Hiking club hits the trail with a passion

For eight dedicated hikers trekking through a quiet North Side neighborhood Saturday, there is always something worth taking in.

“We hike every week – rain, snow, whatever,” said Virginia Danke, 80, one of the founding members of the Hobnailers Hiking Club.

Leaving at 10 a.m. sharp from St. Thomas More Parish, the group walked briskly through the residential streets nearby, stopping to look at houses smothered in Christmas décor and other details of the neighborhood that would be hard to capture if not on foot.

With Christmas falling on a Sunday this year, their weekly hike was bumped back a day, but neither snow nor holiday traffic could keep Danke and her cohorts from enjoying a five-mile walk in welcoming weather.

“In the wintertime we stay close to home,” she said. But Hobnailer trips have taken her as far away as New Zealand and Russia.

“They don’t turn on the heat over there ‘til October 15. We darn near froze to death,” she said of her trip to Russia in the 1980s.

The Hobnailers started tackling trails in 1951. Danke and about 30 other members of the Spokane Mountaineers split off from the group after a difference of opinion regarding land on Mount Spokane that the Mountaineers had purchased, according to that group’s Web site.

Off the trail, Danke was the head of the physical education department at Lewis and Clark High School for 29 years.

Her love of the outdoors has taken her all over the Inland Northwest. But even after more than five decades of hiking, she said she still sees something new on all of her trips.

“We don’t just walk, we check everything out,” said Delores Sullivan, 76, after bending down to smell a clump of hemlocks on the Whitworth campus.

Banter from the hikers directed their eyes to sculptures and new buildings on the campus, historic markers and rising fog against the cliffs in the distance.

Club members range in age from people in their 30s to one woman over 100, Danke said.

The eldest member still hiking, she said, is 94 and legally blind but hikes two or three miles with the group each Sunday.

“I think all the men are Christmas shopping today,” Danke said early in the hike, noticing that Saturday’s group happened to be all women over 60.

Hike leader Shirley Wihlborg, 84, periodically studied a folded phonebook map, which she kept in a sealed sandwich bag, to find the most interesting route back to the cars.

“We have younger members, but you see who are the real toughies in the group,” she joked about halfway through the two-hour walk.

Some in the group said that staying active and hiking regularly has even helped keep them healthy and independent.

At their yearly banquet next month, Danke will be recognized for logging 11,000 miles with the club. Another Hobnailer will be recognized for 14,000 miles.

Among the highlights of Saturday’s walk was the home of a retired firefighter who has a fire tower in his back yard and a house that is practically a museum of firefighting relics.

“We get into some places people wouldn’t ever know about,” Danke said.