Renowned hiker rides the rails through Blyth

BY MEL LUYMES

Last Thursday, you may have seen Ed Talone about town in Blyth. He would have been difficult to miss, in a green vintage Toronto hockey jersey and ball cap, sporting a very large backpack, he stopped in Blyth for lunch while hiking the Goderich-to-Guelph (G2G) Rail Trail. The Citizen caught up with him over a coffee at Gourmet Cookie Factory on Queen Street.
He sat down on a bench before releasing the large pack from his shoulders.

 

“I got this pack in 1978,” he begins, and Talone estimates he has carried it 75,000 miles, over many of North America’s trails. For this trip, he began in May with a ferry ride from Sandusky, Ohio to Pelee Island and from there, another ferry to Leamington. He hiked a few rail trails in the southwestern part of the province before walking up to Goderich. The night before, he had camped in Auburn on someone’s lawn (with permission) and wasn’t yet sure where he would end up that night. He could continue on the trail to Walton and camp or stay around Blyth at the Inn so he could catch the hockey game.

 

“I don’t have to do anything today, actually,” he laughs. His only goal is to be in Niagara Falls for July 1, when he has a train ticket back to Ohio. And, in August, he’ll take a train back to Toronto and on to Portage la Prairie, Manitoba, hiking back to Toronto around Lake Superior.

 

At the age of 67, Talone is now retired from his work as an accountant and auditor; has no plans to settle down. He bought a house in Ohio a few years ago, but he isn’t there too much by the sounds of it.

 

“I also took the nineties off work to hike,” he adds. Talone has hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, the Appalachian Trail, you name it. He has walked from the tip of the Florida Peninsula up to Canada. Twice. He has walked the Trans Canada Trail, though he notes that there are parts in New Brunswick that have been destroyed by ATV use.

 

“I basically walk from dawn until dusk,” says Talone, and he averages 20 miles hiking a day. He carries a tent with him, and has camped on thousands of lawns, in hundreds of fire stations, or found many a rural hotel to call home for the night. He goes into town to buy food.

 

“I’ve just always liked to walk, and I always wanted to see what was around the next bend,” he says.

 

Talone says his favourite hike will always be the Chesapeake and Ohio (C&O) Canal and the Monocacy Aqueduct, which was where he first fell in love with hiking at the age of eight. His father, an engineer, had taken him and his brother to see the Aqueduct, and Talone remembers a sign that indicated that it was 42 miles to Washington, D.C. and 142 miles to Cumberland, Maryland. Though they only did four miles that day, Ed swore he would come back and do the whole trail.

 

“I thought that trail would take my whole life to walk,” he laughs. Now that he has done it, he says it only takes him nine days.
“If I had only two weeks to live, I would do that trail one last time,” says Ed, who hikes the C&O Canal trail every few years.
But Ed did have a brush with death about two years ago after he had collapsed from heart failure in a Tim Hortons in Ohio. He had been born with a congenital heart condition and, when he went on to have heart surgery to repair a valve, complications left him in a coma for a month. “I technically died twice,” says Talone, and he credits a friend for saving his life by not allowing the doctors to take him off life support during that time.

 

“I’ve walked 2,000 miles since then,” smiles Talone, and he understands now, more than ever, how precious every day is.
His hikes have led him on many adventures, meeting strangers every day. He has turned down hundreds of offers for rides when he walks along stretches of roads, and says the south of the U.S. is by far the friendliest place he has walked through. He remembers staying in Saint Andrew’s, Newfoundland and someone making him a meal of fish and brewis, a local specialty. He has been interviewed several times, he is all over the internet as “Ed the Hiker.” He encourages people to look him up online to see that he isn’t just a vagrant walking through town.

 

He has also met several bears along the way, and notes that he is more worried about racoons than bears. Talone travels with food in the pack, so he needs to be careful with animals. A box of Harvest Crunch cereal pokes out the top of his pack; it is one of his favourites that he can’t buy in the U.S. anymore.

 

Talone is a writer himself, having written articles for the American Hiking Society, but he jokes there are only so many ways to write, “this beautiful trail goes through the woods.” But his favourite article is one he wrote about his friend Sue Lockwood, a blind woman whom he guided for 3,000 miles hiking across the U.S. The article is featured in American Hiker’s Summer 2010 edition and is entitled, “A Hiker Like Anyone Else.”

 

As he straps the pack back on after our coffee, he notes that it isn’t as heavy as it looks and, after so many miles on the road, he hardly notices that he is carrying it. He then walked down Queen Street, onto his next adventure.