Elk River Trail - January 19, 2014

The Elk River Trail is located 2.5 hours south of Kansas City outside Independence, KS. Its a 15 mile point-to-point trail that roughly follows the north shore line of Elk City Lake, and Corps of Engineers lake. Its designated a National Recreation Trail and supposed to be on the most scenic and rugged trail in Kansas. I'd been researching trails closer to Kansas City and it seemed the most promising so I invited some people at work to join me. I had a few express interest but some had things come up last minute and it ended up just being me and Matt P. We decided to try and do 20 miles. 

Back when I was in college I had done a 26 mile day when I got turned around on the Berryman Trail. More recently I'd done 18 miles with a full backpacking load with Chris D. on the Blair Creek section of the OT last May. I've been working out a lot since then and lost about 20 lbs and gained a lot of endurance and have been wanting to really push myself. As for Matt, he had run a 25k trail race at Konza Prairie in the fall but that was the farthest he'd run in a few years too.

So with a big day planned I gathered up a bunch of Larabars, some cheddar Pringles, and a PB&J sandwich. I also tossed in my little emergency kit, first aid kit, and water filter. A lot could go wrong in 20 miles and I suggest always carrying the 10-or-so essentials anytime you step off a paved trail. The Ozark Trail Association has a good list and some good general information on being prepared while on the trail. I decided against bringing my big camera since there wasn't going to be a lot of time for taking pictures.

I met Matt at the office at 6:45AM on Sunday. It was pretty damn cold, only 20 degrees. But by the time we got to the trailhead at 9:30AM it had at least made it up to 32 degrees. We started at the dam on the east side of the lake, near the Fish and Wildlife Office. After giving my GPS time to figure out where we were at and to get our packs in order we finally headed towards the trail around 9:45AM. We had to walk across a picnic area then cross a railroad tie that spanned a small creek before we actually got on the trail. And that's when I ran into trouble. The railroad tie was partly submerged and had some ice on it. I got half way across and then my left foot hit an icy patch and slipped off into the creek. In a flash my right foot slipped off and just like that I was knee deep in the creek. Luckily I caught myself with my trekking pole and didn't fully submerge. Matt had a good laugh and made it across with no problems, making sure to avoid the icy patch I found. After spraining my ankle 50 feet into a trail run a few weeks ago I was beginning to doubt my surefootedness. With that nagging suspicion in the back of my mind we finally started up the trail. 

The trail was fantastic, within the first 5 miles we had passed through a wide variety of land features including tall slots in between rocks, cracks in rocks, overlooks of the lake, hardwood forests, under tall bluffs, and through a prairie. We also saw three armadillos, spooked a covey of quail, disturbed a bald eagle perched in a cove, and had thousands of snow geese fly overhead. I believe Backpacker magazine said this was the best trail in Kansas and I have no reason to doubt them. The rest of the trail was more of the same great scenery. The trail was very, very well marked along the whole route. It was probably over-marked actually. It used blue spray paint blazes and we joked that if you couldn't see at least three from where you were standing you were probably lost. There were blazes on trees, bushes, and the rocks. Even the rocks you stepped on! They did help keep us on track later in the day when we started getting a little loopy but in my opinion they were pretty obtrusive. In addition to the blazes there were signs with numerals at every mile. I had my GPS and Matt was using Run Keeper on his Iphone and neither of them ever matched the mile markers. We decided to just go with the numerals for our "official" mileage. By the end of the day my GPS said we'd done 19.5 miles so it wasn't too far off.

We made pretty good time all day, especially before lunch. Including breaks we were averaging nearly 3 MPH. Speaking of breaks, my GPS showed that we only stopped for 20 minutes total before lunch. We stopped for a minute or two at an overlook to take pictures and a few times to pull out some snacks. We ate on the move. Around mile 8 we were both ready for lunch but pushed on until we got to the 10 mile marker. There wasn't a very good place to sit there so we walked a few hundred feet farther and found some nice rocks overlooking a small creek to stop at around 1:00PM. We both had PB&J sandwiches for lunch. Even that was fast, we were back on the trail after 20 minutes. 

We were feeling pretty good after lunch so we decided to jog some of the easier sections to see if we could negative split the last half of the hike. It didn't take long for that to burn us out though. After about 3 miles of mostly walking and occasional jogging we were feeling pretty tired. We made it to mile 15 before we finally had to stop and have a real sit-down break. I could tell I was getting tired because I was slipping quite a bit in the mud. I also started to lose my appetite. We stopped again about a mile and a half later and I only ate half of a Snickers bar there. I trade the rest to Matt for a handful of Tropical Mike & Ikes. There was a bench on an overlook at the 18 mile mark and we made it there before stopping again. Even has tired as we were, we were still hiking about 3 MPH when we were moving. Our breaks were getting pretty long though. Shortly after leaving the overlook we caught up with a couple from Independence, KS out for a dayhike. They were walking quite a bit slower than we had been but we slowed down and walked the rest of the way out with them. The slower pace really helped because we didn't take any more breaks the last two miles. We got back to the car at 5:05PM. Total time on the trail 7 hours 20 minutes. 20 total miles. That's 2.7 MPH including breaks. Taking out breaks, our average speed while moving was 3.3 MPH.

The couple we hiked out with told us the only restaurants that would be open in town were fastfood and they confirmed there was Dairy Queen so we decided to go there. On the drive into town we saw a line of black birds miles long flying in crazy formations. I've never seen so many black birds in my life. We stopped and watched them but our stomachs were growling so we didn't stop too long. When we got to DQ the couple we had hiked with were there too. After getting some food and ice cream in our bellies it was past dark and we still had a 2.5 hour drive to go. Matt slept part of the way back and he missed seeing a shooting star. It was a fantastic way to end a great day. I ended up getting home around 9:00PM and after a quick shower collapsed into bed.

I have to say that even though the trail is hyped up online I was still surprised at how scenic and rugged it was. I'll certainly be going back, though with a less ambitious schedule to maybe tempt some other coworkers into coming along. It would also be a good place for a easy backpacking trip. There's even road access near the middle where you could cache water if you didn't want to filter anything. All in all a very nice trail.

Just a test

Just a test post. Going to use this as a place to dump all my trip reports so I don't have to post them in multiple places any more. In the meantime feel free to take a look at some pictures I've taken on previous adventures. 

Stay tuned!