When it comes to Appalachian Trail legends, Warren Doyle's name has a place at the top of the list. The 73-year-old set a fastest known time of 66 days five decades ago, has hiked all 2,198 miles of the trial 18 times, has coached other AT record setters, and has since 1989 run the Appalachian Trail Institute (ATI), imparting his knowledge to would-be hikers during a quarterly five-day seminar. As Grayson Haver Currin writes in a profile for Outside Online, "from memory, he can cite the exact mileage from the trail's start in Georgia to the best creeks for bathing." He's a trail wizard—but also a "polarizing figure" and a "curmudgeon."
Haver Currin's profile bounces all around, describing the myriad ways Doyle has lived his life as an AT evangelizer while also pooh-poohing the need to pack out toilet paper, regaling ATI students about AT murders in "lurid detail," and touting the benefits of drinking unfiltered water and the parasite giardia he contracted as a result: "It kept his stools loose and staved off hemorrhoids for the entirety of the nineties." He's also no fan of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which is one of the entities that manages the AT and its future, and which Doyle believes should essentially be done away with. But Haver Currin ends with a twist: The ATI students he spoke with all felt ready to bail on Doyle's class after day one—"but three months later they almost all said the experience was crucial, perhaps even transformative." (Read the full story here.)
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