BY KURT RHEINHEIMER

Editor in chief Kurt Rheinheimer and his wife Gail have gone day-hiking nearly every weekend for the past four-years plus. Why? Well, he asserts the experience has been among his most marriage-, wellness- and
life-enriching ever.

West Virginia’s Dolly Sods offers great and varied hiking at elevations up to 4,000 feet.

“Isn’t that just a little obsessive?” some say in reaction to my wife Gail and I having walked more than 2,000 miles – pretty much all in once-weekly day treks – since the onset of our Hiking Oddity on Valentine’s Day, 2004.

And that’s just those being kind. Most who know us well enough offer some version or other of: “Cut it out awreddy!”

We haven’t, and I hope we don’t.

One way of considering why is to go back to the beginning, when Gail said we ought to do something different for Valentine’s Day. We settled on a winter-day hike. At that point in our lives, I was the more experienced hiker, beginning with some 200 miles of the Maine Appalachian Trail with my father when I was nine, and 100 more Maine miles 45 years later, completing that state’s AT miles with a son at the start of his southbound thru-hike.

And so on that Valentine’s Day 2004 and for a few weeks thereafter, things began the way they should, with the guy showing the way…

“Just step where I step, Gail, and you’ll get across the stream just fine.”

“Yes, we do have six more miles and yes, it is 6 p.m., but we will be out of the woods before dark. I promise.”

“Okay, I won’t get so far ahead anymore.”

The transformation – the total flipping of who rules in the woods – has long since been complete. For Gail, genuinely The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All, has surpassed me so thoroughly in all realms that I spend at least a bit of each hike sort of involuntarily admiring her (often concurrent with trying to catch my breath after catching up – as she waits with arms akimbo in some combination of love, pity and triumph – at the end of a long climb).

Apple Orchard Falls’ flow can range from a summer trickle to a roar that leaves visitors with no choice but to shout; it’s the perfect Valentine’s Day spot for at least one couple. PHOTO BY PAT AND CHUCK BLACKLEY

Which brings to mind one reason I don’t quit: It’s a lot of fun to brag on your honey. Which is even better when you know that had you remained the better hiker, she’d be just as pleased to do the same on you.

But let us take a moment to count the ways she’s left me behind.

• Her natural pace – without any conscious effort – is at least two minutes per mile faster than mine. I can still outrun her in a 5K race by four minutes or so, but in the woods, the average mile takes us 22 to 24 minutes – and that’s with me going well beyond my natural pace and still holding her back. Left to her own devices, she’s more like just-under-20 to maybe 22 on a hard climb. She has, on occasions of racing darkness or other reason to hurry, drug us along at a 16-17 minute pace for several miles at a time.

• She very soon moved beyond the mere walking and began to focus on what was around her – to the point that she now has a good working knowledge of the wildflowers of the Southern Appalachians; and the ones she can’t identify she can often place at least within a family – and then cackles with glee at lunch when she verifies it in the book. At non-green times of the year, she turns to other on-ground identifications, from lichen to, um, scat – she’s gotten pretty good at doo-doo ID.

• Her complete ease in the woods – having long-since overcome fears of stalkers, cold, darkness, rain, snow, bears, you-name-it – was brought into sharp focus last summer, when we came upon our first rattlesnake. I was uncharacteristically close behind, and as she saw the snake, just to the left of the trail, I immediately took a couple of steps back, expecting Gail to do the same. Instead, she immediately removed her pack, got the camera and moved in closer while I continued the equivalent of standing on the table squealing. She got her shots, the snake continued calmly across the trail and we resumed our walk.

• In every month except August, she has suffered from one of the creepiest things you’ll ever see on a person – the whitish-yellow-fingers evidence of Raynaud’s phenomenon, which usually occurs just before and lingers well after she’s changed from a cold, sweaty top before lunch. I’m not sure I’d keep on going out into conditions that turned my fingers an inhuman color, but she mentions it only when it manifests itself, and then usually just to see what kind of reaction she can get showing me fingers that look like death.
So much for marriage enrichment.

The winter sun hangs low over the mile-long bald along the summit of Virginia’s Cold Mountain, a favorite spot for the Rheinheimers and their canine co-hikers.

There’s a book called “Younger Next Year” that talks about the value to our early ancestors, in their role as hunter-gatherers, spending many of their days walking long distances across the African savannah. Authors Chris Cowley and Henry S. Lodge put it this way: “That exercise – the physical work of hunting and foraging in the spring – has always been the single most powerful signal we can send that life is good; that it’s spring and time to live and grow.”

And later, in their book-ending exercise program at the third (most advanced) level: “And for your special Level Three bonus, do at least one day a month of extra long and slow [as compared to the aerobic exercise they recommend six days a week]. Could be a two-hour hike to your favorite fishing hole or a three-hour bike ride down a country road.”

Our experience is that they’re right, and that the “at least” part of their prescription should be taken literally. Because . . . you do get that long, sustained dose of exercise, making your body meet the demands that its ancestor bodies met, and respond with the fitness it takes to do it. It’s especially valuable when you carry a 15- or 20-pound pack up a 2,000-foot climb. Your heart pounds, your back sweats through your layers, your thighs call out to you – you’re truly linking up with early people on the savannah; or as we call it these days, hitting 75-80 percent of maximum heart rate for sustained aerobic benefit, which by all accounts does a body a great deal of good.

The view from Virginia’s Old Rag to the northwest is compelling; maybe even more thrilling is the rock scramble to the summit. Photo by Erik Gerhardt

Not to mention another trendy physical benefit or two: You’re outside all that time, soaking up the recently increased recommended levels of vitamin D from the sunshine; and it truly is better to do than to watch, and every hour you’re out in the woods, your body is moving instead of sitting and rooting for, say, the hapless Baltimore Orioles.

Marriage and physical benefits aside, there’s another plus to hiking that seems even more magic: the sort of concurrent confronting and avoiding the realities of life. You cannot help, over the course of three or four or more hours walking in the woods – much of it in amiable, companionable silence (well, it’s hard to talk to her when she’s so far ahead) – but to cast your mind over and under and around the things that trouble you – the things that need to be thought out; and if you’re lucky, to find a solution to one.

And yet at the same time, Gail and I look forward to the hikes in one large measure because there is no better escape from the pressures and trials of life; out on the trail, with nothing around you but the woods and wind, all that is urban and turbulent and burdensome is nowhere to be seen.

In that process of escape we have come to know so very much that we didn’t about the area where we live – the mountains’ names, the forest roads to them, the fit of counties and geologic features, the flow of streams, the great open spaces that still exist in our part of the country.

And that opportunity to explore and learn is of course available in every area of the Blue Ridge region. These days county websites tout their walking trails as amenities, listing walks from urban to forested; and if the government website doesn’t list them, then the visitors’ bureau or the chamber sites surely will.

Beyond the geography you inevitably learn things you had no idea about – like the Indian pipe or ice flowers that come out only under certain conditions. You get to know how the north face of a mountain is so different from the south. You get to weigh in on whether you prefer 15 switchbacks to get up a mountain or a straight-up-the-ravine lung buster. You get to trade trail and weather notes with the occasional hiker headed the opposite direction, with sets of thru-hikers pleased to answer The Day Hiker’s questions about where they’re from, when they started, what their trail names are.

You get, in short (and in long hikes too!), to be a genuine part of the earth.

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TRAIL MAGIC: UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL, BOY-GIRL STYLE

A walk in the woods, like a walk down the aisle, is what you make of it.

In both cases as well, God is in the details. Details like the purest boy-girl interactions since you were 12. One day, pre-hike, for no discernible reason at all except my excitement that we were about to climb a new mountain – Reddish Knob – I caught my left little finger in the car door as I closed it.

Inevitable first reaction from boy, whether he’s 12 or nearly 60: Hide it in the other hand and act like nothing happened.

Inevitable reaction from girl of any age: “What happened!”

“Nothing.”

She, going motherly: “Let me see that – right now.”

He, seeing blood all over the fingers of the holding hand, yields reluctantly, asking if she has a tissue.

“Tissue?! That needs stitches!”

“Nonsense. We have a 4,400-foot mountain to climb.”

Through the long drive to a strange hospital, the interminable wait, the stitches, the placing of a splint over the broken bone, boy keeps talking about getting back out; girl about “no hiking today, young man.”

In the end, with the day cut too short for Reddish Knob, we settle for a shorter walk around Natural Chimneys.

But hey, the next day the 12-year-old inside of all of males is out showing off for the girl on a 13.5-mile loop including the 3,000-foot climb of Three Ridges.
While the girl pretends oh-so-convincingly that he’s like a hero or something.

—KR

Talk of the Trail: “There’s Audie!”

Walk in the woods for hours at a time once every six or seven days for years on end with the same person and you get to know her even better than you thought you did.

One measure of which is how you feel about the little things that tend to get mentioned again and again. Herewith a few oft-repeated phrases from The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All:

• “Hey, this is the perfect spot for lunch!” Inevitably and invariably said at the first rock or clearing encountered on a hike, generally 10 to 15 minutes into a multi-hour walk.

•“There’s Audie!” Spoken at the sound of a small aircraft somewhere above, and in reference to Audie Murphy, the highly decorated WWII Army infantryman turned actor -- he died in 1971 while a passenger on a small aircraft which crashed into Virginia’s 2,500-foot Brush Mountain in the rain. The first time we visited the monument, just off the AT, was by pure coincidence the 33rd anniversary of the crash.

• “Hey, Kurt, over on the horizon there – isn’t that Sharp Top?” Spoken in Georgia, say, or West Virginia, about a mountain peak looming ahead, using the famous Virginia mountain as a taunting tool against he who spends most of our viewpoint lunches trying to identify the surrounding mountains.

• “Heads up on this turn here, or you’ll be lost forever.” Spoken back over her shoulder with full irony, on sections of the Appalachian Trail where over-zealous trail blaze painters have put direction-change-warning double blazes in places where the trail takes, say, a 10-degree bend to the left.

• “Don’t forget – geology happens.” Mentioned at places with names such as Balance Rock or Slide Rock or when walking under an overhanging formation, and in reference to the strange geologic occurrences in recent years at Natural Bridge (a chunk fell on somebody) and on the New River Trail (a piece of rolling rock killed a cyclist).

• And my favorite, which occurs now and again on the coldest winter hikes and is spoken in total, uncomfortable seriousness: “I really really have to pee but it’s way too cold to pull my pants down.”

—KR

The Greatest Day Hiker In the Snow: At Her Best...And Her Worst

This corridor of snow-laden pines was the easy part of a frozen hike in West Virginia’s Cranberry Wilderness.

Her Best: If there was ever a day when The Greatest Day Hiker Of Them All earned her badge, it was October 29, 2005, when we stepped out of the car into freezing temperatures and a foot of heavy, re-frozen snow that anchored every possible branch down over the trail into West Virginia’s Cranberry Wilderness, making hiking all but impossible. We went anyway, having enjoyed our little cabin at West Virginia’s Watoga State Park so much that we’d put ourselves into the position of starting a 16.5-mile, 2,500-foot elevation change (twice) walk at 10:30 a.m – way too late. Long hike shortened: The pre-lunch part of the day took us down 2,500 feet to the Williams River, where there was no snow and it was fall instead of the winter we’d started in. The walk back into winter – up, cold, late, icy, through seldom-walked wilderness – was where Gail was at her best (maybe at least in part because of fear from the big bear and cat prints she’d seen). She led us up and into the oncoming darkness, keeping us on a “trail” with an average of one blaze per quarter mile. We reached the car cold, wet and half an hour into darkness but still triumphant, with her indomitable spirit having carried us through what, at any slower pace at all, could have become perilous.

Her Worst: Another icy-snow day, this time on the Andy Lane Trail near Roanoke, the steeper parts of which on this day were all but unclimbable. We had along both of the dogs that have accompanied us on many hikes: The young, calm, white-coated, snow-loving Fluff, who belongs to one of our sons; and the old, hyper, black-coated, cold-hating Gunnar, who belongs to Gail. Along the narrowest section of the climb, as we navigated the icy trail, old Gunnar lost her footing and began what ended up as a 60-foot yelping slide down the side of the mountain, stopped only when she smacked, butt-first, into a fallen tree. Before the slide was done, her mistress panicked, and began her own backside-slide down the steep slope toward the dog. Fluff and I, at least one of us stifling a laugh, moved on ahead a ways, toward a gentler slope where the sliders might make their way out. It was during these steps away from The Day Hiker that she turned on me completely, turning the snow blue between us and swearing again and again she’d never hike with me again – as if I had pushed her dog down the hill. Meanwhile, I boot-chopped a diagonal path back toward them, creating their escape route. It was at least a mile before she was again civil to me. The old black dog kept glancing back at me, in what I took to be some blend of gratitude and wonder at what the heck was up with the ol’ lady.

—KR

Take Chocolate!

Four-plus years of hikes render The Day Hiker and I in full agreement on basic needs:

1. Get the map and take it along; there are always surprises on the trail, and it’s satisfying and sensible to be able to deal with them. Pre-hike, use the map and your projected pace to estimate a general timeframe. Appalachian Trail Conservancy and National Geographic maps are great.

2. Dress – and just as important – equip yourself to re-dress based on conditions. Except on hot days, take along the number of new layers equal to the number you start out in; change out of sweated-through layers and get warmed with comfy new ones. Synthetic-fabric wicking layers only; no cotton on the skin.

3. Get the walking equipment you need. We eschew full boots on all but snowy days. Light hikers make for easier walking and provide enough traction. Waterproof is good. Hiking poles – one each – are great on steeper, rockier trails. And your own day pack is like your first bike.

4. Don’t leave home without Alan and Leonard. As in Alan de Hart, whose statewide hiking guides to Virginia, North Carolina and West Virginia are indispensable; and Leonard Adkins, whose books take you along the trail and into the flora, fauna and history.

5. Do lunch right. You’ve earned it by the midpoint, so take your favorites. In our case: veggies and dip, cashews, cheese, jerky, dark chocolate (Dove!), chardonnay (cold!). I carry a heavy-plastic bag cooler that keeps ice (and lunch) cold even on hot days; Gail carries the three-liter bladder with tube, which we fill with ice before adding water; there’s nothing like cold cold water after a long climb – any time of year.

—KR