"People Are Good": Rhiis and Sara Cross Kansas on the American Discovery Trail

On the Fourth of July, Rhiis and Sara were sitting in the shade outside a gas station in Ford, Kansas, working through one Arnold Palmer after another, when a man drove up to tell them about the potluck in the park. Nobody had promoted it more than a week out, so the turnout was small, more family gathering than town event.

Before the two hikers left, the same man offered them his house for a shower. He had met them an hour earlier.

"He just met us," Rhiis said a few days later, in the High Plains Public Radio studio in Garden City.

Rhiis Lopez and Sara Heitman are walking the American Discovery Trail, the coast-to-coast route from Cape Henlopen, Delaware to Point Reyes, California. They walk it slowly and on purpose, checking water sources, camps, and road conditions as they go, and the notes they send back feed Hiking America's guides and Gaia GPS data. They stopped by HPPR while passing through southwest Kansas, and the half-hour they spent on the air with host Lynn Boitano is the first episode of Hiking America's new (occasional) podcast series, Field Recordings.

Kansas was the part they had dreaded. They loaded up on audiobooks and music to get through what everyone had told them would be dreadfully boring and flat, and they never needed any of it. "It's just not true," Rhiis said. The Flint Hills wowed them. A sunrise on an empty farm road could stop them where they stood. "The sun comes through the clouds and paints just this one section of prairie gold, and it's like, this is for me right now," he said. "Sometimes it feels like the show is just for you."

Carol, at Salt Creek Ranch near Osage City, is a former endurance rider. She shuttled Rhiis and Sara's packs so they could walk a few days without thirty-five pounds on their backs, then connected them to Carolyn near Chase, Carolyn to Debbie, and Debbie to a night inside the church at Pierceville, thanks to Pastor Mike. Somewhere in that web was Joyce Adams, a Garden City local who came to the studio to hear them tell it.

"People are good. I didn't know that before this," Rhiis said. "I used to think the opposite." The last two or three weeks of Nebraska the year before had run the same way, meals and beds turning up town to town until their tents rode uselessly on their packs.

Kansas was becoming Nebraska part two.

The walking itself is a negotiation with heat and water. In summer they wake before dawn and try to reach the day's stopping point an hour or two ahead of a 104-degree afternoon, then find shade and water and wait it out. They carry more water than an ultralight hiker would, which puts their loaded packs near thirty-five pounds, a trade they will happily make in July.

Crossing into Colorado this week put Kansas behind them as their tenth state. They have stopped tallying the distance. "We keep track of the daily miles, but we don't count the miles anymore," Rhiis said. "We just take it a day at a time." The plan is to keep walking until the cold comes, probably late October, and they are weighing a flip to the California end to walk Utah eastbound in milder weather rather than cross it in the dead of summer.

The full half hour, Elvis impersonators and all, is the first episode of Field Recordings.

The ground under that Fourth of July in Ford is now mapped and updated. Kansas Segment 3, the fifty-four miles from Dodge City to Kinsley, is posted in the printable guides and the Gaia GPS data, with the water sources Rhiis and Sara checked on foot marked reliable or not.

Segments 1 and 2, west of Dodge City where Garden City and Pierceville sit, are still being compiled and will follow.

Episode 1 was recorded by Kathy Holt, who runs the Historic Old West Hotel in Cimarron, Kansas. Studio photo by Lynn Boitano, High Plains Public Radio.

Hike Your Hike - John.