Sometimes they ask for him on the forum by name: congregants speaking their trail hopes, doubts, and dreams into existence and waiting for a word from on high.
Always, he answers when called: confirming that a pass in the wilds south of Yellowstone is marked in the correct spot. Or advising to skip a small town in northern California on a family road trip to see the redwoods (there’s nothing there).
Other times, he chimes in unbidden with a route suggestion, or gear advice, or a kind word. Each message, whether as banal as updating current snow conditions or as expansive as sharing the route for a nine-day backpacking trip, is received as if delivered by an all-knowing being.
In reality he’s just a man, if an exceedingly knowledgeable and unfailingly helpful one. His name is Bob Bruington.
B ob wears his signature smile at his home in Island Park, Idaho. | Izzy Lidsky
BOB’S DOMAIN IS an internet hiking forum called Backcountry Post. There are other, similar forums out there—High Sierra Topix, Northwest Hikers, Backpacking Light, 14ers, and White Blaze—but no site covers a broader swath of prime hiking country or boasts the community engagement of Backcountry Post. If you’re looking for beta, trip reports, or general information about backpacking in the Rocky Mountain West, from Montana down through Utah canyon country, there’s no better place.
Backcountry Post also attracts a more, shall we say, exploratory hiker than most. The highly detailed trip reports recounting members’ off-trail quests are legion, as are the information request threads that basically ask: Does this route go? If you’re looking for beta on a popular hike in a national park, a regular ol’ Google search will do the trick. Need the lowdown on getting to a lake miles from any known trail, though? Backcountry Post is where you’ll find it.
I first came across Backcountry Post—and Bob— while planning a bushwhack into Wyoming’s Wind River Range. My destination was a high-alpine playground of boulder-rimmed lakes called Bear Basin, hard up against the Continental Divide. There’s no easy way into Bear Basin. Although it’s only about 4 miles from the nearest marked trail, the terrain traverses blowdown-throttled drainages and steep talus slopes that leave ankles and knees quaking in fear.
As I pored over requests from Backcountry Post members looking to backpack in the area, Bob’s name came up again and again. Sometimes his input was prosaic, Hemingway-esque in its bluntness: “Past natural bridge has always been bad,” he advised one seeker. Other times, he veered into the poetic: “Country is rugged and remote and beautiful,” he wrote of the northern Winds. “However, it’s not for the faint of heart and is dangerous. You need to know what you are doing.” Bob advised to take a specific route up to the divide in the Winds. As always, he was right.
After that trip, I checked Backcountry Post each time I was planning an adventure where feasibility was in question. Each time, Bob was there to help. When I was looking for the most straightforward path between off-trail drainages in Idaho’s Sawtooth Wilderness, he had already provided another member with the full GPX track of a previous trip.
Most recently, I was planning a loop that traversed Yellowstone’s uber-remote eastern boundary. This is not country that many people travel. Yet, of course, there was Bob giving his two cents on a laughably specific section of trail: “Our difference is we dropped straight south of Parker Peak and hit the ridge running west just by the creek, then all the way down the creek.....great brookie fishing, took us forever to get out. And we went out Mist pass to Pelican TH.” Where hadn’t this guy explored? I needed to talk to Bob.
HE WASN’T HARD TO FIND. A simple direct message on Backcountry Post was all it took. (His forum name, hilariously, is simply “Bob,” as if it’s clear there’s nobody else worthy of the moniker.) We quickly set up a phone interview.
I had expected Bob to be taciturn, or perhaps even gruff; the stereotype of the loner mountain man was fixed in my mind. But from my first question, Bob proved jocular and delighted to expound on his adventures, punctuating every backwoods anecdote with a sandpapery, gregarious laugh.
Surprisingly, Bob didn’t start making multi-day forays into the wilderness until he was 44 years old. He grew up outside Kansas City, but aside from a few childhood overnights with his local Boy Scout troop, backpacking just wasn’t high on his list of priorities. After college, he had jobs with the Forest Service, marking timber for fire management in Flagstaff, Arizona, and later spent 22 years as a Postal Service mail carrier, before raising two kids.
In 1997, Bob and a friend from Phoenix embarked on a 10-day, 85-mile hike down a portion of the Little Colorado River in Arizona. Bob can’t remember exactly what spurred him into that excursion. “I think on that trip, my mindset was, ‘Why am I doing this?’” he said, chuckling. “We had to get the water data records for the Little Colorado River to see if we could even go, because it floods every spring with snowmelt, and then if you wait too long it’s dry...Everyone uses ‘epic’ for things, but that was an epic trip.”
From then on, Bob was hooked. He’d never enjoyed being indoors much. “I was outside and walking around. That’s the appeal,” he said of his stints in the Forest Service and the Postal Service. But only after that Little Colorado trip did his love of open skies turn into a hobby.
A 13-day, 115-mile traverse of the Wind River Range followed in 1999, and Bob began to embark on one or two week-long backpacking trips every year. The Southwest was his first area of expertise, and he spent years wending his way through sunbaked sandstone defiles. “I’d hike canyons down in southern Utah and we’d never see another footprint,” he said.
As backpacking became a major part of Bob’s life, he began seeking out like-minded folks with their own stories to tell and trail tips to share. Niche internet forums were just gaining steam, and Bob quickly embraced the online hiking community. However, since Bob likes to take his time in the wilderness, the forums geared towards ultralighting and thru-hiking didn’t interest him.
Bob keeps custom-printed photo albums featuring the backpacking trips he’s taken over the years. | Izzy Lidsky
SO, WHAT DOES INTEREST Bob? Expansive views, for one, and trout-filled lakes. So does solitude (“I try to steer away from a lot of people”), off-trail routefinding, and trips that take seven or eight days. Those are the ingredients for a "Bob Hike." Turns out a lot of Backcountry Post users hold those elements in high-esteem as well, and Bob is more than happy to help them find bliss. He’s 71 now, but rather than settle into the sedentary life of a trailmaster emeritus, he’s still hiking long routes every year and dispensing advice almost every day.
Like Bob, Rich Marquiri began backpacking relatively late in life. The 44-year-old paralegal from Sarasota, Florida started doing wilderness overnights in 2018, and soon decided he wanted to leave the crowds behind. Like many off-trail-curious hikers, he found his way to Backcountry Post and then, of course, to Bob. Marquiri asked for Bob’s help planning a trip in the Winds; Bob delivered. Bob has now advised Marquiri on multiple routes, and is helping him suss out another for this summer.
“He seems like he’s always available,” Marquiri said. “Every time I’ve sent him a message he’s always gotten back to me really quickly with an answer to my question, and answers to five or six other questions that I hadn’t thought to ask yet.”
Bob is careful to note that he doesn’t baby his fellow hikers. “I say, ‘What I think is easy, you may not like,’” he recounted. “I’ve been doing it for 30- something years, and I haven’t found a whole lot that really bugs me.” He’ll carefully answer any questions, but at the end of the day he expects interlocutors to scrutinize the route as well. “[Do the] research, number one,” he insisted. “Don’t try to go too far mileage-wise in a day. Pay attention where water is. Know your limits. Know when to turn around.”
Bob takes great pride when a Backcountry Post user reports back that a trip was successful. His first thought? “Good. I didn’t kill anybody,” he said with a guffaw.
Backcountry Post has also provided Bob with the opportunity to get out with friends he’s made on the forum. From his current home in Island Park, Idaho, he meets up with them a few times a year to hike in the northern Rockies. One of his now-frequent hiking partners is Hugh McGirt, 59, who’s known on the forum as Scatman.
“I think it’s just his longevity, his knowledge,” McGirt said when asked why Bob is such an in-demand trip-planner. “He loves maps. He’s got lots of paper maps where he’s gone in and hand-written the trails on the maps and the mileage and points of interest. [It’s] very impressive.” Bob always had a penchant for cartography (his timber-marking job with the Forest Service provided daily experience poring over maps) and his recall for terrain that he may have only hiked through once is near-photographic.
Marquiri agreed: “I haven’t asked him about a spot yet where he hasn’t been able to say, ‘Oh yeah, I can send you a route for that spot.’”
Bob takes joy in helping out the hiking masses, but he also sees his work as a necessity. “It’s good for the soul. Most people have a more hectic life than me,” he said. “People need to get out, I think. It’s relaxing. Rejuvenate a bit from all of the hecticness.”
He distributes his wealth of backcountry knowledge with the generosity of a philanthropist, and plans routes that make me want to quit my job. Bob inspires kinship, bravery, and self-reliance in the people he interacts with. I hope I get to hike with him one day.
“He’s fun to backpack with, his storytelling is wonderful. You’d be really missing out if you didn’t take him up on an offer to take a backpacking trip with him,” said his hiking partner McGirt. “Bob is Bob.”
