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Walking the Walk One day Brian Robinson dreamed up the preposterous idea of conquering hiking's Triple Crown in a single calendar year. He's not out of the woods yet, but he just might do it
The 40-year-old Robinson is in the midst of the mother of all heel-cracking, quad-busting adventures. He is attempting to become the first person to hike, in a single calendar year, each of the three U.S. National Scenic Trails: the Pacific Crest, the 2,168-mile Appalachian Trail, which runs from Georgia to Maine, and the Continental Divide, which has no official route or exact mileage, and runs up the backbone of the country from New Mexico to Canada. To appreciate the difficulty -- many would say madness -- of such an endeavor, consider that fewer than two dozen people have completed the Triple Crown of hiking in their lifetimes and that no solo hiker has conquered even two trails in a single year. "Doing the Triple Crown during your life is like doing the Seven Summits," says Karen Berger, who has hiked all three trails and is the author of Hiking the Triple Crown. "What Brian is doing is like trying to do all seven peaks in one year." Every day since Jan. 1 Robinson has risen with the first light and gone to sleep with the setting sun. In between, he has walked -- through the 100° heat of the Mojave Desert, through the relentless rains of the Pacific Northwest, through five pairs of shoes and 16 states. On some days, like in March, when the Vermont snow was so deep it reached his hips, he has fought to cover 10 miles. Other days, when the summer sun lingers and the trail lies level, he has covered 40. "I don't walk any faster than anybody else," says Robinson. "I just don't stop walking." So far, the only obstacle that has stopped Robinson is the weather. After hiking most of the AT early in the year, Robinson was forced by the icy New England terrain to skip the last 590 miles and abandon his hope of thru-hiking all three trails. Instead, he took a Greyhound bus from Vermont to New Mexico, where he squeezed in a 614-mile hike through the southern half of the CDT before beginning the PCT in late April. He plans to finish the final leg of the CDT, a perilous stretch that includes the high country of Colorado and Montana, by late summer and the rest of the AT in the fall. "Beforehand, I would have said what he's doing is impossible," says Berger. "But considering how far he's gotten, if he can get a little help from the weather in the mountains, I think he can do it." The first person to thru-hike one of the Big Three was Earl Shaffer, who conquered the AT in a little more than four months in 1948. Four years later Martin Papendick became the first to finish what is now the PCT, and since then thousands have followed their leads. (Debate continues about who is the first person to complete the CDT.) Included among those trekkers are Bill Irwin, a blind hiker who completed the AT in '90; David Horton, an ultramarathoner who in '91 finished the same trail in 52 days by running most of the way; and Jim Adams who hiked the entire Appalachian Trail in '90 with his cat Ziggy perched on the top of his backpack, once logging 52.4 miles in a day. (Among those who have tried and failed is author Bill Bryson, whose AT attempt nonetheless became fodder for his best-selling A Walk in the Woods.)
As he approached his mid-30s, Robinson realized that even childhood dreams have expiration dates, or as he puts it, "It couldn't be someday much longer." So in 1997, though he had never covered more than 50 miles in an outing, he took a six-month leave of absence from Compaq to hike the PCT, accompanied half the way by his father, Roy, a seasoned backpacker. It was during his many days of solo hiking that Brian dreamed up the idea of attempting the Triple Crown. "You could say it was a midlife crisis," he says. "I wanted to make my mark, and looking back, I saw that the more I broadened my horizons, the happier I was. This was a chance to really do something." What followed was three years of the kind of methodical, minutia-filled preparation only an engineer could love. To prep his body, Robinson took up ultrarunning and began putting in 50 miles a week training on dirt trails, a regimen he upped to 90 miles a week last fall. In planning his route, he set up spreadsheets plotting mileage, potential weather patterns and resupply points near the trails -- P.O. boxes for the most part -- places where his father and brother could send the 95 boxes of food and gear he would need. Last December, Robinson moved out of the apartment he shared with two buddies in San Jose and quit his job, having saved enough money (and sold enough of his tech stocks at the right time) not only to fund the estimated $10,000 cost of the hike but also to remain financially secure long after the trip. After flying to Georgia, he spent New Year's Eve on top of Springer Mountain, the southernmost point of the AT, bundled up in 10° weather, his water bottle frozen. Still, Robinson was itching to get started. "There are several inches of snow on the ground, but it's sunny," he would write in his journal that night. "I'd certainly trade the future for a whole winter of days just like today if I could." Seven months later Robinson's body is holding up despite a litany of injuries that includes shinsplints, plantar fasciitis, ankle sprains, a badly cut knee and a six-week case of Bell's palsy that paralyzed the left side of his face and forced him to replace his contacts with glasses. More daunting has been the discipline required to keep going, day after day, alone on the trail. "You have to resist the siren song of the towns and the urge to stop, talk to people and have a pizza," he says. "You have to stay positive when you're tired and wet." To deal with the isolation of his journey -- few other hikers can keep up
with him for long -- Robinson keeps a journal (he mails the entries
to his father to post on his website,
With his sanity still intact, at least for the moment, Robinson is a model of low-tech efficiency as he chugs down the trail. His custom-made pack, minus food and water, weighs a scant 12.95 pounds in the summer (18.96 in the winter to accommodate his heavier winter gear), every item he carries possessing a multitude of MacGyveresque uses. His trekking poles serve as the support for his "tent," a 6-by-10-foot silicone-lined tarp (which is also his raincoat) that he props up like a sideways taco. Dinner is cooked over his alcohol-burning "cat stove" -- two cat food cans formed into a tiny burner. Instead of crampons, he carries half-inch screws with hexheads that he pounds into his shoes sharp side up to provide traction on ice. "Nothing I have," Robinson says with obvious pride, "is noncritical." To fuel himself for 12 (or more) hours of hiking a day and to maintain his 150-pound weight, Robinson eats every two hours, usually on the move, and takes in a staggering 6,000 calories a day. His diet is rich in Snickers and peanut butter ("I have no use for salad," he says with disdain) as well as Flintstones chewable vitamins, which he sucks on while walking. When he comes into a town to pick up a resupply box every three to five days, Robinson embarks on a junk-food bender fit for an offensive lineman or three. On a recent evening he walked into an Oregon campground minimart and in four hours devoured three ham-and-cheese hot pockets (1,060 calories total), two pints of Ben & Jerry's ice cream (2,160 calories) and two chicken chimichangas (660 calories). Sitting there, a streak of stray vanilla ice cream melting on the shelf of his thick brown beard, he looked immeasurably content. "I get so hungry that I have no taste buds," he says. "As long as it has calories, it all tastes like filet mignon to me." While gorging himself, Robinson must keep one eye on the clock, so precise is his schedule. Every hour is critical, and a day squandered can be disastrous. (During the winter he did allow himself to stop for a day and a half to do his taxes.) On June 28, when he arrived at a campground post office at 3:30 p.m. only to find that it had unexpectedly closed a half hour earlier, the normally serene Robinson panicked. "That's half a day I'm losing!" he exclaimed to the bewildered cashier at the campground. After first blaming the post office, he pointed the finger at himself, muttering, "I should have gotten up earlier. I should have known this one closed at three." Finally, accepting his fate, he resigned himself to an early night. "You have to understand," he explained once he'd calmed down, "if I lose even one hour at each resupply point, that's 95 hours of hiking." Robinson ponders that point for a moment and says, "It's ironic, isn't it, that time is irrelevant out here, but that I'm counting every hour?" Robinson's fight against the clock is really a battle against the onset of winter. He plans to finish the PCT by the end of this month but then must hike the CDT from Montana to Colorado, a trek that requires climbing through elevations as high as 12,000 feet. "He's got roughly 2,000 miles of potential snow problems, and you can't hike that in a month," says Jeffrey Schaffer, a topographer and author of a series of PCT guidebooks. Schaffer thinks someone will pull off the calendar Triple Crown, but only with the aid of an accompanying support team. Robinson acknowledges the obstacles that await him but believes he can avoid the worst snow if he arrives in Colorado by the end of September. "If I can do that, I'll see snow but I won't be slogging through it," he says. After the CDT, he still has to finish his remaining 590 miles on the Appalachian Trail, starting at Maine's Mount Katahdin, the AT's northernmost point, and heading south to Bennington, Vt., where he left off in March. If Robinson does complete the calendar Triple Crown, it will be due in no small part to the support he has received. Friends and other hikers have left him care packages on the trail, posted messages like KEEP FLYIN' BRIAN in trail registers and sent a stream of e-mails to his website, which his dad updates for him every few days. "It's like the first attempt on Everest," says Schaffer. "Even if Brian doesn't make it, he's a success because he's spurred others to try. Either way, the race is on." Says Berger, "We're a community that really appreciates the value of physical exertion. We're all on these trips of a lifetime, and there's a lot of respect for something like this." Ray Jardine, a guru-like figure who pioneered the concept of "ultralight" hiking, embodied this attitude when asked whether he thought Robinson would succeed. "I don't comment on other people's adventures," Jardine replied. "If those adventures are fun and meaningful to them, then that is what is important." Descending from the rim of Crater Lake as the sun burned through the grayness, Robinson provided a similar perspective. "I'm not doing this for anybody else," he said as he picked his way through a rocky stretch with his trekking poles. "You couldn't pay me enough to do something like this anyway. I have to be doing it because I want to. I'd never make it if I didn't." Issue date: July 23, 2001 For more news, notes and features from the world of adventure sports, call toll free to order SI Adventure at 1-888-394-5427.
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