Pre-scouting the scouting hike for the long walk...

Although it might be difficult for many of you to believe, I do actually have at least two functioning brain cells that sometimes bump into each other and spark a hint of smarts. When I decided to do the long walk for my mid-life crisis, the two cells whacked into each other long enough to form the coherent thought of... 'boy, you really need to prepare for this thing so you do not end up dead or worse out there.'

Knowing that I don't have a lot of actual backpacking experience... which isn't to say I don't have experience hiking (skipping around the woods with a quart of water and a pocket full of fig newtons) or camping (living for a few days semi-outdoors without the pillow-top mattress)... I fully accept that I need to work into this backpacking (skipping around the woods with a quart of water, a pocket full of fig newtons, and your entire living necessities on your back) thing pretty slowly.

My idea is, that over the next year, I will hike out several of the section of the Ozark Highlands Trail in 2 to 5 day increments. By the time the long walk happens I should have a goodly idea about most of the trail and how to exist out there for at least 5 days. The only real difference between 5 days out there and 20 is setting up food drops along the way.

The start of the process of hiking out sections will be on April 18 and 19. I found a nice 10 mile part in section 5. I figure I can do 5 miles a day pretty easy as a starting point. Today we went out to find the trail head near Ozone where Cyrilee will drop me off and the point where the trail crosses a county road, where she will pick me up the next day...marked them both on her GPS.

Today's expedition also let me take some notes...we found out that at those two points I can text on my cell phone. This is good information to know when the long walk comes around. When I arrive at these points I can turn on my cell phone for 5 minutes and send Cyrilee a text to let her know I'm fine.

As I said before, I installed an app on my phone that lets me text my location. A url results and it can be followed to show a map. I will post these urls and when you follow them, you can click on the "hybrid" tag at the top of the map and see an aerial photo of the place...too cool huh.

The Ozone trail head can be seen here: http://loopt.us/owXbCg

The pick up point can be seen here: http://loopt.us/biEarw

Then we had a late lunch/early supper at Mexico Veijo, it can be seen here: http://loopt.us/Rkx4Tw

Very interesting country out there...the walk should be fun...

take care... t