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February 2005

Photos - Doug Jorgensen

Couple Has Logged Over

9,000 Miles Along U.S. Trails

Ken and Marcia Powers are not exactly your typical fifty-something retirees, spending week upon week touring the USA in a RV or other modem convenience. However, they are definitely distance travelers and down-to-earth ones at that.

Since 1998, the pair has logged some 9,000 miles backpacking through 23 states. “We feel we are privileged to see something special,” says Marcia of the couple’s roughing-it approach to travel. “Look at how many people retire and buy a Winnebago. We just don’t have glass between us and what we are seeing.”

The Pleasanton couple has hiked the Tahoe Rim and the John Muir Trails, walked from Mexico to Canada twice along the Pacific Crest and Continental Divide Trails, and from Georgia to Maine along the Appalachian Trail. At the end of February, they begin their most ambitious trek to date. They will backpack more than 5,000 miles along the American Discovery Trail (ADT), which stretches from Delaware to California.

 Leaving their home Feb. 25, they fly to the Baltimore-Washington International Airport, where another seasoned hiker will pick them up and drive them to Delaware. There, two days later, from Cape Henlopen State Park on the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of Delaware Bay, the couple will begin their cross-country backpacking trip. Planning to average more than 20 miles a day, they expect to arrive at trail’s end in Pt. Reyes in early October.

They will be trailblazers of sorts on the relatively new ADT, the nation’s longest recreational trail that ties together country roads, railheads, canal towpaths and hiking paths. ADT has been described as a “Route 66” for hikers, mountain bikers and horseback riders, passing through vast stretches of greenbelts, countryside and urban areas such as Washington, Cincinnati, Denver, and San Francisco.

“Nobody has had a single season on the American Discovery Trail backpacking,” says Marcia. “One person ran it, but had a support team. Another couple has done it (backpacked). It took them two seasons to hike it. They did half one year and half the next.”

The Pleasanton duo spent a good portion of last year preparing for their cross-country hike, toning their bodies by hiking 20 East Bay Regional Park trails and taking 25-mile-a-day training hikes. They also did a significant amount of pre-trip planning, assessing terrain and weather conditions along the route they plan to travel this year, identifying re-supply towns, and stashing water in Utah and Nevada, the only places they think they might run into trouble.

Instead of mailing food packages to themselves at post offices en route as they have done for other backpacking journeys, they intend to pick up food at mini-marts in re-supply towns. Each will carry about a 20-lb backpack laden with sufficient supplies to tide them over between towns. They’ll lug camping gear, maps, a GPS location device, a watch with a built-in compass, and a gizmo called PocketMail, which they can connect by modem at telephones they come upon along their route to send and receive email. Friends, family, other hikers, and the curious can track their progress through messages posted to the Internet. [www.trailjournals.com/GottaWalkADT]

“We are trying to keep careful records for other hikers that come after us of where we cache water and what we use for re-supply towns,” says Marcia. “They (other hikers) are taking notes on what we do. If it works out, they will do the same thing. If it doesn’t, they will learn from our mistakes.”

Marcia says that hiking America’s trails is something she and her husband of 30-plus years “just fell into it.” Says she: “We are so fortunate to be fit enough to hike, and we are incredibly fortunate to be married to somebody who wants to go with us.”

Their journey together as backpackers began in 1998 shortly after Marcia, to celebrate her 50^th birthday, undertook a 22-mile day hike with Ken of the Sierra range’s Mt. Whitney, the highest mountain in the “lower 48” states.

“At trail crest, which was 13,600 feet, we could see over into the western area, the back country of Sequoia (National Park),” said Marcia. “It was like a lunar landscape. It was so different and incredibly beautiful. Ken said, ‘Well, you can go there but you have to backpack five or six days just to get there.’ And I said, ‘I’ll do it.’”

Ken had hoisted backpacks on numerous occasions as a Boy Scout troop adult leader and had gone on 50-mile Scouting hikes. Marcia, although a trail runner, was a stranger to backpacking.

For Marcia’s inaugural hike, the couple chose Henry Coe State Park in Santa Clara County. The largest state park in northern California, Henry Coe has been described as “a backpacker’s dream come true.” Over 87,000 acres of open space offer hikers rugged terrain with trails across picturesque countryside and along ridges and canyons. The park also provides an abundance of plants and animals to observe and photograph.

Nature, though, played an April Fool’s jest on Marcia on her first backpack outing. “We went out April 1st, during spring break,” said Marcia, who was still teaching flute privately (she has since retired). “It snowed. It hailed. It rained. The wind was so strong it blew Ken’s pack cover away, so I put my pack down and ran back up the hill and looked for it. I found the pack cover and a towel that we did not even know was gone. They were coated with snow.”

Ken remembers that the tent cover blew off the first night, allowing rain to pour into the tent through the mesh top. “By morning the air mattress I was sleeping on was almost floating in two inches of water,” said Ken.

Said Marcia of that experience: “We made lots of mistakes. We didn’t plan our food carefully. Our map was floating in the water when we got up in the morning so we had to dry everything out. We learned to put everything in plastic bags.”

However, she said, despite the drawbacks, the pair was able to keep to their target of 10 miles a day for their weeklong outing. “If we didn’t get the 10 miles a day, I was going to be really, really upset.”

A few months later they were ready to tackle the rugged John Muir Trail, a 211-mile stretch from Yosemite Valley to the top of Mt. Whitney and then out to Lone Pine. They had so much fun, said Marcia that they decided to tackle the John Muir Trail the following year.

On the web site they maintain to chronicle their hikes (http://www.GottaWalk.com), they describe their John Muir Trail experiences in September 1998 and 1999 as being “far more different than we would have expected.” As they put it, “The wildflowers were still in full bloom the first year. Many places were so beautiful we felt like we were hiking in a garden. Many of the passes still had bits of snow in them.”

 They remember Wanda Lake, north of Muir Pass, as being thick with gnats, grasshoppers and frogs. “We covered our faces and hiked quickly beyond the lake,” they wrote.

When Ken retired from Chevron as a data base analyst in 1999, Marcia told him, “We are not going to stay home. We are going hiking.”

The next year, they upped the ante on their distance, deciding to backpack from Mexico to Canada along the 2,658- mile Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail. They left the Mexican border April 20, arriving at the Canadian border September 21.

Their route hugged the often-remote crest of the Cascade Range and Sierra Nevada. It is a route traveled in its entirety each year by only “a few determined people,” they note on their web site. “We kept reminding ourselves that we were some of these determined people.’”

On their journeys they have met other hearty souls. Two that stand out were encountered picking blueberries on a remote part of the Pacific Crest trail in Washington state. Marcia describes them as “two tiny, white-haired grandmothers.” One was using a walker, the other two canes.

Although admitting hiking is not a social experience for her, Marcia says that meeting people on the trails or through response to their GottaWalk web site “is something that is really wonderful.”

Marcia, though, prefers distance hiking--”through hikes,” she calls them--on trails that are remote, that do not attract hordes of hikers, and that offer precious solitude and time to reflect on life and nature. She got her wish beginning in the summer of 2002 on the Continental Divide Trail (CDT), a some 2,800-mile stretch through the south- western deserts, past snow-capped peaks through Colorado, Idaho and Montana into Canada. The Powerses’ journey took five and one half months.

They note on their web site that the CDT was “much more challenging” than the Pacific Crest Trail. “The scenery along the trail varied from the high mountain vistas to miles of sagebrush,” they wrote. “The divide was sometimes a carved knife edge, but many times was a wide, gentle slope.” Because the air was so clear on the great plains of eastern Montana, they could see the curvature of Earth. And there was awesome isolation.

“We saw so few people the last month that Marcia was ready to take a job at Starbucks so she could say ‘Good Morning’ to lots of people,” said Ken. “We saw nobody for like six weeks. In 900 miles we saw 15 backpackers, and ten of them were in one day at the trail head.”

If the CDT was Marcia’s idyllic trail in the sense of providing the ultimate in isolation, the Appalachian Trail (AT) they hiked in 2003 was the opposite. “It really didn’t appeal to me at all,” said Marcia. “There were too many people. It wasn’t remote. You could hear lawn mowers, barking dogs and traffic practically every day. It was like a nice walk in a city park, a very clearly defined trail. You couldn’t get lost if you tried. I like something on the edge that I can put some effort and thought into.”

They hope to get another taste of the wistful solitude they seek when they begin their walk across America next month.