I grew up in the Chicago area, mostly in the suburbs near the flight path of jets flying in and out of O’Hare Field. Watching planes from all over the world gave me an appetite for journeying the world. As a teenager I discovered the natural world and the challenge of long-distance travel by completing a 1,000-mile cycling trip around Lake Michigan. Upon completing my college degree in accounting at the University of Illinois (1976) I was hired as an internal auditor after the manager concluded I had a “sense of adventure.” I think the cycling trip convinced him I had the strength to endure his Vince Lombardi-esque management style. The job did appeal to my desire to travel. On one of those trips I discovered the Pacific Northwest, and I moved there in 1979.
I discovered hiking and backpacking in Washington state and soon learned about the Pacific Crest Trail. The thought of hiking the entire PCT never crossed my mind until I met Ray Jardine on a section hike of the trail in Oregon in 1991. A few years later I became one of the charter members of the American Long Distance Hikers Association-West. The connections and friendships I made at the annual gatherings fueled a sense of confidence that I could thru-hike the PCT.
In 1995, a year which had a tremendously high snowpack in the Sierra Nevada of California, I started what I hoped would be a thru-hike on the PCT. Along the way to the Sierra I met an aspiring writer, Cheryl Strayed along Spanish Needle Creek a couple of days before reaching Kennedy Meadows. At Kennedy Meadows we both decided to skip around the deep snows and rejoin the trail in northern California where we hoped to find less snow. However, as we discovered after parting ways, there was plenty of snow to deal with. I bailed off the trail to take a couple of weeks off, returned to the high Sierra, but went home after hiking over a couple of the high passes. To her credit, Cheryl Strayed kept hiking north and completed her section hike to the Columbia River in Oregon. But I was not finished! I returned to the PCT in 1996, started at the Mexico border on May 8 and reached the Canadian border on September 15, 1996.
The thru-hike of the PCT gave me confidence to upgrade my job skills, which were becoming obsolete as the era of big data began to grow in the mid-90’s. In the spirit of adventure, I took community college classes in IT subjects, found challenging jobs in the public and private sectors that led to new experiences and global travel. Side trips and weekend journeys in far away places included the Alps in Europe, part of the Coast to Coast in England, part of the Bibbulmun Track in Australia, the Inca Trail in Peru. On work trips I sought bullet trains in Japan, cog railways and trails in Switzerland, night trains through Europe, and more. A late career lay-off convinced me to seek other opportunities…on the Continental Divide Trail in 2016! Now that I am retired I hope to finish the Bibbulmun and Coast to Coast trails! The Ice Age Trail looks appealing, too!
Cheryl Strayed’s memoir, “Wild”, was published in 2012 and became a best seller and an outstanding feature film. To this day I am grateful that Cheryl portrayed me in a positive light as “Greg” in both the book and the film versions of “Wild”. In September 2015 I met a CDT thru-hiker who gave me the trail name “Greg” after hearing my story, and “Greg” modified it slightly to Greg in Wild.
I live in Portland, Oregon with my lovely wife, Cindy Kleinegger, an Oral Pathologist. After Cindy completes another walk on the Camino de Santiago (Portugal route) in 2021 and I complete (hopefully…no guarantees!) the Appalachian Trail in the same year, we plan to hike the Camino France to Santiago route together in 2022.
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