Hitting the Trail with Hiking Legend Bruce Sundquist

January 16, 2015
With contributions from Kathy Zhao

For her first piece at The Allegheny Front, our host Jennifer Szweda Jordan, went hiking with Bruce Sundquist. Sundquist is a living legend in Western PA, and back in 2002, he was the first-ever recipient of the Venture Outdoors Recreation & Outdoor Community Steward (or ROCS) award.

At the time, he’d already led countless groups on many different types of recreational trips, including skiing, rafting, and caving. He had also written, edited, and/or published eight trail guides, none of which for personal profit.

Sundquist said he’d been involved with the outdoors since he was a child, growing up in Minnesota. He was always exploring the backwaters of the Mississippi River, and ice-boating or ice skating when the lakes froze over in the winter.

In fact, he attributed his comfort in the outdoors and his feeling of connection with nature to his childhood experiences, at least at the start.

Sundquist first came to Pennsylvania in June 1960.

“I got a job with U.S. Steel’s Fundamental Research Laboratory until 1971 or 1972 and then I went to work for Westinghouse’s reader reactor division,” he said.

Sundquist said he never considered his job to be at odds with environmental work. In fact, he said that back in the '70s, the many members of the Sierra Club seemed to be pro-nuclear power.

As for his recreational participation in the Pittsburgh region, Sundquist says he first got involved with American Youth Hostels Pittsburgh Council.

“It was at that time a very delightful group,” he said. “There were people there who were just starting to write their experiences of their trips up in the form of a little guide. They had a canoeing guide, and I thought this would be a great thing to expand upon and sell, perhaps, and provide a resource for people who wanted to lead trips for AYH and other groups.”

Sundquist said that the guidebook had all the information people needed to pick out a good spot to go to, and the trips that the AYH hosted were a good way to get people outside.

“In those days, the outdoors wasn’t as big as it is now, by a long shot,” he said.

“The hiking trails weren’t used as much as they should have been used, and thus the Forest Service Management tilted toward timbering,” according to Sundquist.

He said that by getting more recreational use out of the forest, the hope was that management interests of the forests could be tilted more towards scenic and recreational values.

Then, in the early 2000s, Sundquist said the main concern was exactly the opposite: overuse of the trails.

“You need to be more restrictive of how people use trails,” Sundquist said. “For example, if you have a steep hillside with a trail running along the hillside, a very narrow, steep trail, you can destroy that trail with one horse. That trail really should not be used for equestrian use.”

He said that some trails are built to be basically indestructible and people are free to do whatever they want on them, such as drive off-road vehicles or ride trail bikes. However, a lot of trails weren’t made to weather anything rougher than a human shoe.

“You somehow have to control how a trail is used so you don’t destroy the trail just by callous indifference and reckless use of devices which aren’t really meant for that kind of trail,” Sundquist said.