I'm going to divide it into the northern and southern halves. Officially that's at a place called Hazel Patch, but roughly speaking it's near I-75, and that's easy to find on a map.
Overall, the southern section is much more trail-like with significantly less road walking. I am pretty sure it gets hiked more as well. However, most of the time where there has been actual trail construction, it's been done well. A lot of the northern part is shared with ATV trails with bad footing- mostly loose rocks.
I think the trail is hiked more in winter. Summer would be just too hot. That suggests that their maintenance season is just starting, and I have heard of some work parties out cutting downed trees.
Just to get it over with, the worst section for me was the one just north of Cumberland Falls. That was mostly due to downed trees across the trail.
The best section was from the John Muir Trailhead to the John Muir Overlook, and most of the way down to No Business Creek. Here is a map of that section. See all those funky toothed lines? Someone or some group that really knew what they were doing planned, laid out and built these six miles of trail. The treadway stays almost exactly on the same grade for that entire distance, following the contour lines. Once past John Muir Overlook, there is a very steep drop down to No Business Creek. There is a little bit of rock scrambling at the very top of that, and a ladder. In fact, this is the location where we invented the word "twitchbacks" for too-short runs on switchbacks. However, after just a few of those, the runs lengthened and the descent down to the creek was smooth. The trail had to drop 400 feet in 1.1 miles of trail. Overall, they did a great job with that.
I do want to commend the trail builders for some excellent rock work. We saw a lot of hand-built stone steps like these. These are a lot of work, and they take time to do them correctly.
There were also a number of stone water channels. Here's a really nice one. The water stays in the channel and hikers just step over.
There were also some good retaining walls to hold benching in place.
The only rockwork that wasn't as good was water bars. Most of those were not overlapped correctly, which let water drain through them, not off the trail.
Overall, I have to say that the Sheltowee Trace is a fairly rugged hiking trail that has some challenges- as a National Recreation Trail, they have to accept more mixed use than some trails. Sharing with ATVs and horses is really hard on a treadway. As for the rock scrambling... mostly I thought it was fun, but a potential hiker should be aware that there are a few difficult places.
I managed to do the entire trail as a series of day hikes with some 13+ mile days. And there are a couple of sections where you can't shorten that. We used the FarOut App and were very glad we had it, as some of the junctions were not marked very well.
It was quite dry when we hiked, but the trail would be a big challenge in the spring. There are hundreds of stream crossings with no bridges, and some of them would be impassible in the spring. In most instances of potentially dangerous crossings, there was an alternate high-water route, but not everywhere.
All-in-all, I had a blast! My knees did NOT like the 13+ mile days, but they survived. I was pleased at how well the body held up given its age and previous wear and tear. I did have a bail-out plan if I decided I couldn't do it all after the first half. But other than being pretty tired, I never even contemplated quitting.
In other news: I almost did a day's work today. Got the laundry done. The pile in the kitchen is very small now. I wrote one of my newspaper columns.
 | See Sheltowee Trace- Fini! |
