Trail bosses
Ridgerunners learn their patch of the Appalachian Trail like the back of their hand --
keeping track of trash, fallen trees and eccentrics.
By Dan Fesperman
Sun Staff
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 Almost
there: A solitary hiker
heads down the last 100 miles of the Appalachian Trail before it ends in Maine. (AP photo)
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They sit in the back room of a farmhouse in the woods, the veterans alongside the
rookies. Soon enough they'll be walking the beat, gearing up for the long, hot summer. But
first, a briefing on current conditions:
"We've got a guy coming south out of Massachusetts," says the briefer.
"He's going into shelters and talking about Armageddon and the end of the world. It
scares some people. Before long he's going to run into a northbounder who is camouflagued
and traumatized by the gulf war."
"I've seen him," somebody says. "Says he's Special Forces, an explosives
expert. Calls himself 'Rainbow 6.' "
"Fortyish?" asks another. "Talks a mile a minute?"
"Yeah. That's him."
More news follows: Multiple sightings in Pennsylvania of "The Naked Warrior,"
wearing only boots and a backpack. Reports of a deaf guy named Robert, who cons his way
into homes then becomes an extended houseguest. An update on the Buff Chef, who invites
the unsuspecting for a hot meal, then disrobes, saying he always cooks in the nude.
Judging from the roll call of characters and cranks, this might be a police precinct
house at shift change. Look around, however, and mostly what you see are young guys in
shorts and T-shirts, hiking boots and bandanas, a lean crew of the hale and hearty armed
only with wit, tact and strong legs trained to run quickly out of harm's way.
It is a gathering of about 19 "ridgerunners," who every summer serve as a
sort of Neighborhood Watch for the Appalachian Trail, the fabled mountain footpath
stretching from Maine to Florida. The briefing comes courtesy of Robert Gray, the trail's
only National Park Service ranger, and it's part of a training session in May for the
ridgerunnners of the mid-Atlantic states.
From Memorial Day weekend to Labor Day, they and some 30 others to the north and south
are on patrol, rain or shine, serving alternately as the trail's constables, pathfinders,
mediators, naturalists and garbage collectors. Their public: a mobile community of hikers
and campers, which in the course of a sunny Saturday can reach a population of 25,000,
strung out beneath the trees for 2,158 miles.
It is not a job for those inclined toward air conditioning, hot showers and videos on
demand. But if you enjoy long, strenuous walks in the woods well enough to endure clouds
of bugs and three-day downpours, ridgerunning might be your idea of a perfect summer job.
As for danger, one shouldn't get the wrong idea from Gray's briefing. There are plenty
of eccentric characters out there, all right, but a single night of clerking in a
Baltimore convenience store is probably more hazardous than a summer on the trail. The
most worrisome critters a ridgerunner usually encounters are deer ticks carrying Lyme
disease and field mice infesting the trail's 262 open-air shelters, nightly skittering
across sleeping bags and gnawing at stashes of food. Throw in the occasional bothersome
bear, and a fireside chat with "Rainbow 6" seems quaint by comparison.
One of the first things a ridgerunner needs to know about the Appalachian Trail is its
class structure, much in the way that a high school principal must stay abreast of the
cliques and cabals in the hallways.
First there are the day hikers - people who generally pack little more than lunch and a
bottle of water. Stay any longer and you're an overnighter, a nice enough bunch that
includes Cub Scout packs and church groups. These first two groups represent the trail's
proletarian masses, largely pleasant and well-behaved. But among the overnighters is an
invasive element - party-hearty types who gather on weekends near trail junctions with
local highways. This sort thinks nothing of lugging a case of beer several miles up a
steep and rocky path, but would never consider hauling the empties back down the mountain.
Noisy, trashy and sometimes aggressive, they are best approached in early morning, when
their excesses of the previous night tend to make them docile and eager to please.
Section hikers are the next rung up, spending days or weeks at a time on the trail. But
the ruling elite - and the trail's most interesting bunch - is made up of 1,500 or so
thru-hikers, people attempting to walk the entire trail.
It is a rolling society of the footsore and the fetid, fueled by instant oatmeal and
Ramen noodles, and traveling under aliases, or "trail names." The frivilous and
the unprepared are weeded from the field with Darwinian severity, hitchhiking home in
early May from North Carolina and Georgia, leaving excess clothes and food in their wake.
Only a few hundred succeed each year, and most take about five months to finish.
Some have an agenda of personal healing or discovery - the emotionally wounded walking
a comeback trail. Others seek a spiritual path to enlightenment. Many keep journals; and
whenever they meet they break into trail jargon while comparing notes on blisters and
equipment failures.
A trail journal posted a fews years ago on the Internet by a thru-hiker named Gutsy
offers a glimpse of this world, as in this April 4 entry: "One of the interesting
young men I met was Greenleaf, who plays sitar and was trying to be a minimalist. He was
trying to learn how to eat mice so he could live off the trail ... I am learning how to
ignore the mice and not freak out when they crawl over my body. The other hikers here
tonight are Godfather, Turtle, Screaming Knee, Cajun C, Dancing Bear, Swift Step, Zamboni
Two Step. Somebody cooked mushrooms (morels) but I was afraid of getting poisoned so I
didn't eat any."
Later Gutsy came down with Lyme disease. She stopped long enough for antibiotics, then
finished the trail in the fall.
On the fringes of this stratum are what Ranger Gray calls "the walking
homeless," wanderers who virtually live on the trail. Sometimes they take over
shelters for their own. A Virginia woman named Peggy, who told people she was a daughter
of Edward VIII and heir to the throne of England, hung out her laundry and left no room
for anybody, until evicted by the authorities.
"Most of them are harmless," Gray says. "A lot of them are suffering
from paranoid schizophrenia. They'll stay up all night giggling in a shelter, or will have
a religious obsession."
Ah, yes, trail evangelists.
If you're not preached to by one, then you'll find their writings in shelter logbooks.
A hiker calling himself "Israel" left this entry in Maryland's Pine Mountain
Shelter, just off I-70, on June 12: "Both my waterbags busted on the way here, and
since I'm right on the highway, I took that as a clear sign from God I should continue on
a different route." He said he was heading for the Prairie.
Ridgerunners are trained to tread gently around such personalities, but to take careful
note as well, in case trouble develops later.
Perhaps the trail's most famous hiker ever, and one who eventually became a problem, is
Ward Leonard, 39. He began thru-hiking in 1981 and is believed to hold the unofficial
record for the fastest hike - 58 days - for an "unsupported hike," meaning no
one helped feed him along the way. That's an average of about 37 miles a day across the
most rugged terrain east of the Mississippi. One year he did a "yo-yo," going up
and down the trail.
A bit possessive
But as the years passed, Leonard grew possessive of the trail, shouting down hikers or
lecturing them on his achievements. Thru-hikers began calling him Spooky Boy. Two years
ago, he awakened an overnighter at a shelter by shining a flashlight in his face. He
ordered the man off the trail.
Authorities banned Leonard from the trail for two years and helped him get counseling.
But he did apparently make a cameo stop at a trail shelter on a summer weekend trip with
his father. He left behind bar graphs of his hiking achievements in the shelter logbook,
plus a multiple choice quiz about himself.
On patrol
The ridgerunner's role in trail society is mostly advisory. Wearing a hat and a sleeve
patch identifying them as ridgerunners, each patrols a section ranging from 30 miles to 80
miles in length, five days at a time before taking a few days off for a shower, some fresh
vegetables and a beer or two.
Almost as important as the walking is the talking - offering the correct mileage to the
next shelter, directions to the nearest groceries, tips on how to filter your water, the
latest weather report or first aid for hypothermia. Ridge- runners also evangelize,
preaching a dogma called Leave No Trace.
Once encompassed by the phrase, "Take only pictures, leave only footprints,"
LNT has evolved into 36 guidelines in seven categories, discouraging campfires, for
example, and encouraging walkers to plod through puddles rather than tread on the grass.
Now you're not even supposed to leave footprints unless it's on the trail.
The most devout practitioners have extended the old "pack-it-in, pack-it-out"
rule of garbage handling to include solid human waste and soiled toilet paper, which
sounds extreme until you've stumbled across a hiker latrine.
A day on the trail
A ridgerunner's typical weekday might go like the one Eric Kindig had on a recent
Friday. Kindig, 21, a rising senior at Binghamton University in New York, is this summer's
ridgerunner for Maryland's 40 miles of the trail. He was one of the year's last hires made
by the mid-Atlantic office of the Appalachian Trail Conference. He didn't hear about the
job until early last spring from another ridgerunner, John Buchheit, who had dropped by a
meeting of the university's outing club.
Kindig was gung-ho to apply. Then he began considering what it would be like to spend a
summer in a tent. He remembered how he didn't exactly like feeling grimy and dirty after a
few days without a shower, and how he'd generally avoided camping trips when the forecast
called for rain. But the idea of hiking professionally - $280 a week, plus gas money - won
him over, and after about a month on the job he still feels like he lucked out.
During a 10-day walk on a slow Weekday, Kindig crosses paths with fewer than 20 people.
He collects trash in his pack from the shelters, notes the newly fallen trees that need
removal from the trail, makes sure that nothing alarming has been noted in the shelter
logbooks, and checks in by radio from time to time with the nearest state park. He chats
with every passing hiker, noting each in his weekly report.
Having avoided rainy hikes in the past, he welcomed one for his first days on the job
Memorial Day weekend. The bad weather reduced the crowds, letting him get used to the
trail before anything troublesome came up. It also let him work out his equipment
glitches, whittling his pack load from 50 pounds to 30.
Kindig also decided to spend a tutorial day hiking with the legendary Thurston Griggs,
one of the mid-Atlantic's first ridgerunners. Griggs, now 84, spent 13 years in the job,
and knows every curve, slope and side trail in Maryland. He commuted to the job daily from
his home in Arbutus, walking 12 to 15 miles until the trail conference decided to hire
someone younger who'd be willing to spend their nights on the trail as well.
Griggs saw plenty during his tenure - finding three suicide victims was probably the
worst part of the job - and he is still a volunteer in year-round "trail
patrols." That keeps him in touch with his favorite part of the old job, chatting
with thru-hikers, who almost always have an interesting tale.
The bad side
For all the benign eccentricity one finds on the Appalachian Trail, once in a great
while the strangeness turns violent. Gray says nine people have been murdered on or near
the trail since 1974, and each time ridgerunners have been mobilized to help track down
suspects and witnesses. That has proven especially helpful to FBI agents, who were
surprised to discover a world in which aliases - trail names - were common currency among
the law abiding.
It is because of these few incidents that ridgerunners are taught to trust their gut
instincts. When something or somebody seems off, there's probably a reason. Karen Lutz, a
mid-Atlantic representative of the Appalachian Trail Conference, told this year's trainees
of the odd feeling she got seeing a strange man hike by one day 10 years ago on the trail
in southern Pennsylvania.
"He seemed angry, and not quite right. He was carrying two gym bags and a little
trail pack," Lutz said. "The hair on the back of my neck stood up."
Two days later a report came in of a double homicide at the next shelter up the trail.
Paul David Crews, a 38-year-old drifter, was convicted of the killings, and it turned out
he was also wanted for a murder in Maryland. He was the angry guy with the gym bags.
Call for help
Ridgerunners aren't cops, however. That's a frequent message, too. If the trouble ahead
looks potentially violent, call it in on the radio, but avoid confrontation. Such was the
case last summer with the thru-hiker who had the misfortune of being a dead ringer for
Eric Rudolph, the suspected bomber of an abortion clinic and the Atlanta Summer Olympics.
Rudolph disappeared into the woods of the North Carolina mountains and is still at large.
His lookalike was arrested three times on the trail before he finally gave up and went
home. It probably didn't help that some other hiker was signing Rudolph's name into
shelter logbooks.
Sometimes a ridgerunner doesn't need a gut feeling to feel endangered. A disgruntled
mountain man, possibly a marijuana grower worried that his field was about to be
discovered, last year pointed a rifle at a Virginia ridgerunner who quit the job soon
afterward.
But Gray put the prospect of danger into perspective with statistics from an article in
Backpacker magazine:
Odds of being struck by lightning - 1 in 9,090.
Odds of being killed by an airplane crashing into your home - 1 in 250,000.
Odds of being murdered in a National Park - 1 in 20,000,000.
Yet, between all the talk of characters like Rainbow 6 and armed marijuana farmers, one
of this year's hires decided she'd rather not take the risk. Her fellow ridgerunners woke
up for their last day of training to find that she'd quit, leaving only a note behind.
Originally published on Jul 12 2000
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