Will This Marathon Hiker Ever Slow Down?

For almost three decades, George “Billy Goat” Woodard has been on a thru-hike with no end.

- Bill Donahue

IT’S RAINING AT RAINY PASS, Washington. We’re just 66 miles shy of the northern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail—way up in the pines and the firs and the shifting fogs of North Cascades National Park—and it’s cold. Even now, in the middle of August, there are still patches of snow in the creases of the steep, sharp-ridged mountains above. It’s hypothermia weather. And earlier, as a trail angel named Monte drove us up a mountain road to the 4,800-foot pass, he waxed grandiose, telling us, “You guys are stepping onto the Trail of Death.” Now, I look out the car window, skeptically.

The most venerated hiker in PCT history is outside, however, standing beside the large wooden sign that welcomes visitors to Rainy Pass trail head. Billy Goat, a retired railroad conductor from Maine, has hiked the entire length of the PCT eight times and most of the route two additional times. He is 77 years old and, ever since retiring at age 49, he has hiked roughly 150 days a year. He is not just another backpacker who enjoys being out in nature. No, Billy Goat is nature. Or at least he’s more comfortable in it than most. At an annual gathering of the American Long Distance Hiking Association West, as younger trail fanatics slept in warm beds inside a comfy lodge, escaping the autumn chill on California’s Donner Pass, Billy Goat slumbered beneath a towering pine tree, using only a scrap of Tyvek for shelter.

In many ways, Billy Goat looks as old as weather itself. His hair, untrimmed since 2004, is an unruly tangle of gray cascading down from the rim of his broad khaki hat, and his long beard, likewise untrimmed, is a bounteous mist of tiny white whorls. The man could reasonably be cast as God in a movie.