Day two of my trip started out rainy, and the weather stayed that way. I woke up around 6 in the morning to the same sound I fell asleep to. The patter of rain on my rain fly (video above). I’ve camped in the rain dozens of times in my life, and I never get tired of it. Hiking in the rain on the other hand can be a real pain in the ass. Or pain in the feet as myself and so many others have found out the hard way. Once daylight hit I broke down my hammock and put it away, boiled water for coffee and a mountain house breakfast. I took advantage of the time my food was cooking to collect some rain water for later on the trail, since it was coming down pretty hard. I also grabbed my “lunch” of two nutrigrain bars and a few cups of GORP and put them in the waist strap of my pack. I don’t always feel like stopping to have lunch, depending on how hard the trail has been and how I’m feeling that day. So I like to keep my lunch in an easily accessible area, so I don’t have to dig into my food bag to find it. Once lunch was prepped and coffee and breakfast were devoured I took down my rain fly, shook as much of the rain droplets off of it as possible and packed it up.

By this time, the trail has taken on so much rain that about 40 percent of the trail that I came across on this day looked very similar to the picture above. I spent most of my time finding flat, clear places to hike adjacent to the actual trail in a futile attempt to keep my shoes and socks dry. In the end they only stayed dry for about the first 5 miles. At around mile 4 I started to feel the morning coffee doing what morning coffee does, and just as I was lamenting the fact that I was going to have to dig a hole in the mud and try to answer natures call. I came around the corner of the trail to an empty parking lot and the glowing blue glory of a port-a-john. “Salvation!” was all I could think as I barrelled across the parking lot, stripping my pack off and grabbing my bio degradable wet wipes. Once back on the trail I took off across more sandy trail that was an absolute creek. About half way through the video below, as I was dreading the fact that the rest of the trail might look exactly like this, I realized that I had left my hat on a wooden pole next to the port-a-john when I had stopped.

So after a quick double back, I was back on the trail and making good progress. Eventually, I made it to dryer ground and saw some cool tunnels in the undergrowth and a steady, fast moving, if silty, stream that I could filter water at along the way. It kept raining consistently until around 1:30 in the afternoon when it finally let up and the sun peeked out for about an hour. By this time I had already put in 12 miles and was ready for a small break. After finding a nicely sized downed tree, I stopped for lunch, stripped my sock and shoes off, took the insoles out of my shoes to help them dry faster and began assessing my feet. If you’ve hiked any amount of distance, especially in the rain or in otherwise wet conditions. You know that taking care of your feet and paying attention to hot spots is an absolute must. At this point in my trip I’d been hiking in wet shoes and socks for about 5 hours. To my relief I only had a few hot spots, no true blisters yet. I let my feet dry out for about 30 minutes, threw some mole skin on my hot spots and put my semi dry socks and shoes back on.

About a mile down the trail from where I stopped for lunch I came up on a decent size lake. Well, really a big pond. But where I’m from we call most stagnant bodies of water bigger than something that you’d have in your back yard a lake. This particular body of water was lined with people fishing and had two or three watercraft on it when I went by. The trail skirted the water for most of the next two miles before meandering back into the woods until it came out into an established camp ground. It was pretty barren on this particular rainy Monday in January, but there were still 3 or 4 older couples with campers that were out and about. I was a little disappointed to find a water spout in the middle of the camp site. I’d spent nearly a half hour filtering 4 liters of water earlier that morning. I hadn’t been checking my trail guide since I got to the trail and found how well marked it was, so I had forgotten that it mentioned running water this early in the trail. Once out of the campground the trail followed a paved road for about the next mile. It was great to be on dry level ground again, but about the time I’d hit the campground it had started sprinkling and clouding up again.

Once I got back into the woods I found myself on trail that was between 1-2 inches of standing water. My shoes didn’t stay dry for very long and my mood started to dampen a bit with them. I knew coming into this trip that the weather was going to be an issue, but being drenched from head to toe and walking all day has a way of bringing you down to a low spot, especially when you’re on the trip by yourself. By 3:30 in the afternoon I’d gone 15 miles, even through the rain and the soggy trails I was still close to putting in my first 20 mile day. So I buckled down, started my war chant in my head and started knocking out the miles. By mile 18 I was aching everywhere, my feet felt like they were worn down to blister covered bone. But putting in 20 miles in a day was something I knew I had to do if I was going to finish the trail in my allotted time, so I kept my war chant going in my head and kept plugging away until I found myself staring down mile marker 26, letting me know that I could, in fact, walk 20 miles in a day while carrying a (probably 40 pound when soaked with rain) pack and battling wet feet.

It was around 5:45 when I finally found a suitable place to set up my hammock, the area around mile marker 26 is rife with standing dead trees and I knew that strong thunderstorms were incoming. So I wanted to be as far away from any potential widow makers as possible. There was quite a bit of undergrowth that I had to clear from the space before I could get the hammock up comfortably and set the rain fly. Doing this in the rain isn’t the most fun thing in the world when you’re racing quickly fading light. I set up the rain fly first so that I could get my hammock up without getting pelted by rain. I ended up setting up the hammock by head lamp. At this point I was so exhausted that I skipped dinner, stripped out of my soaking clothes and climbed into my hammock to call my wife before calling it a night. I promised myself a nice big breakfast after my phone call as I laid up in the hammock, listening to an audio book as the wind rocked me into a trance before more heavy storms rolled in. This day was miserable for the most part, but I proved to myself that I can do 20 miles in one go, and that meant the world to me at that moment.

If you’re interested in hiking the Lone Star Trail, additional information and directions are available in the link below.                                                                                                      http://lonestartrail.org/

Happy Trails!