already know.
Blue Knob is beautiful.
Blue Knob is strange.
Blue Knob is magnificent.
And Blue Knob is going to hurt.
Welcome to Rock ’N The Knob.
Welcome to Blue Knob.
I still don't know exactly what this place is.
But after all these years, I have finally figured out what it's good for: making memories, creating stories and making perfectly rational adults question their life choices somewhere around Throat Punch Hill.
Information on Rock 'N The Knob Trail Challenge is linked here.
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