Caleb Jackson and Daniel Griffith walk back and forth. They stop and look around, trying to get their bearings. But the two Appalachian Trail ridgerunners are lost.

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"Where's your dehydrated milk?" Jackson asks a supermarket clerk. The man points a couple aisles down.

I ask how two outdoorsmen could get disoriented so easily. "Oh, we do this every week," Jackson says of their meandering exploration of the store. "It's fun to learn all over again." They spend most of their time alone in the backcountry. Once in town they’re in no rush to complete their errands.

Earlier, they met the rest of their team at the Sunrise Diner in Sheffield, Mass. Every Friday from Memorial Day through Labor Day, AMC's AT ridgerunners crowd around one of the diner's plastic-draped tables. Jackson, Griffith, another ridgerunner, and their two supervisors were there on this late-August day.

Sitting amidst truckers and retirees, the ridgerunners read and re-read the menus, carefully choosing a meal they'd been thinking about for days. With their orders finally placed, the group started planning the coming week. Who would park which car at which trailhead? Who would camp where? What youth groups would be backpacking that weekend? Over omelets and burgers they moved on to what they'd noticed during the previous week: lost hikers, missing trail signs, full privies.

Jackson paused in the middle of the discussion. "Sorry, I lost my thought," he said, staring down at his milkshake. "I've just been looking forward to this so much."

A few hours later, with the sun already setting, the ridgerunners finally hoist their packs and head back into the woods, into their element.

***

The Appalachian Trail swings from New York into Connecticut from the west. It turns north and passes high over mountains and low along the Housatonic River. The trail winds through the northwest corner of the state and, after climbing into the Taconic Mountains, crosses into Massachusetts. After traversing a narrow ridgeline and descending into the low woodlands of South Egremont, it emerges in a pasture behind an 18th-century farmhouse. There, AMC shares office space with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy at its Kellogg Conservation Center. Ridgerunners have patrolled this 63-mile stretch for more than three decades.

In the mid-1970s, federal authorities began designating a 1,000-foot-wide AT corridor through Connecticut, but quickly found themselves in a contentious debate with locals. Landowners complained of litter and vandalism, and hikers camping on private property. Designated campsites suffered abuse. The town of Kent tired of sending its fire department to put out trail fires. The first volunteer ridgerunners began patrolling Connecticut in 1975.

AMC's Connecticut Chapter started working on the AT in 1949. In 1979, it assumed sole responsibility for maintaining and managing 50 miles of the trail. The chapter helped fund the first professional ridgerunners that summer. Across the border, the Berkshire Chapter holds the same responsibility for nearly 90 miles in Massachusetts. The ridgerunners do some trail work, but they also catalog the needs of the trail, campsites, and shelters for chapter volunteers, who do most of the maintenance.

The mountains here have stood for 450 million years; the forest has survived the rise and fall of an iron ore industry and rebounded from heavy logging. The ridgerunners' impact on this resilient landscape is subtle, but three decades of their presence has made a difference. "If you took them off [the trail], next year it might be the same," says Matt Moore, a former ridgerunner who now oversees the program for AMC. But over many years? The trail would widen and wash out, fire rings would dot the forest, and litter would blow through the trees.

Ridgerunners don't have legal authority—no badge, no power to write citations. Instead, they use the "authority of the resource" as their leverage. They try to educate rather than scold, hoping that the camper washing dishes in a stream and the hiker walking off-trail will have a new perspective once they understand the impact of such actions.

Nudging people toward sustainable wilderness habits requires interrupting the very experiences people seek in the backcountry. Still, most hikers seem to appreciate the ridgerunners' presence. Some immediately recognize their uniforms, beige button-down shirts with official sleeve patches ("A.T. Management"), and thank them. Others listen silently, masking interest or annoyance, then hike on. On Saturday, while Griffith gives two thru-hikers directions to a water source, a third bounds by. "Hello, Mr. Ridgerunner!" he says jubilantly.

About 30 ridgerunners work the entire AT each summer. They're concentrated in vulnerable, high-traffic areas. Their "carry in, carry out" and Leave No Trace messages have gradually changed backcountry habits. Recently, technology has also infringed on this wilderness. Griffith and I hike in to the Sages Ravine campsite on Friday evening. The sounds of civilization dim. Then, from the top pocket of my pack, just behind my head, I hear my cell phone buzzing, a reminder of how hard a complete escape is today. Later, zipped into my sleeping bag, I check the day's baseball scores.

The ridgerunners usually work alone, spread out along the trail. But on Saturday morning Griffith and I climb Bear Mountain, the busiest spot on the AT in Connecticut, so I can meet up with Jackson. We sit atop the stone memorial at the summit. This isn't the Connecticut I know, the suburban New York version. Trees and hills and ponds spread out before me.

A rambunctious Boy Scout troop, a few thru-hikers, and several day-hikers pass by. The ridgerunners chat with each. Two middle-aged men climb up to join us. One shouts into his cell phone: "They need wind generators up here—they got nothing!" Griffith and Jackson exchange a glance. After the man hangs up, Griffith politely suggests that he refrain from calls at peaks and viewpoints, where the noise affects the enjoyment of others. After a brief defense, the man falls silent. "You didn't do anything wrong," Griffith assures him. If only he worked on my commuter rail train.

***

Jackson and I head north after lunch. He wears expensive hiking boots that he says fit perfectly on Memorial Day. But he’s hiked 500 miles since. Two weeks shy of Labor Day, his swollen feet jam painfully against the toes of the boots with each stride. Despite the discomfort, he bounces along on the balls of his feet.

After the relative bustle of Bear Mountain, the trail is quiet. Jackson scampers up the sheer rock slabs. I clamber behind on all fours. We chat with an occasional southbound hiker. Atop Mount Race we sit on a boulder and gaze east, across farmland and forest.

Does Jackson suffer from that backpacker's affliction— fretting over every ounce he carries? "Entirely the opposite," he says. As the summer has progressed he's added luxuries to his load. In among his camping essentials, Jackson has tucked an ear of corn, coffee, and at least three paperbacks. He's reading Mailer and Vonnegut and Frank Herbert. The orange handle of a fold-up saw juts from a side pocket. He's carried a small yellow notebook all summer, its waxy waterproof pages now browned with grime and filled with pencil slashes, a tally of every hiker he's met. "Hello, my name's Caleb and I'm one of the ridgerunners in this area," he tells them.

Jackson is a 25-year-old student who fires his own pottery and always leaves a pack in his truck, in case he decides to stop driving and start hiking. He has a hard time settling in during his days off and often ends up sitting outdoors on his porch. But he's no loner. Personable and inquisitive, he enters into conversations smoothly. Moore, AMC's regional trails coordinator for southern New England, gets about 100 applicants for four ridgerunner positions. Many hope to get paid to hike. But he pays hikers to talk. "The interview process is pretty much me trying to scare people away," he says. Jackson wasn't scared. In a few months Moore will rehire him for 2011, this time as field coordinator.

On the trail Jackson sees everything. He bends and swipes up litter I wouldn't have noticed: candy wrappers, water bottles cast into the bushes, and flecks of blue foam shed from a sleeping pad. He collects it all in a plastic bag. The ridgerunners remove about 275 gallons of trash in three months, including an abandoned set of luggage and a 5-speed American Flyer bicycle that Jackson occasionally rides.

Jackson and I complete our hike at the Glen Brook Campsite, a spongy clearing shaded by giant hemlocks. A group has set up camp in one corner. Jackson strides over and introduces himself. Half the party is off searching for water—in the wrong direction. He points across the clearing toward a nearby spring. It's been a dry August and that trickle is the best water available.

In building their campfire, this group collected only thin sticks—nothing thicker than a wrist—and Jackson compliments them. They know what they’re doing and seem unlikely to be destructive. He wishes them a good night and we head to the opposite end of the clearing to give them privacy. A rustling in the woods interrupts our chat. A backpacker crunches from the underbrush into the clearing.

"Uh-oh," Jackson says. "His beard's bigger than mine. That's when I have trouble." He rubs his own beard, brown and close-cropped like his hair. "This is my merit badge." Then he calls out: "Hello! I was hoping I could talk to you about walking off the trail."

The man grumbles a reply. He's looking for water and scowls at the interruption.

"It kills the vegetation," Jackson continues.

"There's not much in there to kill," the man snaps back. He hikes off.

The man's white beard suggests he might be able to recall this corner of New England in wilder times, when the number of hikers seemed too small to do much damage. No wilderness management rules existed. No college kids monitored hiker behavior. But highways expanded, populations grew, and backpacking boomed. The collective footprint of hikers spread. Jackson and his colleagues will interact with more than 5,000 hikers by summer’s end.

Jackson figures out hikers' baseline knowledge, then offers them something new. When the other campers pass by to fill water bottles from the spring, he strikes up another conversation.

"You going to brush your teeth tonight?" he asks. The concentrated acidity of a puddle of toothpaste kills what it lands on, Jackson explains. The campers can dilute their toothpaste in their mouths, then spray it out widely.

"That I didn't know," one of them says. Neither did I.

***

On Sunday, I awaken first and have just finished my oatmeal when I hear the hum of a zipper. Jackson sleeps in an enclosed hammock, a giant black pea pod strung up between trees. A former ridgerunner, after watching Jackson emerge one morning, said it looked like a giant manta ray giving birth. Two feet appear, then Jackson slips to the ground.

"Is there a sump here?” I ask, not wanting to dump my rinse water in the wrong spot. There isn't.

"You're not going to like it," Jackson says, "but one of the Leave No Trace recommendations is..."

I don't need him to finish. "Drink it?"

The apple-cinnamon-flavored water goes down pretty easily.

We chat over coffee. He's still bothered by the previous evening's encounter. Rarely do his interactions become confrontational, he says. He wonders if he was at fault. Then he returns to a question I'd asked during dinner. Do the days on the trail become a grind? Yeah, it becomes taxing, he says. At home he can choose what to eat, what television channel to watch. "But," he says, "I can't hear the wind."

Finally, I stand and hoist my pack onto my shoulders, ready to head home myself. We shake hands and I begin walking. "Stay on the trail," he shouts after me. I do, and soon I'm picking something out of the fallen leaves: A fleck of blue foam. Farther down the trail, a crumpled Band-Aid. I tuck them in my pocket and keep hiking.