432.     BOOTS, BOOTS, BOOTS!!!

Well, looks like the time to hang up my old boots finally came! And, as the above picture shows, this was not your "average hiker's boot collection" to hang up either, since it didn't even include all the boots of my backpacking days that "bit the dust along the way"!

No, many of the boots that I used along my 30,000 miles of solo long-distance backpacking "radical repeater" multiple thru-hiking days never even made it home, since they were oftentimes replaced by new boots in "mail drops" at the nearest trail towns every thousand miles or so along the various trails I was backpacking back then in the 80's and 90's. After I'd hiked my first three AT's and two PCT's in the mid-80's, one company even sent me free boots along the trail in exchange for using my name in their advertising. So, although, many boots got left behind, many more made it home with plenty of miles of trail tread left to spare...



Until recently I hadn't really known what to do with all these old boots lined up on shelves in my garage. Sure, I would rotate wearing different colored pairs on the various trails I still hiked after retiring from backpacking, but there were still more miles of tread left on all these boots than I could ever use up in my lifetime, and some of them were practically new - especially the higher cut ones that I never really adapted to, since nowadays I mostly just wear low-cut sneakers for hiking anyway.

So, when our pastor announced at church this past summer that a collection of clothing, hats, bags, belts, shoes - even boots and backpacks! - was being organized both to get these items to those who could use them and to help send kids to camp by earning money according to the weight of the articles collected, bells went off in my head! I had some mighty heavy boots and packs from my early backpacking days that I'd never be using again...heck, my oldest pair of heavy-duty winter leather hiking boots was so weighty they just might send one kid to camp singlehandedly!:-) Anyway, that's how I managed to get these boots out of the garage, cleaned and dusted them off, and got Pete to take one last picture of them out on our back deck before packing them off in big plastic bags to "go to camp"!

And now a memento of those many pairs of boots can be found near the end of my "backpacking career", wandering in the woods of western RI before that final parking lot gate. Whether wandering back from the first or final loop, simply stop 22 steps before the yellow trail takes off to the north, or 22 steps after the yellow trail, if just going for this one box. There is a boulder adjacent to a thin 5-trunk tree on the north side of the trail, and behind that boulder, under its mossy point, rests this box.

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