Appalachia, Winter/Spring 2007
When I started Backpacker magazine in March 1973, the baby boomers’ boom in backpacking had brought such a huge increase in numbers to the trails that new backpackers in that year exceeded the total number of all backpackers on the trails just four years earlier. The number of backpackers has more than doubled since then, bringing more than 15 million pairs of their boots onto the trails every year. If that doesn’t startle you, consider this: More than 31 million hikers, including backpackers, use our backcountry trails annually.
To put these numbers into perspective, right after World War II, I used to have the trails pretty much to myself on any summer weekend. There were so few of us that it was unlikely to see other hikers on even the most popular trails before Memorial Day or after Labor Day.
By the late 1950s, I ran into not just an occasional hiker, but two or three others on any summer weekend. With the increased numbers came increased trashing. It was common to find a long string of gum and candy wrappers strewn along a popular trail, not to mention tissues and cigarette butts. Campsites were beginning to become worn from over-use. In the 1960s, campsites on the Appalachian Trail (AT) had as many as 128 hikers camped on a busy summer weekend.
Most of the increasing numbers of hikers were on trails for the first time. I became so concerned about the impact of this rapidly increasing trail use that I decided to do something about it. That eventually led to my starting Backpacker magazine. Here is the way that story unfolded.
The Spark of an Idea
One morning on the AT in 1963, I woke up in camp, yawned, stretched, and heard the patter of rain on my tent. I changed my hike plans, snuggled a little deeper into my sleeping bag, and decided to cook breakfast beneath the tent fly. The only others at this campsite that morning were some teenage boys standing around a campfire. I barely could see them through the trees.
While eating my oatmeal, it began raining more earnestly, causing the other campers to scurry out of sight. At first I paid little attention. But while savoring my coffee and beginning to peel an orange, it dawned on me that those campers had taken down their tent and left camp with no intention of returning to put out their fire.
I got annoyed, finished my orange, drew on my pants, and went over to put out their fire. I saw that they had scattered tin cans, paper plates, cups, forks, spoons, scraps of food, assorted plastic containers, and wrappers all about their campsite. It took me almost an hour to pick up the rubbish.
To say that I was irritated by the culprits is a gross understatement. I entertained all sorts of sadistic ideas, like, say, shoot them, strangle them, or at least toss them in a pokey until they learned better trail manners. But then compassion won the day. I realized that they obviously were youngsters new to the trails and clearly did not know how to behave in the woods.
The question reverberated wherever I hiked after that: “What could be done to get newcomers to be more respectful of our backcountry?”
I had such mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was pleased that more people were coming out to the woods—for they, too, would become sensitive to preserving the beauty of our backcountry. On the other hand, so many of them were careless and, albeit inadvertently, they were despoiling the backcountry I loved so much.
Naturally, I thought, “There ought to be a law.” Obviously, that was impractical, because it would be impossible to police American’s vast stretches of backcountry. It might even produce the opposite, more trashing, simply out of rebelliousness. Don’t many of us go to the trails simply to get away from rules? How, then, to influence new hikers, if not by laws?
Hiking Heroes I Emulate
One day a year or so later, on a lonely trail in the Presidential Range of New Hampshire, a seemingly grandiose idea came to mind. It was after I had enjoyed a swim in an eddy of a cascading stream. I was stretched out upon a wide flat rock to dry in the mountain sunshine. I virtually had nowhere to go and all the time in the world to get there. It was one of those rare moments in life that make it seem that all’s well with the world. That’s when the idea struck.
I was allowing reveries to swirl idly in my mind. I wondered what it would have been like, for instance, to be a Native American back before the arrival of Europeans. Suppose I’d been hunting all day, taken a refreshing dip in the stream and now was lying out on the rock in the sun.
That fantasy was followed by other visions, one of which found me as a fur trapper taking a break from tracking along my trap line in the olden days of the fur trade. Or what if—I chuckled at the thought—it were a couple hundred years ago, and I were an itinerant preacher stopping for a moment in the lazy afternoon sun to jot down some notes before hiking into town to preach at my camp meeting? And then, and then—I have a vivid imagination—what of all those others who might have lain out on that rock in ages past?
For some reason, don’t ask how, it struck me that one way to influence newcomers would be to fuel their fantasies with heroes they would like to emulate. Other hikers, “newbies” included, had to be something like me—with active imaginations fed by heroes. What if we experienced hikers gave new hikers square-shouldered, jut-jawed backwoods heroes to emulate?
On other hikes, I considered my own heroes and how they had influenced me. I was an admirer of Pinkham Notch hutmaster Joe Dodge, who seemed immortal. He was the most down-to-earth, easy-to-chat-with fellow you could imagine, even when I could not afford $4.75 for a bed at the lodge. By the time I met him he was near the end of his 30-plus-year career at Pinkham; he had become an institution as, pretty much, the founder of the hut-to-hut system in the Presidentials and the weather station atop Mount Washington. I so admired Dodge tales that I had searched and eventually found his famous insect repellant, called something like “Joe Dodge’s Smoke-Eaters’ Firefighters’ Mosquito Repellant.”
- William Kemsley, Jr. is the founder of Backpacker magazine.
The full text of this story may be found in the Winter/Spring 2007 issue of Appalachia
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