Article Last Updated: Thursday, January 30, 2003 - 5:27:07 PM MST

Thousands of miles

Retired couple ready to hike third long distance trail 
By Zoe Francis - CONTRIBUTOR

Imagine walking 2,658 miles. Twenty-mile day after 20-mile day. Week after week. Month after month. From the Mexican border to Canada.

For most people making such a journey along the Pacific Crest Trail  would be an accomplishment of a lifetime. Ken and Marcia Powers  hiked the almost 3,000-mile Continental Divide Trail for good measure.

The retired couple - Ken is 58 and Marcia is 55 - aren't anywhere close to being finished. They plan to tackle the Appalachian Trail this summer. Every step is worth it, they say.

"You never know what's around the next corner," Marcia says with an edge of excitement. "It could be water or it could be a drop-off of 3,000 feet down. Even walking through a burned forest has its own strange kind of beauty."

"I enjoy just being out in the woods and never knowing what you're going to see - what vistas, what wildlife, what plants or flowers," Ken adds.

Ken figures they've seen more than 1,000 elk, five bears and at least a dozen moose on their most recent hike. They've spotted bighorn sheep and wild horses. They've seen more small animals, such as weasels and ermine, than they can count.

The couple, married 35 years, initially conquered the Pacific Crest Trail in 2000, a trek that took them nearly five months. Two years later, they hiked the Continental Divide Trail, a nearly 3,000-mile hike that took five months.

"The views and being in nature, seeing the wildlife and the wildflowers," Marcia says, as her voice trails off with the memories. "The terrain is the hardest part. Sometimes you have really easy walking, like nice forest duff. It's a combination of dirt and pine needles. Sometimes you have fist-sized rocks that shift. Ups and downs I recognize are going to be there, and I just go with it, but difficult terrain is hard."

Ken and Marcia each wear out a pair of shoes every 500 miles or so. That averages out to five pairs of shoes per person on each border-to-border hike. Toss in another pair for training, and they easily wear out a dozen pairs in a few months.

The key to tackling such a lengthy hike is trying not to think about how many thousands of miles lay ahead, Marcia says. Instead, she takes the months-long journeys one day at a time.

"A lot of distance hiking is mental," she says. "You have to be disciplined. You think that tonight I go to bed and tomorrow I have to get up and do another 20-plus miles. I enjoy it, but it is a tremendously demanding schedule and a lot of work."

The couple didn't have a long-term dream to hike from Mexico to Canada twice in three years. It simply evolved from their mutual love of hiking and enjoying the great outdoors.

Ken, a retired data base analyst for Chevron, has long been active with the Boy Scouts. He routinely took troops on 50-mile hikes. Marcia, a stay-at-home mom who taught flute lessons, preferred getting her exercise in her regular runs around town.

Neither was an avid hiker in their younger years but both came to enjoy the sport as their two sons, Adam and Luke, grew up and left home.

"I grew up in Montana, and I always hiked there," Marcia recalls. "But those were day hikes. I wasn't aware of distance hikes. Once I heard about it, I said, 'Yeah, I have to do that.' When Ken did his first 50-miler with the Scouts, I was just eaten up with envy."

Marcia attempted her first major hike in October 1998 when she and Ken scaled Mt. Whitney, the Sierra peak that is the highest point in the lower 48 states.

"When we got up high on Mt. Whitney, we could see the John Muir trail coming in from the west side," Ken recalls. "I said, 'You know, Marcia, we could hike Mt. Whitney from that side, but you'd have to learn how to backpack.' "

Marcia was smitten by hiking and gladly accepted the challenge. The couple trained by hiking around town with their loaded backpacks. His weighs about 16 pounds. Hers weighs a mere 10 pounds.

In 1999, they tackled the 210-mile trail that leads from Happy Isles in Yosemite to the top of Mt. Whitney.

They enjoyed their two-week odyssey so much that they eagerly sought a greater challenge. They settled on the popular Pacific Crest Trail that runs from Mexico to Canada. The trail follows the Sierra Nevada and Cascade mountain ranges as it runs through California, Oregon and Washington.

Once the couple settled on a trail, they spent months researching the route and figuring out how to plan for a long-distance hike.

It's about the food

"We are both very organized," Marcia says. "Doing five months of organization is something we enjoy. We end up buying food, clothing and incidentals like Band-Aids and toiletries for five months. We have figured out exactly how long contact solution lasts or how many miles we can get out of a pair of shoes. We figure out how many times we want to eat macaroni and cheese in the next five months."

They experimented with various foods as they hiked around town.

"Do tortillas last for a week? Yeah, they do," Marcia says. "Can you hike with bread in your backpack? It's smashed, but it still tastes good. We always had fresh cheese. It lasts in the pack."

They seek out high-calorie, high-carbohydrate snacks for the trail. Pastas and grains are popular because they cook quickly. Snickers and Pop Tarts pack a high-calorie punch without taking up much space.

While an average adult may burn 1,200 calories each day, Ken says, "we burn 5,000 to 6,000 calories a day. You have to eat 20 to 25 times a day at that rate."

"We learned the hard way that if you don't eat every hour, you pay a price," Marcia adds. "You burn off all those calories and you just crash. We eat to stay ahead all the time." 

The couple estimates they each lose at least 30 pounds on a cross-country hike. Marcia recalls a time on the Continental Divide Trail when she had gotten her hair buzzed in an attempt to stay cool in the Wyoming desert.

"My mother came to see us in Dillon, Montana," Marcia says. "I was very, very skinny, and I had no hair. I ran out to meet her at a motel and she didn't recognize me. We look really emaciated at the end of the hikes. People are shocked at how we look. But we really are incredibly strong. We feel like we can handle anything."

Showers are a luxury that come only every five or six days when they pass through a small town, Marcia notes. They usually get a hotel room so they can clean themselves and their sparse supply of clothes. And they eat. Lots and lots and lots of food.

"We'd go to the grocery store and buy bags of potato chips and candy bars," Ken says. "There were a couple of places where we would eat lunch and by the time we were finished, they'd bring us a dinner menu. We burn so many calories that we cannot carry enough food."

The small towns also are where they picked up the supplies they packaged months earlier. Their son, Adam, mails the boxes based on his parents' hiking itinerary.

The biggest challenge on the trail is finding enough drinking water. They carry a device that purifies even the most revolting puddles of water.

"It's water that they share with cows," says Dick Frendberg, the couple's former neighbor and longtime friend. "It's a puddle that the cows come to drink out of. They not only drink, but they deposit stuff in that water. That's sometimes the only water available."

Frendberg, who now lives in Castro Valley, hiked with the Powerses for half a day when the Pacific Crest Trail cut through Yosemite. On the hike back to his car, Frendberg got caught in a chilling rainstorm. His fingers were so cold he could barely move them enough to unlock his car.

"I only got caught in a rainstorm, but Ken was wading neck-deep in rivers of water that were melted snow," Frendberg marvels. "These are cold, cold rivers. It's really hard to imagine what they've done. It's truly amazing. I admire them for doing it."

So what's next? Possibly the Appalachian Trail, which would give the couple the missing link in a trio of hikes considered the Triple Crown of long-distance hiking in this country. The Appalachian, which stretches from Georgia to Maine, is the oldest, most well defined and most heavily traveled of the three major trails, Ken notes.

"We're not real eager to hike with masses of people," Marcia says, clearly planning her hike strategy. "We might start that one late and go behind everybody. Or go southbound. The two of us can handle whatever comes along together."

- You can read about the hiking duo at www.GottaWalk.com

- Zoe Francis wrote the article