I am Strider

My email is strider@900milerblog.com

 

 

This page began with the start of my second “900 Miler” quest.

For those who don’t know, there is an informal club of people who have hiked all the open maintained trails in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park.  It is called the 900 Miler Club, which is a misnomer really because there are only 800.4 miles on the official list.  On the other hand, if you complete this quest, you manage to hike well over 1,000 miles to log the official list.

On my first “map” as it is called, I was fairly haphazard about documenting the experience.  The effort took many years, beginning with my AT thru hike in 1984.  Many years later, having moved to Knoxville, I began hiking many of the more popular trails.  One weekend, my wife treated me to a stay in the cabins on Mt. LeConte where I heard stories about a guy who just broke the record for hiking all the trails up Mt. LeConte.  He did it in 10 hours.  This sounded like a reasonable challenge although I had no aspirations of breaking the record.  I just wanted to do it in a continuous 24 period.  So a friend and I put together this hike, which we documented at www.leconte24.com. We made it in 21 hours.

From there, it was destiny to finish the rest of the park.  Midway through, I began to hatch the idea of a blog, not only to capture and document my hiking experience but also collect thoughts about hiking in general and experiencing creation in our own special garden.  But I didn’t want to start the idea halfway through my first 900 miler.  So I was committed to do a second one, even before the first was complete.

So here it is.  Number 2 was kicked off with ANOTHER LeConte 24 hike.  We broke our record by hiking the 6 trails in 19 hours and this experience forms the opening posts of 900milerblog.com.

I hope you enjoy traveling with me…

Strider out…