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We lost another hiker, friend, and asset to the Appalachian Trail community on 02 August.
Known here on WhiteBlaze as Hikerhead and to the Appalachian Trail community as Hokey Pokey. He was one of the original members of WhiteBlaze. He contributed a lot to the WhiteBlaze web site in its early days.
Don’s obituary is here:
https://memorial.oakeys.com/donald-h...1kITI5LPTydtGs
https://memorial-assets.frontrunnerp...05-7627545.jpg
Wow...way too young. RIP Hikerhead.
Jeff, here's the link to my writeup on Facebook.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff
https://www.facebook.com/Cookerhiker...17880610916211
Wow, I just saw this. I'm shocked. Hikerhead/Hokey Pokey and I backpacked almost 200 AT miles together over the course of 4 of my section hikes (Glasgow, VA in '03; GA in '04; NH in '05; and southern VA in '07). He actually drove and helped shuttle on each of these hikes, as I was flying in from Michigan.
I met Hokey Pokey on the bulletin board that was the precursor to WhiteBlaze.net in or around 2000, when I was restarting my quest to hike the entire AT. Hokey Pokey (Hikerhead on WhiteBlaze) was the turtle to my hare -- it took him a while to cover the miles but he never stopped.
I have a lot of good memories of our time together. He was generous, humorous, curious, competitive (he hated that I beat in him 8-Ball at a little bar in Twin Pines, NH on a zero day!) and simply loved being out-of-doors. I'm terribly saddened and will miss him despite rarely seeing him in person.
H-P crossing a tributary of the James River trail-north of Glasgow, VA (Oct 19, 2003):
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Hokey Pokey and Kerosene at Dicks Gap in GA, heading for the GA/NC state line (Apr 9, 2004:
Attachment 46748
We had met up the prior evening atop Mt. Liberty in NH. It was chilly that morning so we skipped breakfast, but we made pretty good time until we started the climb up to Franconia Ridge. Hokey didn't like climbing. I was finishing breakfast in the early morning sun halfway up and took this picture of him when he finally caught up to me. (Sept 12, 2006):
Attachment 46749
We took a zero at Crawford Notch (actually in Twin Peaks down the road) before continuing north through the Whites to reach LOTC Hut. As HP was a bit slower than me, I shuttled him down the the trailhead in his car at 6:10 am, then returned to the AMC Lodge to park the car and catch the 8 am shuttle back to the trailhead. I caught him after a solid hour of climbing, first seeing him as a shadow in the dense fog of one of the Webster Cliff ridgelines (Sept 15, 2006):
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A little bit later, I took this sequence of four shots to try to give the folks back home a sense of what it can mean to scramble in the Whites:
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The next day we summited Mt. Washington on a perfect 50-degree morning with absolutely no wind! We got separated that night as we tried to get to Pinkham Notch (despite the walkie-talkies that we carried), so I caught the first shuttle in the morning back to the car in Crawford Notch and was back at Pinkham Notch before he finally strolled out of the woods ready for a big breakfast!
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RIP, good buddy.
Met hikerhead hear on white blaze when he had us meet up from white blaze for a hike on mcaffees knob.
I'm sorry to hear about Hikerhead's death. He and I became good friends in the very early days of Whiteblaze. He was a Virginia Tech fan as I remember it and I'm a Crimson Tide fan. We traded jabs thru emails a lot during football season. RIP Hikerhead.