Reprinted by permission of the author.

The 15-mile long Butterfield Trail loop is both in and out of Devil’s Den State Park as it loops through the rugged Boston Mountains, a few miles southerly of Fayetteville, Arkansas.  An excerpt from an Arkansas State bulletin includes the following:

An indicator of the roughness of the terrain was the need to hitch a four-mule team to the stage as it traversed the area.  Waterman L. Ormsby, Jr. of the New York Herald described the area in his book “The Butterfield Overland Mail.”  Ormsby wrote: “It is impossible that any road could be worse.  I might say the road was steep, rugged, jagged, rough, and mountainous, and then wish for more impressive words.”  Although the Butterfield Hiking Trail does not follow the original stage route, it does come within two miles of it.  When hiking the trail, you will get a feeling for what Ormsby wrote.

With that description in mind and the trail-comfort we felt from running trails in the Cascade and Olympic Mountains of the Pacific Northwest fairly fresh in our minds, I folded the map and put it away.  Okay, lets do this.  The fifteen miles would be a nice break from the multiple loops we had been doing around Fayetteville.  We put on the two-bottle fanny packs and headed down the trail.  By the time we got to the we-are-about-half-way point, we were wishing for our mountain trails back in Washington.  Up, down, up, down, and not a straight piece of trail had we seen.  And who on earth designed the rocks—ankle turners about the size of bricks that slide out from under you as you cross and recross creeks.  At one point, we took fifteen minutes walking back and forth looking at a 25-30 foot high bluff before deciding we were supposed to climb around some car-sized boulders and wiggle our way up where a waterfall would be during a wet spell.  At the Holt Ridge Overlook, we sat down and ate a PB&J.  Kathy pointed at the plus signs someone had scratched after the distance listed on the signpost nearby.  We began to wonder if we were in for a long afternoon.  We were.  It was.  That fifteen (15++?) miles took us right at four hours to complete.  Back at the trailhead we both agreed that Kathy’s role as boat anchor had worked and I would return the following weekend to run the loop solo to salvage our family honor.

The following Saturday with grim determination, and a fanny pack, I set out to run the loop properly.  I did not wear a watch.  I just ran hard.  You don’t need a watch to run hard.  Several shin scrapes later, with an earned gouge in the right knee, a leg coated with poison ivy welts, and a throbbing knot on my forehead from a low branch on an oak tree, I was back at the trailhead where Kathy sat reading a book.  “Time,” my raspy voice asked and she looked up.  “3,” she said. “Aha!” “56,” she finished.  Hmmm, was that best I could do?  I had ran a 3:10:10 road marathon in these same hills a few months ago: fitness was not the issue.  And my boat anchor had stayed in port reading a book.  So what happened?  Hmmmm.  Was it the rocks?

Rocks are for sitting on when you pause for a PB&J miles in from a trailhead.  In most areas Gaia scatters appropriately-sized rocks for this energy-replenishing pause.  Along the Superior Trail in Minnesota, the rocks run from huge slabs that disappear into the cold waters of Lake Superior to the chair-sized some round and some not-so-round rocks we sat on eating oranges.  The next day we did the run, walk, jog, climb, shuffle along the Superior Trail—jokingly discussing the sheer torture this route would be by flashlight at o’dark-thirty in the morning.  The challenge of “100 miles in one day” shifted again.

On the trails of Ricketts Glen State Park in Pennsylvania, Mother Nature left many stair steps, most just the wrong size for running, at least for my big feet.  Most were the right size to make you run with arms flailing,  clutching at the air to regain balance.  The 7.2 miles on the Falls Trail sign was just a teaser.  Kathy laughed and said another plus-plus mileage sign and we “ran” on the slippery rocks alongside the waterfalls.  The steepness of the steps demanded we pause if we wanted to look at the many waterfalls.  Steep, slippery, and the wrong-sized rocks, or right-sized, depending on whether you’re a human or a marmot—the randomness of nature remains constant on the trails.

The rocks on the east side of the Mississippi River tend to be slabs or layers tilted this way or that.  Great slabs that break into cubical sort of things that roll out from under one foot only to fall on top of the other (never have understood that sequence).  These are the smooth-grained rocks that form a bond with leaves in the fall to create a wonderfully smooth, warmly colored photograph that is downright evil to run.  Each leaf that falls from a maple, oak, hickory, elm, ash, beech, and all the other deciduous trees contributes to the tension that grips a runner’s toes as slippery surfaces are felt for, hidden holes are felt for, sure footing is felt for step after step after step—and the pace slows and slows and you learn to spell Massanutten like you were born there.

Or you go faster and faster:  about seventeen miles into the Siskiyou Out Back 50k you start the drop from Wrangle Gap to the Siskiyou Gap.  As distant views distract there is a subtle change from a gravel based trail to the broken rocks where the trail was etched into the solid rock of the mountainside.  You are happily unaware that you are now running almost entirely on toe-grabber rocks, the pointy-side-up stuff that grabs at your shoes and—oops, eyes are darting to analyze where to fall, hamstrings are trying to find the surge to get you back to balance, hands are out … balance is, or is not, regained.  The huge uplift blocks of the west coast allow us to enjoy long ascents or descents.  In the three times I have ran down this gorgeous trail, the first time I feel my shoulders relax and think the rocks are no longer grabbing my toes is when I see the aid station through the trees just ahead.  As the downhill ends, a long uphill that will not end until next Tuesday beckons.  The toe-grabbers are behind.  The shade of the pines on a sandy stretch waits.

And then there are the rocks that hitch rides.  You always hope it is a “real” rock when you finally stop to remove whatever it is that is in your shoe and will not shift around to where you can run without noticing it.  We were running a loop on the Frijole and the Smith Spring Trails in the Guadalupe Mountains NP.  The limestone and sandstone layers are easy to see as we run.  But where the hard rocks of the New England areas are slow to erode, the sandstone in the Guadalupe Mountains NP in western Texas is not.  Fine sand and gravel cover most of the trails here, some finding its way into our shoes, or, at least, into my shoe.  I finally say I need to stop.  As always, as I turn my shoe upside down to evict the intruder, I hope a rock of some sort will fall out, not some puny little grain of sand an oyster would use for a pearl starter.

+1  Thanks, John.