At some point, you’ve probably dragged your weary self to the end of a trail thinking, “That has got to be the longest mile I’ve ever hiked.”

You’re not alone. Bob Lochbaum had that feeling, too, after hiking all of the nearly 900 miles of trails in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the 1990s. He knew that some of the “official” trail mileages had to be wrong, so the retired engineer decided to check his hunch by pushing a measuring wheel again over every mile of trail in the park.

A store-bought wheel didn’t survive his second 900-mile-trip, so he built his own from bicycle parts and PVC pipe for the third go-round. Applying an engineer’s attention to accuracy, he decided to wheel all the trails twice, and he would only be satisfied if the data agreed within 26 feet per mile. Over three years and nearly 3,300 miles, he pushed the cumbersome wheel over some of the steepest and rockiest terrain in the Southern Mountains.

How valuable is this work? Steve Kemp of the Great Smoky Mountains Association figures Lochbaum’s work would have cost the Park Service hundreds of thousands of dollars. Kemp first heard of Lochbaum’s work while revising Hiking Trails of the Smokies, the little brown bible of Smokies hikers. Kemp asked to use Lochbaum’s data, and suggested he incorporate altimeter readings to fortify the elevation profiles that give hikers their forecast of the hills ahead. With Bob’s information, Kemp is “100% sure there is no more accurate hiking data in the world,” and claims that Bob has “transformed the literature of the Smokies.” Lochbaum has even entered the language of the park. “When a trail has been ‘Lochbaumed,’ it means its length is no longer in dispute,” explains Kemp.

Lochbaum’s data was used by the Park Service to update trail signs throughout the park. It turns out some trails were over a mile longer than originally thought, while a few others were only half as long as advertised.

But Lochbaum wasn’t finished. After measuring all of the trails by foot-twice-Lochbaum hooked up with the All Taxa Biodiversity Inventory, an ambitious project to catalog all life in the park. Researchers walking the park’s trails noticed that published maps could be as much as a half-mile off, and were asking for more precise trail locations. Once again, Lochbaum agreed to help out by creating GPS trail maps accurate to within one meter. To do so, he would walk all the trails again, this time lugging a 15-pound, 12-channel receiver that sprouts like a mutant mushroom from his backpack. Battling weather, the dense forest canopy, and stubborn satellites that refuse to transmit on queue, this project took another three years.

“Thanks to Bob’s painstaking work, researchers can now go into the field with accurate maps in hand,” says Keith Langdon, who oversees the ATBI project in the Smokies. Lochbaum estimates that he is “99% done” with his fourteenth circuit of all the park trails. He’s also taken on other Smokies projects, including photographing all backcountry campsites and shelters and locating the cemeteries scattered throughout the backcountry.

“My main goal is to hike,” says Lochbaum. “These projects are good excuses to be out on the trail.”

–Hiram Rogers