At 5:42 a.m. on Sunday, April 9th, WIll Ortmayer and I dipped our toes in the Ohio River in Elizabethtown, Illinois. We turned away from the river and started making our way toward the Mississippi River via the River to River Trail.
The weather was beautiful and we really enjoyed the first day. Our plan was to walk the trails (except the very runnable downhill portions) and run the road walk. R2R starts out heavily trail and becomes more and more road walk the closer one gets to Grand Tower at the other end. We were pleasantly surprised at the lack of roads and quality of the trail. There were huge stretches of pine needle double track where we could walk side by side and catch up. This was in stark contrast to the horse-rutted mess that others had claimed the trail would be.
We walked at about a 17 min/mile pace and were well ahead of schedule despite very little road to run on. We decided to take a 4-hour sleep that night from about 11:30 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. just past the road walk through Eddyville. It was miserable. I had brought a closed cell foam sleeping pad cut to my waist and an emergency blanket. Will had the heavier and more luxurious setup, an inflatable sleeping pad and an emergency blanket. Neither were enough to protect us from the low 40 degree temperatures and neither of us slept well at all.
We decided that moving was warmer and night 2 would need a new strategy. We moved well through the morning but the bottom of my foot was beigining to ache. I offered that we stop to soak our feet in some cold water so we did for 5 mintues. After that, we hit a nice long road stretch where we planned on making some good time. Three steps into running I got a sharp stabbing pain in the bottom of my foot and screeched to a halt. I ripped off my shoe and poked and prodded and stretched but didn't see anything. I tried again to run but there was just no way. Walking took considerable effort from me and my trekking poles.
We decided to take a nap at the next trail before deciding this FKT attempt was over. We took an hour long nap, where Will once again struggled to sleep at all. After the nap, I pretended the foot was good enough to walk on and we limped our way to the next road walk. On our next road walk, we passed the halfway point which was a real kick in the teeth.
We walked and walked all day and started to realize that if we could not run anymore, the pace simply didn't work. We would have to walk continuously, at roughly 3 miles per hour, through the night and the next day to have a shot at the FKT with any meaningful buffer. This meant no sleep again. In addition, the trail conditions had gotten substantially worse and the miles much slower. At the end of the day, this is a horse trail and the reports of rutted trails, piles of poop, and miles of mud could not have been more accurate.
Fern Clyffe State Park kicked our asses with unexpected elevation gain and very little progress towards Grand Tower. We made it to the road walk as night two set in and enjoyed the mindlessness of walking along the road at a steady pace. My foot was miraculously feeling better and better.
The good fortune ended when we got to the Panther Den Wilderness area which was a huge pain to navigate in the dark with wilderness blazes and multiple creek crossings. We laid down for a 15 minute nap at mile 100 in generally higher spirits than earlier. This also didn't last long as we soon realized we still had 60 miles, or 20 hours of walking, minimum.
We took the sections one at a time on day 3 and finally made it to Bald Knob Wildnerness, the only section of the trail which I had seen before. This was false confidence because this section went on forever and had a lot more elevation change than I remembered. Lastly, we began the levee walk.
10 miles of levee walk never sounds good but certainly not at the end of a 150 mile hike. It was hot and exposed and we did not have the patience to walk on the levee for nearly 4 hours. We even tried to sprinkle in some running despite our bodies screaming not to. At 8:15 we rounded the corner into Devil's Backbone State Park and jogged (for dramatic effect) to dip our toes in the Mississippi River. At 8:17 p.m. on Tuesday, April 11th, we stopped our watches and finished our journey. We piled into my camper and made our way to Cape G to shower and spend the night.
This was an incredible challenge and we are so thankful to have had the opportunity to attempt this trail. A huge thank you to Brooke Prater for nursing us back to health after the finish, the R2R trail society for creating and maintaining the trail, Lindsey Roberts for setting the bar on this route and writing extensively on her previous attempts, and the entire R2R trail community for all of the kind words and encouragement.