Summer Adventures

“They had no idea what they were doing,” said Robbie Anderson, describing the outset of her son’s Appalachian Trail adventure. “They didn’t even have the right shoes for a long walk in Manito Park.”

The North Spokane teacher speaks with resignation and humor about her son, Mark Anderson, and his best buddy since middle school, Mark Stenerson: two 26-year-olds who clearly have given her years of entertainment.

She’s still getting mileage from their summer trip on the granddaddy of national scenic trails through 14 states from Georgia to Maine.

“The funny thing is that my son had virtually no camping experience,” she said. “He wore Ralph Lauren polo shirts – that were ironed. He likes to sleep in clean sheets. He didn’t even like camping. He still doesn’t like camping.”

Yet it was her son who talked Stenerson into quitting a good job with a Seattle computer firm to go on the hike.

“I never know what they’re going to cook up,” she said. “Before he went on this trip, Mark (Anderson) never, ever, would have thought to wear the same shirt two days in a row. But (during the course of the hike) he kept sending things home. He had only one set of clothes for the last thousand miles of the trip.”

Hiking the AT was just another tangent in the twosome’s young-adult learning curve.

“We didn’t really plan for the trip and I don’t know why,” Stenerson said. “We thought it would be the East Coast – people everywhere. We worked at Camp Reed and a caretaker said he did it when he was 18 and there was nothing to it. Turns out there were a few gaps in his memory.

“First of all, he never mentioned that it’s hard work.

“I’ll always remember our first night. We’d just bought all this stuff from REI and we’d never tried any of it. Our packs were heavy and full of gear, it was getting dark and we didn’t know where our lights were. I went to use the water filter for the first time and it didn’t work at all. I came back a half hour later with a half a cup of water. Mark (Anderson) was using the stove for the first time and the rice was completely burnt. The wind was coming up and we didn’t know how to set up the tent. It was the windiest night I’ve ever seen.

“Everything was a disaster.”

Within a few weeks, they’d lightened up. The hikers mailed home many pounds of unneeded gear, including the stove. They lived on no-cook groceries they bagged at stores and gas stations supplemented by a few restaurant meals a week, goodwill from locals and a lot of care packages from Robbie and Stenerson’s mom, Bonnie.

“At a place called Mountain Mommas, they’d eaten dinner before they realized the café didn’t take debit cards,” Robbie said. “Mountain Mommas made them work it off by cutting wood and hauling sandbags.

“I heard from my son every week until he jumped in a lake with his cell phone in his pocket,” Robbie added. “But even then, Bonnie and I could peg them within 10 or 15 miles by tracking their Visa debit card trail.”

And the route wasn’t confined to the Appalachian Trail.

“We really enjoyed the social part of meeting all the crazy people who live in a different part of the country,” Stenerson said. “We had a blast going on mini-adventures off the trail to small towns. We even went to Boston, Washington, D.C., New York and Philadelphia. Bums would come out to talk to us. They really liked our egg-crate sleeping mats.

“We stayed in a bunch of random houses,” he said, making quick references to notables such as the felon and the moonshiners.

“In Blacksburg (Va.) we met a guy with a bunch of tattoos, but really nice, and then some girls who’d just graduated and they let us stay at their place. Turns out the guy was known as the town arsonist. Later I was checking out an abandoned frat house when eight cop cars zoom in on me. They wanted to book me for arson. It was really intense. They had me hold a sign for the jail photo and I got DNA’d and fingerprinted. Right off the trail, I guess I looked the part.”

On the trail, they survived a lightning storm while camped on top of a mountain, had close calls with rattlesnakes, negotiated trail washouts, endured shin splints, infected toes and serious rashes from poison ivy.

“I guess we got lucky a lot,” Stenerson said. “We even got rid of the water filter.”

They slept in idyllic campsites, but also in parking garages, under bridges, abandoned gas stations.

“Oh, the hiking?” he said, referring to the question: “The hiking is just tough day-in, day-out, staring-at-the-ground work. I enjoy a good challenge, but it’s safe to say Mark (Anderson) hated every second of it. It might have helped if he wasn’t always sleep deprived. I can sleep anywhere, he can’t – especially while camping.”

“And I’m more competitive than he is. I couldn’t stand having older people passing us. I made him go faster.

“The hiking part, well, it was more fun when it was over. The miles don’t add up very fast.”

Their moms probably think it’s more fun now that the trip’s over, too. But they’re not relaxing.

“They’re a scream,” Robbie said. “The second they finished the Appalachian Trail, they started thinking of what their next adventure would be. Bonnie and I think it’s time they get girlfriends.”