The Magazine of The Sierra Club
In the Company of Pines or People?
Ward on top of Mount Katahdin, the northern terminus of the Appalachian Trail.
|Photos courtesy of Scot Ward
The night before his 38th birthday, Scot Ward wasn’t sucking back beers or sending a Facebook invite for his party. He was pedaling with more gusto than a Beverly Hills spin instructor, switchbacking up dark, rural streets on a balmy August evening, trying to make it to a meeting 126 miles away in Columbia, South Carolina. He’d been doing this kind of thing since he was 13, when he’d bike across the state of Florida to visit his older brother for the night. (His parents were OK with him making the 340-mile round-trip as long as he was back in time for school Monday.)
Now Ward had a beard like brushwood, and he was steering his scuffed-up, white Trek bike to the Palmetto Conservation Foundation. A small trailer cradling his camping gear and a skateboard squeaked behind him. It was 2012. The foundation was managing the multisectioned Palmetto Trail—a 350-mile, palm-shaded stretch from the rolling slopes of the Blue Ridge Mountains to the salty toes of the Atlantic—and Ward thought he could write a through-hike guidebook for them.
As Ward tells it, he wobbled into Columbia at 5:55 A.M., drenched in 15 hours of sweat, then flopped onto the foundation’s front porch before meeting with a few freaked-out staff members. With some convincing, they agreed to let him write the guidebook. Ward got the opportunity to boost America’s long-distance trail repertoire—and to postpone getting back to his day job as the fastest limo driver in Lexington, Kentucky.
Ward’s rig, complete with the skateboard he used to navigate 500 miles of road walks in North Carolina.
Ward is something of a mad scientist in the trail world. Before his interview with the foundation, he’d made a name for himself by writing through-hike guidebooks for North Carolina’s Mountains-to-Sea Trail (MST) and Kentucky’s Sheltowee Trace—regional routes that can be difficult hikes all the way through because they’re patchworks of smaller, local trails, and, in the case of the former, connected by highways or city streets. Ward stitched each trail together with his pencil and a map—creating one fluid, cross-state pathway—and included the best all-you-can-eat buffets, “trail angels,” and natural water sources along the way.
Some trail purists balk at his urban pathways, but they appeal to voracious through-hikers and organizations (like the Palmetto Conservation Foundation) whose states want long trails but lack extensive nature corridors.
Ward wouldn’t accept money from the foundation, even though he had to walk more than 140 miles of road links along their trail network, in addition to the 350 trail miles. It took him almost two months to finish. By the end, he realized he wasn’t finished at all. Somewhere between sharing stories at neighborhood block parties, sleeping on the couches of hospitable trail angels, and making fast friends at rowdy roadside dive bars (though he swears he’s a “one-beer kind of guy”), something clicked.
“Palmetto is when the idea for the Lakes-to-Ocean Trail began,” Ward says. “The people along those road walks added so much to my experience. They invited me to barbecues as I walked past their yards. Pastors let me pitch my tent in their church parking lots—things you don’t get when you’re in the forest the whole time.”
Though Ward had been hiking and cycling around the country for more than 25 years, mostly as a cheap means of getting around, it was the Palmetto that spurred him into action. He wanted other hikers to experience the States the way he had, and that meant intentionally routing trails through cities. He’d been doing this on a regional scale. Now he wanted to go big and cross multiple state lines.
On the final stretch of the Palmetto, he was already planning the Lake-to-Ocean Trail (LOT). Over the next year and a half, he walked 3,000 miles, biked 1,200 miles, and skateboarded 500 miles to create his dream through-hike.
The result is a ragtag set of guidebooks detailing how to walk from Chicago’s Great Lakes to Charleston’s Atlantic shore on an unconventional path that meanders across six states and through big cities like Indianapolis, Louisville, Frankfort, and Knoxville. Now he just has to convince America to give the LOT a shot.
Ward poses along the Mountains-to-Sea Trail. He walked 1,300 miles in those Tevas.
Is Ward a crackpot or a visionary?
The Appalachian Trail Conservancy, steward of the world’s longest hiking-only footpath, says on its website that hikers choose to hike the trail to connect with nature and escape the “stress of city life.” Likewise, the Pacific Crest Trail Association, caretaker of another triple-crown jewel, prides itself on offering a path through “remote, primitive landscapes” and has as its mission to keep the trail wild. Neither organization plans to reroute through urban areas.
While Ward recognizes the full worth of connecting with nature, he thinks trail hiking should be treated more like travel.
“A lot of hikers think their adventure has to be 100 percent wilderness, but when I did six months on the AT, I got culture shock every time I resupplied in a new town. It wasn’t an ‘American’ experience,'” he says. “If you want to get to know the culture, you have to get out of the forest.”
While some hikers recoil at the thought of their trails careening through the urban prison of pollution they’re trying to get away from, Ward thinks feeling culture change via interacting with locals only heightens the adventure. As Ward hiked the LOT, he talked to hundreds of residents on the road walks that connected trail networks, and hearing their values and opinions change by location helped him better understand the country as a whole. He even got to know his own roots a little better.
“I stumbled on the Circus Hall of Fame in Peru, Indiana, when I was on the Hoosier Trail, and I realized some of my family’s memorabilia was there,” Ward says. He’s talking about his great-grandparents, who were circus aerial performers known as the Flying Wards. “It was cool. It gave me the motivation to keep going—and I still had a long way at that point.”
The LOT is full of quirky cultural opportunities like this (the Hoosier leg actually uses old circus railways that have been converted into bike paths). Ultimately, it presents itself as a love letter to mideastern America.
Unsurprisingly, the most unconventional hikers have been the biggest fans of Ward’s 21st-century trails.
"I'll never forget when Diane Van Deren—in front of 200 people—held up my book and said, ‘Scot, we used this every minute of the day. It was our bible for the MST. Thank you so much.' She'd been diagnosed with epilepsy and had the part of her brain removed that could understand maps, so she followed my book word for word. She set the speed record for the MST that year [2012].”
Ward adds that blind hiker Trevor Thomas, who through-hiked the Appalachian Trail in its entirety in 2008, will use his guidebook (and Siri) to tackle the Sheltowee Trace this year.
With the 2015 releases of Wild and A Walk in the Woods, America’s famous north-south paths are projected to be more congested than ever. It could be the LOT’s moment to win over the trail community and attract a more diverse group of hikers.
“I opened myself up to the road walks, understanding that there was a different mentality to have there, instead of just shutting everyone out and being by myself,” says Ward. “And I’m really happy I did. I want other hikers to have that experience, too.”
