I started this run pretty late, around 10pm. The first portion of the route has some really tall grass but is still easily navigable. The trail climbs pretty steeply up to the Black Mountain plateau with a decent amount of deadfall along the route. Running along the plateau was easy breezy.
The trail coming down off the plateau was techy but fast. The trail gets a bit hard to locate before popping out on the road, but someone had placed some orange flags in that section, which was helpful.
My headlamp died somewhere along the road portion, so I had to resort to using my phone light for the rest of the run. It took me some time to find the trail coming off the road. In fact, I’m not sure the trail is super well-defined until you just commit to walking into the woods for a bit along the GPS track. It does eventually materialize.
The rest of the route has quite a bit of deadfall to circumnavigate, and the trail is a bit overgrown and so somewhat hard to see, especially with a phone light. I lost the trail at a couple points, once near an old wooden bridge that seems to be disconnected fe the trail entirely.
I took one more wrong turn that I had to backtrack, maybe 2 miles from the finish. Overall, this is a very cool and primitive route. I highly recommend doing it during the day and will probably do so myself at some point in the future.