Angie and I rented a cabin at the Northern Terminus of West Rim trail for the 12th-14th. We met at Southern Terminus on Friday 6/12/26 around 3 PM and organized our equipment for drop bags. We left her car parked there for our half way resupply. We then drove West Rim Road and left a tote and cooler at Bradley Wales picnic area for re-supply around mile 16.5 and on the way back around mile 44 ish. We then continued towards our cabin, leaving a water only drop at the bridge on Painter Leetonia Road around 7.5 miles on the way in and mile 52 ish on the way back. We then headed to our cabin in Ansonia, had dinner and were in bed around 7 PM Friday night.
We woke up at 11:30 PM and took our time getting around, drove the 1 mile to the trail head and walked over to the sign. We touched the sign and began heading south on 6/13/26 at 12:44 AM. We had lots of fog at the vistas (we are used to this) and cooler night temps made the first few hours easy. We rolled into Bradley Wales at 7:22 AM. We re-stocked our vests and enjoyed part of a hoagie (Callie) and a quesadilla. We rolled out from Bradley Wales at 7:45 AM. Several miles later, we saw our first people of the trip, a large group of many teen boys and 4 adults who had biked the rail trail from Ansonia to Waterville on the rail trail and were now on day 2 of hiking back to the Northern terminus. in the next 2 miles we saw 2 more groups (4 people in one and 2 in the other) who were on a multi day thru hike as well. They warned us of a large rattle snake that was laying on some longs in the "below down" section of trail a few miles ahead of us. We then ran into 5 women on a look from Blackwell along with their dog Sammy (seen in picture). We made it through the blow down with no snake encounters, but just a few miles later while getting ready to step up onto a downed tree, a little black fazed rattle snake let us know he was underneath. Angie tried hard to get him to move, but we ended up having to tight rope walk the tree with him underneath. We arrived at the Southern Terminus at 1:59 PM where we had Angie's car stashed with our resupply and lunch. We enjoyed taking off our shoes, sitting in the shade and having a "picnic lunch" as everyone else enjoyed Pine Creek (the parking lot was very busy). We changed socks and Angie changed shoes and we were off again heading north at 2:57 PM.
We have done both directions before (and we like S to N better) so that was a little bit of a perk to ending in this direction. We made our way back to Bradley Wales (finding a bag of left behind garbage at one of the camp sites), which Angie strapped to her back and carried for the next 10 miles to Bradley Wales hahaha. We made it back at dusk (9:28 PM) and walked into a circle of 6 friends from Lancaster who were camping in their RVs nearby. They had brought their chairs and their binoculars to do some star gazing. They were entertained by us crawling around in the woods to get our "no bears allowed" food stash. We sat at the picnic table, re-supplied and snacked as we got ready for our final push. We toasted to being 75% done and were back on trail at 10:03 PM. We ended up going through 11 campsites total (the 2nd one was still awake in their tents and realized it was us since we had talked to them earlier in the day) and turned their lights on and cheered for us as we went by! As we entered Colton Point Park we could see the horizon getting lighter as the sun began to rise at the end of the canyon. It was a beautiful way to end the last few (hard downhill) miles back to the Northern terminus. We came out of the woods and touched the sign at 5:33 AM on Sunday 6/14/26. Angie looked at me and told me that she was sorry and that I never have to say yes to another one of her ideas again. HAHA. We walked to the car, drove back to the cabin, immediately showered (Angie fell asleep on the porch floor while she waited for me to shower). Once we were both "clean" we crawled into our beds for a few hours of sleep. Waking up around 9:30 AM, we packed up our cabin and headed out to collect our stashes. At Bradley Wales there were 2 women waiting for a pick up (worried about the weather coming that afternoon) and said they had heard us around midnight passing their site and could not believe people were still on trail. We made it back to Angie's car (saw another rattle snake on the way) and decided we no longer like eating...since we did it every 30 minutes for almost 29 hours. It was an effort...but we got it done!