My husband, Thomas Smith, and I ran from the dock at Windigo to the dock at Rock Harbor across Isle Royale National Park via the Greenstone Ridge trail dock to dock route. It went pretty well considering many new trails we have never run, the last minute planning of a pretty difficult route to plan for (transportation wise), the remoteness of the Island, not being totally dialed in with the exact location of water spots, and maybe lack of feeling totally prepared for a 41.5 mile run in regards to training, but regardless of the minor details we learned a lot about the route and how it could be done faster, as you always take away learning lessons in long attempts/races like these. Most importantly, it was a very fulfilling trip and a really fun adventure that we will always remember :) We ran the entire trail together unsupported. We carried all our "food" and we had to re-supply with water two different times. The first stop was at Hatchet Lake, which ended up adding on quite a bit of time, distance, and elevation, but we were not going to risk not having water moving forward, and we were not 100% confident with our water research on the trail about when the next really good water spot would be. This added maybe about ~1 mile more to the course. Our 2nd and final water stop was at a creek that cut right across the trail between Chickenbone Lake and Lake Livermore. We didn't have any other major stops. We had a few instances where the trail was slightly rerouted due to mud, and another time where the trail took us on what felt like a deer trail, but we were able to navigate back to the trail.
An exciting start to our morning was about .42 miles in we ran into a mama and baby moose on the trail. There was no way that mama was moving anywhere so we had to go far enough into the bushes for safety to get around the mama and her baby! Besides the moose, we heard loons call, saw small critters, saw some humans, but we never saw the elusive wolf. All in all it was a truly epic adventure and such a cool experience.