King Of The Trails

Last Monday a 66-year-old former postal worker from Wilkes-Barre, Pa. named Ed Kuni boarded a Greyhound bus for a four-day transcontinental journey to Medford, Ore., where this Saturday he will begin a 900-mile backpacking hike up the Pacific Crest Trail through Oregon and Washington to Manning Provincial Park in British Columbia. Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor volcanic ash—all of which Kuni will encounter to a depressing degree—will stay him from the reasonably swift completion of his appointed round, and when he finishes his trek at the Oregon-California border around the first of September, his reputation as one of America's hardiest—and quirkiest—backpackers will be secure. There is no precise way to measure achievement in backpacking, to determine which hiker is the champion, but for miles logged per day, use of survival skills and allegiance to an ascetic code of living on the trail, there is no one quite like Edmund John Kunigonis.

Kuni (he shortened his name 20 years ago) is the only person known to have hiked the entire length of the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail two years in succession, a feat he accomplished under trying circumstances in 1972 and 1973. Granted, he may also be the only person who ever wanted to do it, but that he pulled it off speaks volumes for his resolve. When he completes his traverse of the Pacific Crest Trail, which he started last summer, he will be in a select club of about 300 hikers, probably none of them as old as he, to finish that 2,700-mile footpath. While easier in some respects than its Eastern counterpart, the PCT is much more demanding than the Appalachian Trail for a person of Kuni's age because of its more varied climes, ranging from above the 100� temperatures of the Anza and Mojave deserts to snowy 13,000-foot elevations in some parts of the Sierras.

And there is the matter of Mount St. Helens, in the Cascade Range, through which the Pacific Crest Trail passes, some 25 miles east of the volcano. To avoid the buildup of volcanic ash along the trail—and to protect himself lest the mountain erupt again while he's in the vicinity—Kuni has altered his course to the west of the range, adding 150 miles to his trip.

Despite these considerable challenges, Kuni will, as usual, travel alone. In a recreational activity that brings together Boy Scout troops, old drinking buddies, high school spelunking clubs and even husbands and wives, Kuni remains a solo operator. Moreover, he will spend every night of his journey on the trail, sleeping either under the stars or in his tent, as he has on every previous expedition. This insistence on staying outdoors distinguishes Kuni from most backpackers, who during the course of a summer-long trek will spend at least a few nights off the trail in a motel or, at the very least, in one of the roofed three-sided lean-tos situated along the major trails. Some hikers respect Kuni for his stay-on-the-trail-or-bust philosophy; others say it means nothing except that Kuni is obsessed with the idea.

Maybe he is. "I remember one night on the Appalachian," he says. "It was storming to beat anything. Sleeting, raining, everything. I was taking a breather in one of the national fire towers. 'Hey, stay in here with us,' the rangers told me. I said, 'Sorry, I sleep only on the trail.' They looked at me kind of funny. 'I know what you're thinking,' I told them. 'You think I'm crazy.' "

Well, the word has been used. At times even Kuni's wife, Stella, is tempted to say it when describing him. Stomping around the kitchen of his small Wilkes-Barre home in a pair of high-priced Fabino Brothers hiking boots direct from Italy, Kuni doesn't look particularly crazy, but his mind is far out—on the trail. "I take the biggest boot they make without it being special," he says, pouring a can of beer into a Davy Crockett mug. "It's a size 13. In 1972, when I started on the trail, my size was only 11, but with the constant weight of a 50- or 60-pound pack [twice what most hikers carry and made necessary by Kuni's insistence on living on the trail], the feet just spread out. I had to give away all my dress shoes." He fiddles with a foul-smelling, bone-dry wafer sort of thing that turns out to be a freeze-dried beefsteak. "You just soak it in a little salted water and fry it," says Kuni, "but not too long or it gets hard."

The paradox of Kuni's obsessive allegiance to the trail is that off it he seems like any other pensioned postal worker. There's nothing messianic about him, no born-again woodsman zeal. When he's not hiking, he's a man who shaves every day, tends to his backyard vegetable garden and helps Stella with the canning. On the trail, he never shaves, and with his heavy pack, his hunched-over gait—it takes him a month or so to straighten up fully after a long hike—and his walking stick, he takes on the appearance of a character in folklore.

An unimposing 5'9", 165 pounds, Kuni was never a star athlete. "A few third places in the 440 in high school is about the best I did," he says. He never lifted weights, never played football, basketball or baseball and certainly never jogged, an activity for which he has nothing but contempt. But his love of the woods has always been there. His earliest memories are of learning how to track and how to timber, and he was not very old when he decided he wanted to be a forest ranger. "I had all the booklets, everything," he remembers. "I could've gone to Penn State for about $350 a semester then and taken up forestry." But it didn't happen. The year was 1933, the depth of the Depression, and his father, John, a Lithuanian immigrant who had opened a small tavern after his shoemaking business failed, didn't have the money. "I still remember the day my dad told me, 'Eddie, Eddie, we owe 11 years' taxes on the building. I just can't send you.' " It is the singular regret of Kuni's life that 47 years ago he couldn't begin training for the one job he really wanted to do.

Still, Kuni may have been luckier than most whose dreams were shattered by the Depression. After three years of road building, six years of driving a dry-cleaning truck and two years in the Army during World War II, he landed the postal job. He spent a few months carrying the mail but hated walking in the city, so he took a job in the office—"sitting on my butt." But what the job gave him, besides a place to sit, was plenty of spare time. Every weekend, every holiday and every vacation, Kuni would hunt, hike or fish in the mountains near his home, or hole up in his family's cabin at nearby Harvey's Lake.

It went on like that for the first dozen of Kuni's 20 years with the U.S. Postal Service. He was a weekend pioneer. But in 1955 he read about Earl Shaffer, who seven years earlier had become the first person to backpack the Appalachian Trail in one trip. Suddenly, there was a goal, a way, perhaps, of becoming the forest ranger he had dreamed of becoming. "Shaffer inspired me," says Kuni. "From the time I read that, I just couldn't wait to do it myself. On vacations I did some smaller hikes, maybe 200 or 300 miles, but no extended journey like the Appalachian Trail." The major obstacle was free time—or the lack of it. Kuni was only 41 and had to wait 17 years before he could retire from the post office and have all the time he needed. He nurtured the dream, reading every Appalachian Trail guidebook, every wildlife and survival book he could get his hands on. He tested equipment on his weekend jaunts. He wrote an outdoors column for the Wilkes-Barre Sunday Independent. But he never told anybody, not even his wife, about his plan to hike the entire trail until six weeks before his departure. "I guess Stella thought it was a joke, until she saw all the equipment I was buying," remembers Kuni. "Then one day she said, 'Jesus, he must mean it!' "