The Hiking Man
By Rick Cipes
Photography by Dan Schwachter
The Hiking Man: Ted Keizer
Age: 34
Nickname: Cave Dog
Hometown: Coos Bay, Oregon
The Mission:
The Duofold Hike 50 Challenge - 50K hikes in 50 states in 100 days.
The Result: Accomplished in 76 days.
Bob Marshall was an American original.
Whenever I go to challenge a record, I feel it’s really important to research the heritage of that record: What are the ethics by which people have competed and come up with their rules? So, when I was researching the Adirondacks 46 High Peaks Record, I came across Bob Marshall. He and his brother George, and a friend Herb Clark, did the first speed record. Marshall is a fascinating character, someone who we owe a huge debt of gratitude to for what he’s done to help preserve our wild lands. He helped with the International Park Service, building the Appalachian Trail and he founded the Wilderness Society. Six hundred names on our map today were coined by him.
Marshall was a rising star in Washington D.C.
He worked for the forest service, and he was moving up the ranks real fast, becoming a kind of D.C. bureaucrat. Which was not his deal at all. He just had a huge passion for the outdoors. And he had this unusual stipulation in his contract: the National Forest Service had to send him around the country to see different national forests and assess them. And, as he did that, he had a life-long goal to do a 30-mile hike in every state. Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to finish it. He got close. Back then there was only 48 states, and he got in the low 40s before he passed away at the untimely age of 38. That was in 1939.
It was a privilege to do a portion of Bob’s most famous New York, Adirondack route which included 14 peaks.
But it was the toughest. Bob was the only one that had ever done it, in 1932. But he did it in July, with full daylight and good summer conditions, which wasn’t possible for us. I was doing it on November 28. We knew that was the worst possible time to try it. It was trying to do fourteen of the highest peaks in New York. And there were these sheets of ice, and the weather was terrible. We had gale force winds that tossed me about. You had to hold on to trees and limbs just to keep from being blown off the mountain. I did six of the fourteen peaks.
Hawaii was just really phenomenal.
On the Napali Coast on Kauai, on the Kalalau Trail. You’re in this dense tropical forest, and then you come out, and you’re in this volcanic landscape with cliffs going down seven hundred feet into the crashing waves. There were herds of wild goats and we actually saw a wild boar, which is unusual. Then the trail finished into this pristine beach, that you could only get to by foot or boat, and it had a waterfall. I mean, you couldn’t have dreamed up a better hike. And I’ve never seen so many rainbows. And we even saw, after dark, a moonbow, which I didn’t even know existed. It didn’t have the color of a rainbow, but it had the same arc, this white arc, what a rare sight that was.
I guess in some ways, it makes sense to call me the Pied Piper of Hiking.
One of the really interesting components to this challenge was that we invited people to come out and hike with me. They didn’t have to do a 50K hike. They could do one mile, or five miles, or ten miles, or whatever they were up to.
I got my nickname from living in a cave for a couple of months.
I was a ski bum in Crested Butte, Colorado. And, you know, when you’re a ski bum, you want to ski as much as you can and work as little as you can. So I searched around in the woods and I found a cave. Saved on rent. Every morning I had a thermometer that would be bottomed out at negative twenty. You can’t have any skin exposed or you get frostbite. So I slept in a ski mask, and goggles, and had two sleeping bags, one inside the other, to keep warm. Anyway, I had a friend who was an executive chef in Crested Butte, and everybody called him Scurvy Dog. So, since I was hanging out with Scurvy Dog, and living in a cave, people kind of put that together.
The security in the capitol was amazing.
I was hiking in this park near the Jefferson Memorial. It was night and it started raining, and blustering wind, and just miserable conditions. Nobody was in the park. And I was walking along this path when this police car came by, and he’s screaming at me: “Do you have any guns or knives?” And I’m like, “No, no, no, I’m just a hiker.” He patted me down, had me sit on the bumper of the car, then two more police cars came. Turns out there was a stabbing in the area and they didn’t have any description, so they were pulling over anyone they could find. And they only found me, because nobody else would be out there on a night like that.
There are four major things you need to be aware of when hiking.
1) Have enough food and water.
2) Carry a headlamp – even if it’s going to be a morning hike, because you never know what could happen.
3) Wear top quality clothing. That’s the most important gear you have, because that’s what protects you from the elements. The two most important pieces of your clothing are your outer shell, which keeps you from getting wet, and your base layer, because that’s what’s next to your skin.
4) Don’t forget a map and compass. You gotta know where you are. GPS’ are great, they’ve really become a lot more useful in recent years now that they have Topo maps on them and it shows you where you are on the map. Before it was just latitude and longitude. And who thinks in latitude and longitude? Computers maybe. But you can’t rely on GPS. What if you drop it and it breaks? The batteries could go dead. It could get wet...
Safety is the most important thing to remember when trying to set a world record.
We’re not out here to get killed. We’re out here to have an incredible adventure and push our limits.
The one mountain I want to conquer before I die is Teocalli in Colorado.
It’s on the western slope of Colorado. When I was a ski bum, that was one of the dominant peaks. And in the winter, it has all these horizontal ledges. So the snow collects, and these layers become striped, it looks like a pyramid, with stripes of white and dark colors. It looks like you’re looking at one of the great pyramids of Giza.
Hiking strengthens your constitution as a man.
In a general sense, when you’re living on the trail or the road, you have to be resourceful, or you’re not going to make it. It teaches you to work with what you have. These challenges take kind of a contradictory personality type to make it work. Because you have to be intense. There’s no way you’re going to keep going if you don’t have that intensity. Yet, if you’re so intense, and worked up about it when it gets really bad, when it’s the middle of the night and the weather gets bad, and you’re feeling fatigued, exhausted, it’s gonna eat you up. You have to have that intensity when it’s appropriate, but you also have to be laid back enough to take what comes at you. In many ways, it teaches you how to approach each situation for what it’s worth, in the correct mindset. Which you can bring into every aspect of your life.
Writer Rick Cipes likes to hike – for as long as it takes to get to the first pool you can chill your beers in. Check out his website theguyreport.com.
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