I met Jacqui Wensich in 2018, the year I signed up for the County Hike series for the first time. Jacqui is the volunteer End-to-End Coordinator. She offers hikers assistance when they are working on completing the FLT. Jacqui maintains a list of trail spotters who will meet you at one end of your planned hike for the day and drive you to your beginning point so you can then hike back to your car. She keeps a detailed spreadsheet of the whole trail which hikers can use to log their miles and track how close they are to completion. And she maintains a list of everyone who has completed the trail and sends us our certificate, nametag, and patch when we finish.

I wrote an e-mail to Jacqui after one of the longer hikes in Delaware County. That day had been rainy and much of the twelve mile hike was through standing water. I told Jacqui that I did not think I would sign up for the county hike series again the following year. The hikes were just too long for me. At some point, it stopped being fun and just felt like a forced march. She agreed, especially when the trails involved a lot of hills.

After we finished the last Delaware County hike that summer, Jacqui and I decide to log some miles together on the maps between her home near Rochester and mine in Ithaca. We covered the 20+ miles on Map 12 together that September and October, enjoying the crisp autumn air and brilliant colors. It was wonderful to have found a partner with a compatible hiking pace and who agreed that seven or eight miles in one day is challenging enough to be satisfying yet still feel like fun.