Trail will helps principal teach life lessons
Steve and I serve on the same board for a local nonprofit organization that we both believe in wholeheartedly, which is how I got to know the principal of Allen Elementary School in the Burlington-Edison School District.
He’s a guy devoted to what he does. He’s a teacher. Even as a school administrator, if you asked Steve, he’d say he’s still a teacher. Well, he’d get to teacher after explaining that he’s a father. And a great one he is, at that.
Steve took his daughter to her first concert – Def Leppard at the Tacoma Dome. And he took her again 25 years later to celebrate that first concert. That’s the kind of dad Dr. Steven Finch is – the cool kind. The kind kind.
Steve has a Ph.D. and still keeps a Beatles hard case on his laptop.
This week he’s embarking on a six-month lesson plan that will likely leave him leg-weary and foot-sore, but with a lifetime supply of stories and adventures.
Steve Finch will spend the next six months hiking the Pacific Crest Trail – a solo trek he plans to turn into a series of teachable moments for his students from along the way north.
“I’ve been working on a series of lessons I can teach from different spots along the trail,” he announced a year ago. “I’ve worked it out so that I can Skype in and teach from the trail.”
And he’ll post updates on his progress on the school’s website. It’s his way of taking the kids with him. Instead of hunting for Carmen Sandiego, the kids from Allen Elementary will be able to play “Where on the Pacific Coast Trail is Principal Finch?”
It’s ambitious. It’s bold. And it’s perfectly in keeping with the kind of guy Steve Finch is.
Once he gets back, which should be sometime in October, I intend to hound him mercilessly until he finishes writing a book about his adventure. After all, Steve is a man born to share.
He told our board that he was planning this trek more than a year ago.
My first thought? Wow, this guy is having a YUGE midlife crisis.
“Uh, Steve,” I told him. “There are easier ways to meet Reese Witherspoon.”
Turns out Steve isn’t a fan of the movie “Wild,” and even less of the book, “Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail,” upon which the movie is based. And neither was the rest of the board, which had all read the book. Which is more than I can say for the minutes of the previous meeting.
But Steve did have an opinion about the movie, which tells the story of a woman dealing with a midlife crisis by hiking the trail. To him, it means that the trail will be vastly more crowded.
Since the movie came out last year, there have been 10 times the applications for permits to hike the full trail.
How many people will finish the trek is anyone’s guess. I’m putting my money on just one guy.
Steve has shared with us his training regimen. His eyes lit up toward the end of one meeting last year when he realized that, since we were finishing early, he had time to hurry to Snoqualmie Pass and get in a good 10-mile hike before going home.
This trek is something Steve Finch has spent a lifetime dreaming about, and it’s especially pleasing to see a good man realize such a dream.
So this week, Steve Finch will align his heels on the U.S.-Mexican border and set off for Canada, some 2,650 miles away. Everything he needs he will carry on his back. He’s worked out mail drops along the way and is sending himself refills on his supplies – his way of keeping the load as light as possible.
He’s taking that load stuff seriously.
One of the last things Steve did at Allen Elementary before packing his duffel was raffle off a chance to shave his head. Eighth-grader Lorenzo Ramos won and promptly took a set of clippers to what’s left of Steve’s blonde locks.
“I’m pretty sad he’s going to leave,” Lorenzo told the Skagit Valley Herald after shaving Finch’s head. “He’s my favorite principal. It’s going to be strange without him.”
So while the rest of us deal with things like Memorial Day and Father’s Day and the Fourth of July, Dr. Steven Finch will be hiking his way north through the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Cascade Range. He’ll walk past Big Bear Lake and through three national parks. He’ll hike through Desolation Wilderness and Lassen Volcanic National Park. He will work his way through Cajon Pass, Foster Pass (the highest point on the trail), Sonora Pass, Ebbetts Pass, Carson Pass and the aptly named Walker Pass. And he will pass through wilderness areas named for John Muir and Ansel Adams and he will be able to teach his students the correct way to pronounce Tuolumne Meadows when he gets to Yosemite National Park.
I just hope he remembered to pack talcum powder.
Steve Christilaw can be reached at steve.christilaw@ gmail.com.