The website I kept checking while the hatch was cicadamania.com. I know the PSU page mentions the 2012 hatch in southern PA, but for some reason I remember thinking I could travel out of state to somewhere else regionally before that.
All I can say about the cicadas is that it was like nothing else I've ever experienced in my life. I don't say that from a flyfishing point of view, but from just from ordinary life that everyone in my neighborhood was forced to experience.
They started around 9 AM once the sun dried things off, first hearing them in the distance on the mountain as a high pitch shrill, similar to the pitch of a cricket but a constant ringing sound. I concluded that this high pitch was the only frequency that made it such a far distance.
When they would pick up for the day in the trees in my backyard, it was nothing like the dog day cicadas. There were so many singing at once that there was just a constant loud sound continuously for the whole day, moving in waves of strongly and weaker concentrations of them. I remember talking to people standing right next to me and having to yell.
One of the days I fished Penns Creek I got there around 8 AM and I couldn't believe how loud it was down by the creek with the mountains closing in on both sides. When I returned to my car 6 or 7 hours later, I closed the door and closing the sound made me realize how intrusive that constant shriek was. I feeling of anxiety came over me, and I put my head in my hands and pushed on my face. The best thing I can compare that in-your-face sound to was the feeling of 70's era horror movies like Rosemary's Baby.
There were probably at least a thousand per tree in my backyard, just about covering the branches. We have this cedar bush in our yard that stands about 8 feet tall. My 14 year old neighbor and his little sister made a game out of hitting the bush and then sending the cicadas for a ride with tennis racquets. The most amazing part of about this was that when they would shake the bush, the number of cicadas that would come off made it look like the entire bush was blooming out into pieces and then in a second or two contracting back as most of the bugs would retreat back in. There would be hundreds, or maybe even up to a thousand that would fly out each time, an incomprehensible amount of them.
This was no ordinary periodic hatch.