Sexagenarian Hiker Travels Light on the Appalachian Trail

The tale of a Big Greener hiking the Appalachian Trail even the entire Maine-to-Georgia length hardly seems unusual enough to inspire headlines. From the melting of the last drifts in spring until the first flakes fly in the fall, countless young Dartmouth Outing Clubbers swing backpacks over their shoulders and strike out on the 2,100-mile wilderness trail.

But Joseph A. Tardiff '37 is hardly a young D.O.C. type with a backpack. For starters, he's 68 years old. Also, Cabin and Trail formed no part of his undergraduate experience. And although he will have walked all 2,100 miles of the trail by the summer of 1983, he has toted a full pack along very few of them. It is, in fact, an unusual enough story for Tardiff's hiking exploits to have been featured in the pages of New Hampshire Profiles magazine, AppalachianTrail-way News, and the weekly newspaper that covers his Exeter, N.H., home.

"My interest in hiking is a relatively recent phenomenon," says the amiable and unassuming Tardiff. "When I took early retirement at age 55 [he was a manager of chemical plants in New York and Belgium], I was 25 to 30 pounds overweight and out of shape." So he started a walking routine his first year of retirement, in 1969, which reminded him that he had enjoyed hiking small sections of the Appalachian Trail some years earlier when he had lived in New York. "I started to think about doing the whole trail," Tardiff says. "It seemed like an interesting challenge."

A challenge it is the Appalachian Trail is the world's longest continuous, maintained, and marked wilderness footpath. Tardiff conceived the idea of walking the entire trail from start to finish but in installments, doing a few hunded miles per year. He started out in the summer of 1970 on Mt. Katahdin in Maine, and next summer which will be his 14th on the trail he expects to hike the last stretch to Mt. Springer in Georgia.

Tardiff says that as far as he knows he is the only hiker who will have walked the entire trail in installments. Hikers he meets on the trail are either making a start-to-finish effort in one season or are doing a short day-hike. He also says most people who hike the whole trail do it south to north, while he's doing the reverse. I'm a a purist, though," he says. "I never do a section backwards or out of order."

When Tardiff began his odyssey in 1970, he says, "I had big ideas. I was going to backpack for ten days, bringing along all my food." He thought he had prepared himself well studying manuals, equipping himself with all the proper gear, and conditioning his body with a regimen of hiking and cycling. But the first day on the trail he found the going much rougher than he had expected, and he fell on some slippery rocks and twisted his knee. He put in a few more days on the trail later that summer but did no more than 30 miles in the first year."

That was when Tardiff refined his installment-hiking scheme further into a technique he calls "rendezvous" hiking. He carefully plots out a consecutive series of one-day hikes, each averaging 11 or 12 miles. Most years he has spent two or three weeks on the trail, racking up about 200 miles annually. On any given morning, his wife Olive drops him off at the access point for that day's stretch; then she goes off in the couple's red VW camper to poke about the countryside or to write (she is a much-published author of historical books and magazine articles). At the end of each day, the Tardiffs meet at a pre-arranged point and camp for the night in their van. "With the camper," says Tardiff, "I get a hot shower and a good dinner every night. I guess it's the 'Hilton' way of doing it."

The rendezvous system has failed only once, when they missed connections and waited for each other at different places for several hours. "We're more careful now," says Tardiff. There have been, too, a couple of places on the trail where he had to make minor modifications in the rendezvous technique. "In the Smokies there were two sections where there were stretches of 30 miles that were inaccessible, so I did one overnight in each section," says Tardiff.

He maintains that his system beats hollow having to lug many weeks' worth of food, plus gear and shelter, on your back. "It's kind of fun to talk with other people on the trail," Tardiff notes, "especially the through hikers. They've been out on the trail for five or six weeks, struggling with a heavy pack, and I come bouncing along with my little day pack and tell them that I'm going to be out that afternoon. A lot of them remember having read some of the articles about me whan I talk with them."

Tardiff completed his 1982 stint of 225 miles just before coming to Hanover for his class's 45th reunion and reminisced about the miles on the trail he has put behind him. The trail is different in each of the 14 states it passes through, he explains. "Maine was the wildest and I think the most difficult," he says. "The trail is rougher and there are so many swamps it was very discouraging. North Carolina and Tennessee were more rugged, but the trail is much nicer."

The end of the trail is only 140 miles away for Tardiff now, and he expects to celebrate his 69th birthday June 1, 1983 at his goal, atop Mt. Springer in Georgia. He then plans to tackle the hundred highest peaks in New England "to keep my hand in."

Tardiff describes himself as a "steady hiker." He says he'll stop to take a picture, observe the abundance of wildlife, or talk with someone on the trail, but, he says, "I get on with it. I'm not a loiterer." He goes on to say that he's "not much of a philosopher" but that "you do have plenty of time to think as you go along." Among the things he occupies his mind with during the mostly solitary miles is composing haiku. One of his verses neatly captures the combination of adventure and challenge he finds on the trail, with the security that his "rendezvous" method of hiking offers: "Red camper gleaming/Like a beacon in the night/ Puts the heart at ease."

Joseph A. Tardiff '37 pauses on the Appalachian Trail sporting his usual hiking gear andgarb a bamboo walking stick, twill workpants and shirt, and an oversize neckerchief toprotect his neck from sunburn, wipe a sweatybrow, or if necessary use as a sling ortourniquet. His only other encumbrances are acamera, a canteen of water, and a small knapsack containing a jacket, his lunch for the day,maps, a compass, and a few basic items ofemergency andfirst aid equipment. Although hehas hiked almost the entire Appalachian Trail,Tardiff has evolved a system he calls "rendezvous"hiking which eliminates the need to carrya full, heavy pack.