By Barney “Scout” Mann

“When I walked the trail my boots were three-and-a-half pounds … apiece.”
- Teddi Boston

“My pack would get upwards of seventy-five pounds.”
- Eric Ryback

“Talk about stoves, our Svea 123s sounded like a flight of F4 Phantom jets taking off.”
- Jerry Goller

“We were not out there for the party, because there was no party to be had.”
- Billy Goat

This year marked the tenth Annual Day Zero Pacific Crest Trail Kick Off event (ADZPCTKO or Kick Off). At age ten, the annual Kick Off event is not only alive, it’s thriving. This year, the weekend thru-hiker send-off was so popular that registration closed more than one week early – all 600 overnight spots at the campground had beenclaimed and for three days (April 25 – 27, 2008) Lake Morena County Park’s sleepy venue of lakeside campsites was transformed. Hikers created an instant Levittown made up of hundreds of ultralight tents (vastly outnumbering cars and the occasional motor home.)

Want to play PCT Jeopardy with 200 newfound friends?  Kick Off’s the place. Want to attend trail classes with standing-room-only crowds? Kick Off’s the place. Want to buy the latest ultralight gear, talk to a ranger, give the PCTA a piece of your mind (or a big donation), see the PCT Class of 2008 pose for their group photo, eat, eat again, and have an old-fashioned good time? Kick Off‘s the place. At age ten, Kick Off is healthy, blooming, and at times pleasantly rowdy.

While there were numerous highlights, among the top was the Saturday panel discussion featuring four trail pioneers – Eric Ryback (who, in June 1970, missed his high school graduation to hike the PCT), Teddi Boston (the first women to solo thru-hike the PCT), Jerry Goller and Billy Goat (both lifelong hikers). This foursome’s experience is staggering: combined they have well more than a century’s worth of trail know-how and if you add up their trail miles, they’ve carried a backpack nearly twice around the globe’s circumference or close to 50,000 miles.

In the early 1970s, Eric Ryback was in high demand and flown hither and yon to speak about his 1970 PCT hike and his book The High Adventure of Eric Ryback – Canada to Mexico on Foot, which inspired many to follow in his footsteps. “I was venturing out into the unknown,” Ryback now remarks regarding his legendary hike (said to be among the first-ever thru-hikes of the PCT, if not the first). Rybacks’s appearance at Kick Off marks the first time in two decades that he has come before a group to talk about hiking. (Welcome home, Eric.)

Fellow panelist Teddi Boston was the first woman to solo thru-hike the PCT. Hiking north to south, Boston completed the PCT in 1976. At the time, she was in her forties and a mother of four. “I didn’t see a single person in Washington State,” she remembers, “I snowshoed the whole thing.”

Now aged 61, panelist and founder of BackpackerGearTest.org Jerry Goller has been backpacking his whole life and comments “even in the Marine Corps, I was in the infantry.” Of the early days of backpacking he says, “I hiked for ten years before I found another person that wasn’t armed.”

The final panelist is so at home on trails (in fact he spends most of each year hiking) that he prefers to be referred to only by his trail name: Billy Goat. Billy Goat has hiked more than 25,000 miles in his lifetime including thru-hikes of the Pacific Crest Trail (at least four times), Appalachian Trail, and Continental Divide Trail. “As short as 15 years ago,” he says, “if someone had a cellular telephone in their pack they wouldn’t break it out. It was taboo. They would sneak out back someplace and make a call.”

The panel discussion with these trail pioneers was moderated by Greg “Strider” Hummel, longtime Kick Off coordinator and PCTA volunteer. Here are just a few of the highlights.

Greg Hummel: “Can you talk a little bit about gear? How do you think it’s evolved over the course of the years?”

Jerry Goller: “On one level the gear hasn’t changed at all… we still carry packs, we still carry sleeping bags… I would say that water purification and trekking poles are the greatest departure from what it used to be

Eric Ryback: “Yesterday I was introduced to extremely light-weight packs. I marveled. I didn’t realize how far they’ve taken it… I wanted to call my wife and say ‘I’ll see you in five months.’”

Goller: “Of course, if you get your pack weight down to around ten pounds almost anything is comfortable. You can almost carry it in a purse… With our Svea 123 [stoves] you couldn’t hardly hear yourself think if you had enough people there trying to boil water. Today I use Esbit tabs and my stove weighs almost an ounce.” 

Teddi Boston: “My boots were three and a half pounds apiece. Because I was a math major, I was trying to figure out how many pounds of boots I was picking up every mile, multiply it by the number of miles I was doing every day. Before you know it, I figured out how many tons of boots I was picking up.” [Though Teddi did the math in her head, we had to use a calculator: At 35 steps per 100 feet, Teddi lifted three-and-a-quarter tons of boot every mile. Over her 2,500-mile hike, that was 4,620,000 steps and 8,035 tons in boot weight alone. Did we get it right, Teddi?]

Billy Goat: “Many of us hike this Pacific Crest Trail … carrying what we must have. A Global Positioning System… Whatever happened to the compass?  … Several of us, not me, have PocketMail. We communicate with each other up and down the trail and at home with a PocketMail device. Some of you folks have them. You know how they work… I have no idea how they work [much laughter] and what’s this thing we have coming out of our ears? A speaker, and this little thing in our pocket called an MP3 player and I don’t know this terminology, but we have all this music or books, we can listen to books as we walk and I guess that eliminates any bird sounds we might have going on.”

Boston: “I didn’t even carry a flashlight because I would have to have batteries for it. So you figure out where everything is in your pack and you put everything back where you got it and you can do it in the dark.”

Goller: “We’ve got water filters instead of Halizone tablets which would choke a buzzard and didn’t even really work that well for that matter.”

Hummel: “What about the increasing number of hikers and how have the numbers changed our view of what we’re doing when we go out there?” 

Boston: “Well I think today that there are so many more people on the trail that you do form better relationships than when I walked it. I didn’t see a single person in Washington State … I met people in the Columbia River Gorge and around Crater Lake and then I didn’t see anybody until I got to California. While I was alone I was never lonely because I don’t believe in being lonely. There’re too many murder mysteries to read. I even read Helter Skelter out there.”

Ryback: “I would have enjoyed more companionship… Whenever I did meet people I really wanted to cling on to them and stay with them and I’d really be saddened when we had to part ways … Something I observe right here is the camaraderie of the hikers… I would have longed for that. I had very few people that I saw and I think it’s marvelous.”

Billy Goat: “There was a time when Eric hiked and several of us… well, we were not out there for the party, because there was no party to be had. We were out there to hike, to be there on the trail… to be in the mountains, progressing along the way. That was the objective … [Today] people … are not so much interested in what’s between here and Warner Springs, as they are interested in Warner Springs.”

Hummel: “Forty years ago [when the National Trails System Act established the PCT as a National Scenic Trail] the amount of information available for someone looking to thru-hike was almost nonexistent. Today, anyone looking to long-distance hike has this huge arsenal of information. What do you think about this knowledge explosion?”

Billy Goat: “We can look up all sorts of information concerning the trail and almost live it vicariously through the Internet.”

Ryback: “It’s wonderful. I looked for everything I could get my hands on when I planned for it. It’s like night and day today … You know there’s a pro and a con to it, but I think more information is better. It’s much easier. You go online, Google or whatever, versus the old way of writing a letter and waiting for the Forest Service to send you the map.”

Audience: “I want to know if back then there was such a thing as trail angels?  Did any of you get picked up and taken home by strangers?”

Boston: “No. I never got picked up by a stranger.”

Audience: “The number two pencil survived the computer age. What piece of gear would you immediately put back in your backpack right now?”

Boston: “I would definitely keep my compass… and I’d keep a darn good sleeping bag too.”

Looking towards the future, the panel had this to say:

Goller: “I’m going to predict that not far away we will have electric sleeping bags.”

Ryback: “They already have an electric jacket.”

Goller: “Hiking is still hiking and I always say I’ve accomplished my goal when I put my foot on the trail.”

Yes and thank goodness — hiking is still hiking. Much appreciation goes to this distinguished panel and to all those who made Kick Off possible.

Acknowledgments: Many thanks to David “Mooch” O’Brien for transcribing the panel’s hour-long talk.