Ken Zellars trudged up Mount Marcy in New York’s Adirondack Mountains on a soaking wet day when an older man hiking down warned him about the dangerous stream ahead.
“If you don’t have your will made, you’d better not cross it,” the man said. “I told that fellow up ahead of you, too.”
Ken rushed ahead to find the “fellow,” his son Karl, hoping he’d heeded the man’s warning.
The stream raged after a day of rain, and the crossing wasn’t far from a waterfall, making even a minor slip potentially life-threatening. Neither Ken nor his daughter, Katie, could see Karl anywhere. But after yelling his name several times, he popped out from behind a tree, although on the other side of the water.
“My dad doesn’t get mad often, but just the way he looked at me, I knew he was furious,” Karl said.
He was, but he also followed his son across the stormy stream, thrusting his daughter to safety as he nearly lost his footing.
That adventure makes for a good story, but it’s also emblematic of the Zellars family, which has too much practice sticking together when the water gets rough.
Not only did the family — and specifically Ken and Karl — find coping mechanisms, but also they found the same one: running. If they finish, this year will mark Ken’s 20th Rachel Carson Trail Challenge and Karl’s 17th — at ages 73 and 35, respectively — continuing their reign as the participants with the first- and second-most finishes in the trek’s 25-year history.
Different, not better
Ken’s first wife, his children’s mother, died of metastatic breast cancer over 30 years ago, when Karl was just 3. Ken’s second marriage, to a woman with a son of her own, ended in divorce.
As a single father, Ken never forced the outdoors — or anything else, for that matter — onto his kids, but he made it available.
The family’s Mars home had a rural backyard, where Karl remembers eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and drinking orange pop, a rare treat, with his dad before heading off on a hike in their own yard.
When Ken would come home from a day driving a bus for the Port Authority, he’d get a run in by taking his kids and their bikes to the Butler-Freeport Trail, where they’d explore together on wheels and feet.
“Growing up when I did, we had three TV channels to watch and that was it,” he said. “So, I was in the outdoors a lot, and I thought it was important for them to be outside.”
Ken became a marathon runner, and when a friend asked him to complete the Rachel Carson Trail Challenge in 1997, the event’s second year, he saw it as “a fun thing to go and do” relatively soon after the Pittsburgh Marathon, which is held in May.
And at 16, Karl, who competed in cross country, logged his first Rachel Carson finish alongside his dad.
The 36-mile trail challenge’s course is grueling, with “exceptionally steep hills,” the kind you must “crawl up and down,” as Karl describes. Flatter portions offer no shade from the June sun, and portions of the course are often muddy, which “can really get on your nerves sometimes.” And it’s completed all in one gulp, in a period of just over 15 hours or until sunset, whichever comes first.
But the drive to come back to those physical challenges was never about winning competitions or finishing more than others. In fact, Ken only realized he’d finished the most Rachel Carson Trail Challenges during the event’s 20-year celebration when it posted a list.
For both men, it’s a private expression of grief in a shared space, where they knew their biggest supporter is never far away.
“When you do these kinds of things, there are certain things you leave behind on the trail,” Karl said. “I don’t think you came out changed after these events, but you can certainly come out better, if you have a certain mindset about the time you spend internally.”
Who’s the ‘slow poke’?
Karl is “sure” both he and his dad think about the same things on the trail, but that certainty comes from intuition, not conversation.
Neither of the Zellars is wowed by chit-chat, especially on the trail. They’ll point out an exceptional wildflower or tree. Occasionally, they’ll pull out a fun hypothetical like, “What do you think about time travel?” Sometimes “personal stuff” will come up, but usually that’s saved for conversations on Ken’s back porch.
Mostly, they stay silent.
“It’s a time, especially if you’re the there with another person who isn’t overly vocal, to have time to look into yourself and hash stuff through in your own mind,” Ken said. “For me, it’s always been an outlet, just to get out and let things disintegrate, so to speak, as I’m out there running or hiking.”
But it isn’t all serious, and it isn’t all together.
In Karl’s second or third year, he brought a friend to complete the Rachel Carson with him. Ken, in his running prime, would speed ahead, wait for the teens and then speed ahead again. They were poised to finish as a group when Karl and his friend took off for the finish near mile 36 to declare victory over Ken.
The next year, Ken got revenge. He knew Karl could out-sprint him, but the elder Zellars had endurance. Ken pushed the pace the whole race, knowing his son would “burn out” by the end. When Ken finished first, he waited for Karl at the finish line where he greeted him, “What happened to you, slow poke?”
Ain’t no mountain high enough
When Ken saw himself at the top of frequent finishers list six years ago, he made the decision to complete at least 20. He hoped to do so by his 70th birthday, but a few drop-outs, plus a missed raced year due to COVID-19 restrictions, prevented that.
Now, at 73, and happily remarried, he hopes to finish his 20th challenge on June 18 — one day before Father’s Day — albeit separate from his son. Karl is now the quicker Zellars, and he’ll stick with his girlfriend who hopes to finish the course for the first time. But just as the men would spend trail time in silence, there’s a quiet confidence in their relationship that makes that separation “acceptable” for them.
Ken and Karl both hesitate to call their hiking experiences “bonding”: That can be done anywhere, doing anything.
These are private-but-shared experiences between two men who’ve traversed choppy waters and jagged terrain together, even if only one of them wanted to go. But where one goes, the other follows because no physical challenge can match the emotional trials they’ve already survived as father and son.
“We’ve had tragic things happen to us. And we both know what you go through when you run a 100-mile race or a 36-mile race: You experience things, and you go through memories,” Karl said. “This is how we’ve chosen to process them, and it’s a mutual understanding.
“We’ve hiked 36 miles. This situation’s easy. I’ve hiked 50 miles. This one’s even easier. I did 100 miles once. Then you think, ‘How much is there we can’t do?’ ”
Abby Mackey: amackey@post-gazette.com, Twitter @AnthroAbbyRN and IG @abbymackeywrites.
First Published: June 12, 2022, 10:00 a.m.
