I am an author, a podcaster, a photographer, a historian, a hiker, and an award-winning educator. I am retired from George Mason University where I taught for 24 years and I maintain one of the most historic shelters on the Appalachian Trail and am the archivist of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club (PATC). And just because I don’t have enough connections to the trail, I’m also a board member of the Appalachian Trail Museum, the Handmade Music School, and the Friends of the State Historic Sites in Edenton (NC). I’ve been hiking on the Appalachian Trail since 1971, which seems like a very long time these days. During those years I’ve logged more than 600 miles of the trail in 10 of the 14 states the trail traverses. Many sections I’ve hiked several times just because I like them.
I live in historic Edenton, North Carolina, and spend a lot of time in Linden, Virginia about a mile from the Appalachian Trail. I’ve been a volunteer with the PATC for almost 15 years, taking care of the trail, working as a co-maintainer of a historic cabin in Shenandoah National Park, and since 2018 I’ve been the maintainer of the Manassas Gap Shelter, one of the original shelters built along the trail in the 1930s. These days I’m also the Club’s archivist.
As an educator I always pushed against the conventional wisdom on how we ought to teach history. I was one of the first historians to teach his students how to create websites to present their research. And sometimes my teaching methods ended up being a little controversial. I was always okay with controversy if it meant my students learned better than they would have otherwise.
