If today's hiker finds the roller-coaster trail exhausting at times, there's some comfort in knowing that it's hardly a new experience. A German adventurer named Friedrich Gerstäcker tramped through the Ozarks in the early 1840s and wrote in his journal (probably while soaking his tired feet) that the mountains "do not appear very high, because only the top of the next division is visible; but when one is surmounted, another and another arise, and people maintain that when you come to the highest there is always one more."

Ernst describes the trail as "challenging but not difficult. There are a number of thousand- foot climbs, but they're contoured so it's not steep." Experienced backpackers who cache food or arrange resupply drops can hike it end to end in ten days to two weeks, usually in solitude enough to satisfy any modern-day Thoreau, an advantage of being in a remote part of a mostly rural state. But hundreds of people use the trail for only a few hours or for overnight trips, finding as much pleasure as the fittest long-distance walker. The trail highlights—all the waterfalls, rock formations, deep hollers, and swimming holes—can be reached in day hikes from trailheads.

While beauty and peace generally reign over the trail, it's not immune to problems or controversy. In recent years millions of red oaks in the Ozarks have died from poorly understood factors lumped under the name oak decline. To keep the trail clear, association volunteers carry chain saws, sometimes for miles, to cut fallen trees that can number dozens each year per mile of trail. In addition, a more open tree canopy lets more sunlight hit the forest floor, promoting fast-growing grasses that have to be attacked with handheld weed trimmers.

Almost from the beginning there have been plans to extend the trail northward to the Missouri state line. There it would meet the Ozark National Recreation Trail, a similarly named trail now under construction, making possible a hike from St. Louis nearly to Oklahoma. To do so, though, would require running the trail 14 miles through a wilderness area along the Buffalo National River. Though it originally supported the plan, the National Park Service later vetoed trail construction, backed by local conservation groups who want to minimize human presence in the wilderness. Ernst says he values the wild in wilderness as much as anyone, but thinks the goal of a 700-mile hiking trail across mid-America merits a 14-mile exception to the rules.