We did it. I strained, sprained, or somehow injured my right foot about 20 miles in but pushed through the pain to the end. The Lone Star is approximately a 96.6 TRAIL miles but we hiked 99.7 actual miles with miles in and out of camps. Not in 10 days but in 12 days of actual hiking due to my foot slowing us down.... plus 2 zero days in there to recover and resupply. I am satisfied. I hope my sponsors are. We collected over $2000 for The Senior Source, a worthy cause.
Thank you all.
We camped slightly off the trail most of the nights. We were almost always able to find a three tree set up enabling us to be "cozy" and only use Bob's superfly to cover us both. Although the temperatures dipped below freezing we were comfortable with our UGQ top quilts and Bob's diy pennypuffer underquilt and my UGQ underquilt. We also had a bottle of hot water in our footbox. We cached some water, filtered some water, gathered enough water to fill our bottles from the tarp as it rained one morning. leap frogged our cars (by the way- Both Double Lake National Park and Huntsville State Park will allow you to park your car in their facilities (Double Lake for day fees, Huntsville with no charge). We met very few other hikers. One was yo-yoing the trail in the 10 days we hoped to do it one way. One started after we did and past us up the second day planning on doing it in 6 days, and two men looked like they were going to finish it about three days before we did. They had packs that must have weighed over 50 lbs. Mostly we were alone on the trail and it was very nice.
If you have not hiked the Lone Star Trail yet, I highly recommend it. It was beautiful even in the winter. The trees are often over 100 feet tall and some are over a yard in diameter. My favorite section was the Magnolia section. I would like to do that section again in the late spring when the Magnolias are in bloom. The Magnolias are as tall as the pines in this section - huge - like I said, over a 100 feet tall. We measured one fallen pine's main trunk and it was 99 feet and that did not include any top branches that were no longer a part of the fallen tree.
We saw a few wild flowers, most notably the Texas native Yellow Jasmine (looks somewhat similar to honeysuckle but prettier). We saw a few deer (one albino) and a herd of hog. The birds were very plentiful. I would love to do it again sometime but not with an injured foot.
You can read our journal on trailjournals.com
You can see a slide show of our hike on Youtube
at
http://youtu.be/Z__6TToZp_Y
A special thank you to those who support our hike from our fundraising site at crowdrise.com 100 Miles in 10 Days. I would not have been able to continue,especially after spraining my ankle, if I didn't have over 50 people counting on me to live up to my part of the bargain.
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