A Trail of Weeping Feet - The Thinking Woodsman

Bloody socks and weeping blisters were the breaking point for our backpacking trip on the Trace Creek section of the Ozark Trail (OT) this past weekend. Apropos because the trail happened to incorporate a portion of the Trail of Tears that the Cherokee nation moved west on almost two hundred years ago.

Photo courtesy of Steve Hardesty, Sns ProAudio

For starters, I was a guest on this expedition; a three day, two night 26 mile saunter through the Mark Twain National Forest. Normally I travel with a band of my guys, but putting together that gang anymore is getting next to impossible (read a Distant Yet Familiar Howl). My buddy Phil had invited me to accompany him, his brother, two nieces and nephew on the trip. Everyone was responsible for their own gear and food, a departure from the collaborative group-gear style of trip I’m accustomed to. I looked forward to simply being responsible for myself though. The extra weight would be a trade-off for autonomy.

My new crew for the weekend comprised a continuum of seasoned backpackers to a first-timer, their level of gear and amount of wear showing on the gear correlated with their experience. Fun. I love to see people push themselves into exploring new things or extending their capabilities, especially in the outdoors. A February 26 miler is no walk in the park. Actually that’s exactly what it is, but you get the point.

We had a chilly start at the Hazel Creek trailhead and in addition to taking lots of pictures, folks spent a fair amount of time zipping and unzipping pockets. Cinching up, and then loosening straps until all gear variables were optimized. The beginning of a trip always twinges with the same nervous excitement you get before a race or a test; a little uncertainty mixed with the prospect of overcoming something difficult, coupled with the knowledge that you don’t know what you don’t know.

Before we stepped onto the trail, I could tell these were people I would enjoy being around: funny, welcoming, appreciative of their kinship and interested in life.

Friday warmed up in no time as we rose and fell with the OT. Anyone who’s been before knows it’s got a consistent repertoire of switchbacks, sidehilling benchcuts, rocky (and sometimes dry) creek crossings and is peppered with just a few gentle valley and ridge top straightaways. My backpacking speed is a slow run, so in an effort to be a good guest, I did my best to not walk in front. It did me good to take my time and appreciate what I might have otherwise marched past.

We lunched on a ridgetop around noon on Friday as a few in the party took time to address beginning hotspots and other harbingers of friction. I had premixed peanut butter with jelly in a snack-sized ziplock which I used like an icing bag to squeeze out calories on top of bagel halves. In real life, I can’t stand bagels. When I’m on the trail, it’s a whole different story. In fact, backpacking is one of the few times when I allow myself to indulge in foods I wouldn’t normally touch; especially foods squeezed out of a bag.

When your job is to simply walk with a fair amount of weight on your back, thoughts tend to focus on what’s coming next that’s different. After lunch, it’s usually where you’re going to stop and make camp for the night. Prerequisites for a camp site vary in priority based on the condition of the team, but generally I look for proximity to water, privacy, and level ground. How many of those you’ll fudge on depends on how tired people are. Fortunately, we were able to find a site with all three components around 3 pm and got to work on civilizing the place.

Setting up camp and dinner was where I realized I was on a trip with people who had divergent ways of backpacking. One of the things I appreciate about the outdoors is that, while there are a few wrong ways to do things, mostly you’re free to develop your own methods. Some methods are certainly more effective and efficient than others, but it’s not as though there’s a test where you’ll get marked off for an incorrect answer. In backpacking, a not-wrong-but-not-a-best-practice method usually means you’ll get too cold, or too warm, or wet, or your food won’t taste so good, or you’ll be uncomfortable. The jerks and snobs in that world are the ones who believe their opinions are fact and cannot stand the thought of someone experimenting and figuring things out on their own. I try hard not to be that.

Our campsite represented a cross—section of shelter options. There was a tent, a hammock, a lean-to, a bivy sack, and a debris hut. Goldilocks could have shown up while we were out gathering wood. Dinner exhibited the same diversity. From granola bars and cold yogurt cups to squeezing ham and lentils out of an MRE pouch to venison spaghetti, we had it all…and everyone got the calories and nutrients they needed.

I held out til ten sitting by the fire that evening chatting with my buddy Phil. The world would be a better place if folks took time to sit under a bare forest canopy backlit by stars while a small campfire dutifully turned wood into warmth. You can get a lot done.

Staying up til ten was also a strategy to avoid an early morning pee. I slipped into my sleeping bag enveloped by the bivy, placed my glasses inside my boots, zipped in, and began to feel the soreness and tension in my body ebb. I’m told the coyotes had an active night of howling, but I slept through all that.

Saturday morning we exchanged sleeping stories: strange dreams, cold spots, eerie noises, etc and each began making breakfast.

By nine we had essentially broken down camp and were ready to roll again. The sun already dulling the morning chill, we could tell it was going to be a warm day. Our campsite was at the back of a shallow valley so our first section of trail subtly climbed for a ridge. I served as the navigator and began fielding more questions about pace and timing and places to get off the trail ahead.

By lunch, we had stopped a few times already for folks to shed layers. At lunch, still more layers were shed and though optimistic, fatigue and blisters were beginning to impact our group’s hopefulness about the future. As the afternoon wore on and the terrain increased in difficulty, conversations became less frequent and people began focusing inward; a way of engaging autopilot to push through discomfort. Think Happy Gilmore going to his happy place.

Around mile 17, approaching the headwaters of the Big River, Phil’s foot pain became too much to bear another day and another nine miles of abuse, so he decided to make an exit while the group continued on. The challenges of accomplishing this departure were a few:

figure out a location where he could be extricated from
do that while covering the least amount of ground possible
get cellular signal
do it all with enough time left over for the group to make our next campsite at mile 20.

Phil, his niece and I found a point to go off-trail that saved us over a mile of walking to a highway crossing. It was especially challenging and steep terrain to get up to the ridge the road was perched on, but we did that as the rest of the team continued on the trail proper. The plan was for Phil to make contact with someone back home for his ride. Once that happened, his niece and I would hike the road eastward to reconnect with the rest of the group.

We needed to do some walking to a higher point on the road to get service, but once we did, Phil got a call through to his daughter to begin the two hour trip to come down to pick him up. Shortly after those plans were laid, an Ozark Trail Association (OTA) member in the process of shuttling some friends of his stopped by and offered Phil a ride to a nearby town…which evolved into an offer to be driven all the way back home to St. Louis.

One of the OTA member’s friends pulled up near us on the side of the road and while there, I asked if he would drive us down to meet the rest of our crew where the trail crossed the highway a little over a mile east of our current position. He graciously agreed. Phil was brought back there too before being driven back home.

Once the entire group was reunited and the possibility of shortening the trip via shuttles from our new OTA friends made apparent, more folks were candid about their physical conditions and suggested stopping the trip right there and heading home.

I was disappointed but understood and agreed with the decision. When you set out to do a point to point journey and don’t make it to the final point, or log the quantity of miles you anticipated, it natively feels like a failure. The problem with that mindset is that it overshadows all the great things that happened along the way. The new friendships, the immersion in God’s handiwork, the technology detox, the simple joy of walking and breathing, all of it can be missed if the purpose was to merely walk 26 miles through the woods.

I also have to give credit for people recognizing their limits and being wise enough to call it, instead of recklessly pushing on out of sheer pride, likely bonking in a place with no cellular service and no access to navigable roads. That highway DD crossing was the best place for that decision to have been made. I was also given the gift of a full Sunday with family that wouldn’t have happened had I been out finishing up the Trace Creek section.

While my body is done with that trip, my mind isn’t. I’m still processing through our decisions, the sights, smells, conversations…everything. It’s still impacting me, which is why it’s called recreation. You grow and change from these experiences. Thankfully for us, our journey didn’t turn into another Trail of Tears; a Trail of Weeping Feet perhaps, but I know that everyone who went is better for having done it and once their aches and blisters subside, they’ll be walking taller than they did before.

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