New Year. New Trails

This year my plan is to hike a couple of shorter trails and a few multi day backpacking trips. Now, by shorter, I mean around 200+ miles. I know this is not everyone’s idea of a short trail, but it works for me.

First up is the Ozark Highland Trail (OHT). Situated in the northern part of Arkansas, this east-west trail runs 208 miles, plus a proposed 50 mile extension to that. In fact that extension exists as trail with the exception of one 15 mile segment. However, for logistical reasons, I decided to forgo the extra 50 miles and end my hike at the 208 mile mark. More on that in another post.

It appears that April is one of the best times to do this hike with warmer days than March and less heavy rain than May. So April is the target month. I have asked my good friend Cappuccino to join me in the adventure, so there may be two of us. The whole thing should take around two weeks to complete if all goes well. There are a number of stream crossing that could be problematic if April turns out to be unusually wet, but we will cross that stream when we come to it :^)

In May I plan to hike a 250 mile side loop of the 1400 mile Buckeye Trail (BT) in Ohio. This trip has a two fold purpose for me. One is to do part of this trail and see what I think and two is to visit relatives that I have in the Buckeye State. The trail conveniently goes right by or very near to several of my cousin’s homes. So big plus there.

Cappuccino and I are going to try and get permits for a rim2rim2rim hike of the Grand Canyon in September. There is a lottery for these permits, because of the high demand, so no guarantee we will get one. But that is our goal.

I also will endeavor to do a trip with my old friends the Slow Brothers sometime, so there is that trip, too.

That is the general plan. I plan to blog weekly until the OHT trip. So come back next week for the next installment. If you would like a reminder sign up using the form on the left and you will get an email reminder every time I publish a blog.

Happy Trails,

-SlowBro