The River to River Trail Society would like to extend a sincere THANK YOU to Karl Van Scyoc and his 4-5 buddies that came to Southern Illinois to hike the R2R trail in March 2023 from the Houston, TX area. Karl is the President of the LONE STAR HIKING TRAIL CLUB which is proponent for the 130 mile long Lone Start Hiking Trail north of Houston. As an active member of the club, Karl recognized the difficulty of maintaining a long trail and the challenge to know where maintenance is required, especially because of downed trees that can be anywhere along the trail. As a result, Karl captured GPS coordinates for 23 areas where trees were impacting their ability to hike the R2R. Karl also described one area that was difficult to get through because it was a pine tree blow down. He also expressed difficulties following the trail for the first mile after Rock Creek due to excessive brush in the area.

Karl and his buddies didn’t just hike the main R2R trail, but started at Battery Rock and hiked to the intersection near High Knob and then down to Elizabethtown and back before continuing to Grand Tower. This resulted in a hike of about 201 miles instead of the 160 miles most thru hikers do. Karl also documented his entire hike in a very thorough Journal which and be viewed https://www.trailjournals.com/VanScyocR2R2023/. Although very long and thorough, it is interesting and highly recommended reading about how they did the hike.

As a result of this report and the excellent weather conditions on Saturday May 20, 5 members of the Society got together to clear the worst of the blockages reported. Points 6-9 were cleared between Iron Furnace and Bassett Road with point 6 being by far the worst. Point 6 turned out to be a 70 yards long area of about 12-15 blown down pine trees. After our efforts the trail is now passable, however extreme caution should be taken when hiking the area because there are still about 5-6 pine trees significantly leaning over the trail that we were not able to clear. Similar to the blowdowns in the Dutchman Lake area, point 6 will need to be watched in the future. The following report documents where all of the trees are and which ones have been reported to be cleared.