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The weekend hikers: Gail and Kurt Rheinheimer stand on top of Rice Fields, a bald southwest of Blacksburg, Va. along the Appalachian Trail. They were photographed in May by a couple who were thru-hiking the AT with their two children.

THE BACKGROUND: Blue Ridge Country editor-in-chief Kurt Rheinheimer and his wife Gail woke up on Valentine’s Day 2004 looking to do a little something different in recognition of the occasion. Sometime-hikers and parents of five hiking sons, they’d done only a few miles in the wintertime. Still, Gail’s suggestion that they bundle up and find a walk in the woods for that day generated immediate excitement and a drive 40 miles up the road from Roanoke to the trailhead of the 7-mile Cornelius Creek/Appalachian Trail/Apple Orchard Falls loop.

THE SURPRISING DEVELOPMENT: The presence on the snowy Cornelius Creek Trail of not a single boot print until theirs (animal prints yes, but none human), along with the thrills of being on the AT in mid-winter and eating lunch – albeit a shivery one – beneath the spectacularly frozen Apple Orchard Falls had the effect of the couple deciding, the next weekend, to go out again, this time to take on the also-snowy, 9-mile Hoop Hole lower and upper loops.

THE STRANGE OBSESSION: As of this writing – July 11, 2005 – Kurt and Gail have hiked at least once every weekend for 74 consecutive weeks, covering more than 830 miles. Most of the walks have been in Virginia (though others have been in West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas), and many have been section or loop-hikes on or including pieces of the Appalachian Trail--to the point that they have now covered more than 200 of Virginia’s 540 miles of the trail, having walked all the miles in the counties of Craig, Montgomery, Roanoke, Botetourt, Bedford and Amherst, with near-completion of Giles’ miles to the south and Nelson’s to the north.

Wrapped-up Gail: Week 90 in West Virginia on a 16.5-mile hike starting at 4,500 feet.

THE NEW DILEMMA: With drives from Roanoke to new-territory day-hikes now reaching to 90 minutes or more one-way, the wacky couple finds itself at a crossroads: Do they work to overcome Gail’s long-held conviction to “do any day-hike we can find, as long as I don’t have to sleep in the woods;” do they start repeating things far more than they have so far; or do they bag the whole thing and start keeping the house clean again? Only the coming weekends will tell.

IN THE MEANTIME, Kurt has agreed to – for as long or as short as he and Gail continue their odd odyssey – to report briefly on their hikes.