Ouachita Trail Thru Hike March 7, 2025 thru March 14, 2025. 223 miles East to West from Talimena State Park in Oklahoma to Pinnacle Mtn State Park in Arkansas. Debbie Rigsby, Stacey Shaver, and Jeremy Rigsby. This was very hard physically, mentally, and emotionally. We started out on a Friday morning with back packs weighing between 32 and 42 pounds. We did not carry tents to save on pack weight. Our goal for the 1st day was 34 miles to Pashubbe Shelter. The 1st 70 miles of this trail is very rocky, technical terrain. We made it to Pashubbe. The 2nd day was rainy, very rocky and the rocks were slick so it was slow going. We stopped sooner than we planned. We slept in trail shelters most nights but cowboy camped a couple of nights. We hard a hard time eating enough food because it was just hard getting food down. We would be walking zombies by the time we reached our stopping points each night and were usually too tired to eat and just went to sleep. We did not set any alarms and just got up when we woke up and started hiking. We slept between 3 and 5 hours. We had many ups and downs physically and mentally. On our last night we pushed so hard to make it 35 miles to where we would only have 21 miles to finish the following day. It was our toughest night and we had several times where we would get off trail for a few minutes. We were crossing water in the dark and trying to keep dry and just keep going. It was a full moon which was nice. We generally carried between 2-3 liters of water between filtering stops. We all had hot spots and blisters but none of the blisters got infected. We had several family and friends at the finish cheering us in and that was great. I would never do it again.