[pct-l] NYT on Scott

[Kent Spring]

November 7, 2006
Pursuit of a Simple Dream Propels a Hiker in the Wild 
By BENJAMIN HOFFMAN
Alone on a trail deserted by fair-weather hikers,
Scott Williamson is not racing other people or a
clock. He is trying to beat Mother Nature again.
Williamson is in the home stretch of a 5,300-mile hike
up and down the length of the Pacific Crest Trail.

He is the only person known to have completed this
yo-yo, in which a hiker travels the 2,650-mile trail
from Mexico to Canada and then back down to Mexico in
a single year.

“It’s such a simple thing,” he said
about his long hike. “It’s just walking.
Anybody can do what I’m doing. You just wake up
each morning and you walk until the end of the day.
You do that all summer, and pretty soon you’ve
walked thousands of miles.”

But the voyage is not as simple as Williamson, 34,
makes it sound. He started at the Mexican border on
May 22 and, traveling up to 40 miles a day when
conditions were good, he reached Canada on Aug. 18.
The shorter days of autumn have slowed his return
because he must do more hiking in the dark, so lately
he has been covering closer to 30 miles a day. 

He recently made it through one of the most daunting
points on the trail, Forester Pass, which is near
Mount Whitney and has an elevation of more than 13,000
feet. The steep inclines of the trail are impassable
by foot after a heavy snow. 

“I did the same hike in 2004, and I made it all
the way back to Mexico,” Williamson said in a
telephone interview last month when he passed through
Truckee, Calif., to gather supplies for the end of his
journey. “Two hours after I made it through
Forester Pass, it started to snow, and that was the
storm that shut everything down.”

Last weekend, he stopped in Kennedy Meadows, east of
Bakersfield, Calif., to rest and visit with his
father. Now, he is in the home stretch.

Williamson has walked the length of the trail eight
times, gaining a sort of celebrity status in the
hiking community. Other hikers seek him out on the
trail, and a documentary titled “Tell It on the
Mountain” will chronicle his journey and those
of four other hikers walking the trail.

“He’s Scott Williamson and it’s
unbelievable to be on the trail with him,” said
Shaun Carrigan, a producer and director of the film.
“If you walk into a trail town with him, people
mob him. I heard one hiker describe it as if they were
an N.B.A. fan and had run into Michael Jordan.
He’s an epic figure on the trail and knows more
about it than most people I’ve met.”

Williamson had his first taste of the trail on a
backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada when he was 16.
He encountered hikers who were walking a 1,200-mile
section of the trail, and he was hooked. 

In 1996, while working at a convenience store in
Richmond, Calif., Williamson was shot in the face
during an attempted robbery. 

“Being shot, coming that close to death, that
made me focus more on what I felt was important in my
life,” he said. “If the hiking is very
important to me, I’m going to pursue that,
regardless of what other people may think. It made me
more willing to just follow my passion.”

Now he is surprised and flattered by all the
attention. 

“When I first started doing it, it was just
something I enjoyed,” Williamson said of his
trips on the Pacific Crest Trail and other journeys on
the Appalachian Trail, the Florida Trail and the
Continental Divide Trail. “As time has gone by,
I’ve found it gives people inspiration.”

But it is not a journey without sacrifice. 

“I don’t own a home,” he said.
“I’m self-employed. I drive derelict
vehicles. I have to work on every weekend. But
it’s been well worth it. The sacrifices
I’ve had to make to get out on the trail every
summer has been well worth it.”

Williamson has received support from his father, Dave,
who has shipped prepacked meals for his son to post
offices along the route.

“Without the support I’ve had from my
father, as well as the encouraging words random
strangers have given me, I don’t know if I could
do it,” Williamson said. “The support of
other people I’ve had both on this hike and over
the years has been a tremendous part of it.”




 
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