The Rise and Fall(s) of the Patio Boys

By Mark Neikirk

Here’s the inventory: one twisted knee, one overstretched Achille’s, and one dislocated pinkie. Hiking in your 70s is like that. No piece of cake. In the insightful words of Bette Davis, “Getting old is not for sissies.”

I’m fairly certain Bette was not a backpacker. If this counts as proof, I’ve never seen her on the trail. A notorious chain-smoker, she might have had trouble on uphills, though a five-pack-a-day habit would have one practical application: She probably could have started a campfire. And she likely could have held court with stories of old Hollywood well into the night. Married four times and romantically involved with the likes of Howard Hughes, I’m guessing her stories of conquest and loss would have left ours in the dust.

Alas, there was no Bette Davis, and we were left to our own stories and reflections, the most memorable of which was our celebration of John Hennessey’s official entry into the Order of the Patio Boys with 100 Nights Out (OPBHNO, which with a little imagination is pronounced like “obnoxious”). 

This means, by rule, that over the two decades or so since his first hike, John had spent 100 nights in a tent pitched at least three miles from the parked car that brought him to the trailhead.  Anything less and he would have been, again by rule, car camping rather than backpacking, and that would not count as a night out.

“You are now a Centurion,” Bob Pauly announced to John, intending to suggest a title for any Patio Boy with 100 nights out. This is a new use of the word, which heretofore was, take your pick, the name of a heavy metal band or the military title of a Roman commander in charge of 100 men. John is neither. Nor is he a centenarian, which would make him 100 years old — although when he is, and rest of us are, too, I hope we are still backpacking. But Bob, who conceived of the Patio Boys some 30 years ago, makes our rules and, it turns out, also our dictionary. So let us stipulate henceforth, any inductee into OPBHNO is, by definition, a Centurion, with all of the privileges and pecuniary benefits that entails.

We all raised a vessel of bourbon — variously contained in plastic camp cups, Nalgene bottles, and titanium cookstove pots— to toast John’s new status, and I invite you, dear readers, to do the same. Here’s to 100 more!

CELEBRATING A MILESTONE 

There were only five us on this hike, which is small compared to past trips, some of which had double digits. Along with John, Bob, and me were Bill Ankenbauer and John Curtin. Four of us already had passed the 100 nights out benchmark, but John Hennessey was one night short. A family emergency kept him at home from the fall 2025 trip, so this was his chance to cross the century threshold. As such, Bob gave John the option of deciding where we would go, and he selected the Cane Creek leg of the Sheltowee Trace trail in Laurel County. We have hiked it before, and all have a fondness for it. And there, John would get his 100th night out, as well as his 101st.

Patio Boys live and breath to accumulate nights out. Or at least we did. Who knows about the future? One of the cold hard facts of this trip is that it may all be coming to an end. Sadly, our commissioner, our CEO, our grand poohbah, our commander-in-chief Mr. Pauly told us he is done backpacking. He never really liked it, he tells us. He likes the woods, the getting away, the camaraderie around the campfires, the seeing new places, the discussions about which new (or old) place we’ll go to for the spring trip or the fall trip.  It’s the lugging a backpack over often steep trails that has worn on its welcome in his life.

Allow me to stipulate that “lugging” is not really a big deal anymore. Bob’s pack was never heavy.  As his trail name “Mooch” betrays, he would just as soon eat some of your food as carry his own. As for the rest of us, a standard pack weight back in the early years was at least 40 or 50 pounds and maybe more. The innovations in equipment have cut that to as little as 20 pounds. 

Consider that a 1980s pack weighed seven or eight pounds and a tent an equal amount. Today’s ultralight packs and tents are under 2 pounds each. Not that every Patio Boy is there yet with the lightest gear. Many are loyal to their old stuff. John Curtin still sleeps on a self-inflating Therm-a-Rest, a pad pretty much outdated a decade ago when modern air mattresses arrived on the scene and cut the weight in half. And while most everyone has a lighter tent now, all but a few us are still carrying backpacks that weigh four or five pounds even though state-of-the-art packs are under two pounds. Carrying 20 pounds on your back is easier than carrying the groceries from the car to the kitchen. 

I’m just saying that if walking with weight is the concern, then there’s a solution.

Further, in the early days hikes, which we liked to call “Pauly Death Marches,” we might hike 25 miles in one day, and do so without regard to elevation gain. Thousand foot ascent? So be it.

This hike was, in contrast, four miles to a base camp with a day hike of perhaps seven miles on Monday, our one full day in the woods. I’m not saying we could not hike 25 miles in one day any longer. Though older, some of us are in better shape than when we started doing this as sedentary office workers still familiar with what used to be called the two martini lunch. Most of those lunches didn’t actually involve two martinis but they might have involved the local diner’s daily special, such as meatloaf, mashed potatoes, salty, soggy green beans, a roll or two with butter, and a Coke with refills. Now lunch might be a small sandwich or even a salad. Most of us have given up drinking Coke.

PARDON MY SCREED

And, to fend off old age, we walk or run or bike or play a recreational sport, whether it is golf (no cart), tennis, or, God forbid, pickle ball, a truly nauseating activity in which a plastic ball makes an irritating sound as it is struck by a wooden paddle. 

The same people who like the sound of an aluminum bat striking a baseball have a tolerance for the sound of a pickle ball being stuck. The difference is that a batter in baseball is lucky to make solid contact with the ball on maybe one in ten pitches. Even the least talented pickle ball player makes contact with the game’s hard plastic ball about one every three seconds over and over and over. Being next to a pickle ball court is something like trying to sleep in a room with a grandfather clock. It never quite becomes background noise.

I should point out that I am a lifelong tennis player, and pickle ball is the enemy. My winter club sold to a pickle ball company. My summer courts, which are clay, adjoin hard courts now overrun by Saturday morning pickle ball players. Two pickle ball courts can occupy one tennis court, so for the owner, revenue is at least doubled. But for tennis players, enjoying the timeless beauty and romance of a clay court, where balls land quietly and the only sound is that of a well-struck forehand, backhand, or volley, is disrupted by something plastic and inelegant.

Pickle ball is to tennis as the Eagles are to Gram Parsons. The latter invented a genre of music that combined the vibes of Buck Owen’s country with folk and rock, and in doing so influenced popular music in the 1960s and 1970s in untold ways. He discovered and sang with the incomparable Emmylou Harris, and played with the Byrds and Flying Burrito Brothers. He was more cult than commercial, and his albums have stood the test of time. As for the Eagles, they stole his sound and ran it through the elevator sound system, spitting out lyrics like “I’ve got a peaceful easy feelin. And I know you won’t let me down. ‘Cause I’m already standing on the ground.” Does anyone know what that means. As Jeff Bridges playing The Dude said so eloquently, “Man, I had a rough night, and I hate the fucking Eagles, man.” He might have added, “And pickle ball, too.”

DO NOT GO GENTLE...

My screed now written, I will admit this: Many of my tennis pals are aged out of tennis, which demands functional shoulders, knees and hips. As those are replayed by titanium ball-and-socket parts, pickle ball is their best option to stay active. And so, deep inside, I applaud that and know that my day is coming. Until then, I shall continue to rage on. I’ll defer to Dylan Thomas now (note that the Eagles never wrote lyrics like this):

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And so it is with switching from backpacking to car camping, which is what Bob says he will be doing. I am no more a critic of car camping than I am of pickle ball. Don’t love it, but it has its place. But could we now play the Eagles in the campground — unless it is “Lyin’ Eyes,” which is a pretty good song? I am a little resentful in that song of the line about her love being given “to a man whose hands are as cold as ice.” In other words, old. At this point in my life, I would like to point out that men with hands as cold as ice also need love, albeit I’m only arguing for age-appropriate love, not creepy old man/young woman financial arrangements “love.” That is, as the Eagles rightly portray it, just wrong.

I guess what I’m saying is the day may come when you will find me playing pickle ball at a KOA with the Eagles blasting on a Bluetooth speaker. But, please, not yet.

And, as I — we, the Patio Boys — contemplate our impending twilights, it is good to remember the fact that there are abundant beautiful places to car camp. Once, in Colorado, I drove with friends and family up a goat path to see a 14,000 foot peak, and there, overlooking a truly stunning Rockies landscape, was a TR-6 and a small camping trailer. Someone had taken advantage of the U.S. Forest Service’s creation of free car camping sites in beautiful places, and I doubt this person had any intention of giving up the site until the first snowfall.

I have, in the many years since, admired this person for many reasons, not the least of which is the accomplishment of pulling that trailer up that mountain in that TR-6. As a feat, it is not quite up there with Alex Hornold free soloing El Cap, but it’s close. 

So, yes, I can see the Patio Boys switching to car camping in the future, but could we just rage, rage against the dying of the light a few years longer, Bob? “I’ve heard him say that before,” John Hennessey said. “We’ll see,” John Curtin said. We have our doubts. We have our hopes.

If this is the end, it has been a good run. We have covered many miles on the trail, yes, but we have also become the closest of friends, and been together through phases of life — the latest of which involves checking our iPhones for pictures of our grandchildren. We have been to weddings together. And to funerals. We’ve been to retirement parties, Christmas parties, birthday parties for years that have a zero. 

And if this is the end, this hike will stand as a good finale. Cane Creek, as coincidence would have it, was the final leg of my first hike with the Patio Boys.  On that hike, we started north at a backpacking landmark, the 49er Diner, which is a rathole of gas station and grill just off of Exit 49 on Interstate 75.

That first hike was 25 miles and included lots of ups and downs over a particularly rugged section of the Sheltowee Trace, but ended in the glory of Cane Creek, which is perhaps the most beautiful bit of the Sheltowee. Here, the trail passes gently through an older forest, parts of which include very tall pines that give the woods a greener look and which filter sunlight in increments rather than in an overheated blast. The woods stay cool. Comfortable. There are waterfalls and streams and overlooks. And while there are occasional inclines to climb, they are mercifully short and rarely more taxing that a set of stairs at home.

SIDE BY SIDE, DESTRUCTION AND BEAUTY 

Our hike this spring was shorter both in miles and days. We arrived on Sunday afternoon, stayed that night and Monday night, and were at the London, Ky., Sonic earring burgers and fries shortly after noon on Tuesday, and home by 5 p.m. The backpack in was 4 miles, plus or minus, and we base camped by a stream, Vanhook Branch, making it easy to get water. There was a fire ring and easy firewood, as well as five flat sites for our five one-man tents. Men in their 70s snore, fart, roll around, and get up to pee at all hours. So one-man tents are a good idea. I’m not sure how our spouses sleep with us at this point in our lives. Habit, I guess. Mine sometimes relocates during the night.

On Monday, we took a day hike to the Rockcastle “east” Narrows. The trail took us up to a logging road, where there were loggers. They were there because, late on the evening of May 16, 2025, a EF4 tornado hit this area, saying on the ground for nearly 90 minutes. It killed 18 people and injured 108 along an 60-mile path. While the news crews mainly covered the damage in town to people and property — as they rightly should have — the tornado also leveled some 600 acres of the Daniel Boone National Forest. The Forest Service is now working with contractors to harvest the damaged and fallen timber. 

With permission from the loggers, I walked about a half mile to a high spot along their makeshift road to see what I could see. Standing on the stump of what once was a giant of this forest, I craned my neck to see over a wall of undamaged forest to see a moonscape beyond, if the moon were littered with tangled fallen trees and the exposed dirt of a landscape uprooted and torn apart. Timber crews are going to be here for quite some time yet — at least another year and maybe longer.

The Sheltowee, which passes through that damage on its way north to the 49er Diner, is closed from this point. Hence, we turned left instead of right and headed toward the cutoff to the Narrows loop trail, Trail 401.

The trail, if it qualifies as a trail, descends quickly at almost cliff grade. It soon loses all definition, disappearing into the trees and fallen leaves. Then, as quickly as it went away, it comes back into view a little lower and continues on to its low point at the Rockcastle RIver. There, a fire ring sits in a clearing above a wide, placid pool in the river. Rapids enter from the pool’s north end, and then exit from the south. 

This portion of river’s run is called a narrows because the river passed through a tight gorge where one rapid follows another. Canoeists really cannot make this run. It’s too technical with too many rapids one right after another. You don’t have time to set up after leaving one rapid to property run the next, and in an open boat you take on water. It needs to be dumped before you start the next rapid or the canoe’s balance will be off and the risk of a capsize multiplies. Kayaks with closed decks, and a skilled paddler, can run the Narrows — but even they risk drowning is this remote place, where a rescue, or even a recovery, would be difficult.

Some years back, when my whitewater skills were more honed, I paddled the stretch of the Rockcastle above its eastern Narrows. We scoped out a dogleg with a drop for an hour or so before attempting it, and then did it twice since we were there. After that rapid, the Narrows was next, and that we were not equipped or competent to tackle. We portaged around it.

Being back at this river and seeing these rapids took me back nearly 50 years to that experience, about which I still take some pride. I sat with a friend who was my bow paddler, for about an hour on a big boulder at the rapids midpoint to study the water and watch others run it. Satisfied we could do it, we carried our gear around the rapid, then got in the canoe, kneeled and braced our knees against the sides of the boat, and took our shot. The dogleg was first, and we padded hard and straight until the last second, when I called for Chris to first pull, then pry, while I ruddered from the stern — as so we could make the 90-degree turn to the left, where the water, after hitting that boulder we had been sitting on, changed directions, and then dropped several feet immediately before swirling into a pool.

Sitting by the river on Trail 401 and looking at the Rockcastle, far upstream from my great adventure, I replayed the memory of what was the climax of my whitewater padding career. Nothing before or since has been as difficult. Or as exciting. As Norman Maclean wrote in a “River Runs through It,” I am too old — he said to be “much of a fisherman — to be much of a whitewater canoeist. I am glad to have done it.

THE LOW POINT WAS THE HIGH POINT 

Bob announced that he was going to walk down the trail a bit. From here, 401 follows the river for about a mile and half, and Bob’s intent was to find a place by the river for lunch. He went on ahead. The other four of us rested on the big rocks and logs around the fire ring. A fish of considerable size jumped and ate something. A bug? A small bird? A swimming mouse? Not sure, but it made quite the splash. Bill caught it on camera, but the shot was a panoramic of the pool. The fish was dot in the middle. When enlarged, it was clearly a big fish but it was too pixelated to tell what kind. Might have been a big carp or a gamefish like a bass or walleye. It might also have been something rarer, a sturegon or muskie. We waited a bit longer to see if another would come up. None did.

Heading out, the trail we followed came to a dead end, and it took some time to find the “real” 401, following first a trail that crossed an ephemeral, mucky stream strewn with fallen timber. After a false start or two, some map consultations, and the spotting of a trail blaze on the other side of that little stream, we found our way and found Bob, resting and eating lunch. We did the same, trying to avoid what we thought might be poison ivy. 

As many times as I’d read the descriptions of poison ivy on plant and trail guides, I still see broad, tear-shaped leaves in clusters of three and wonder if it is poison ivy or not. There are several look-alike plants in the Appalachians, Virginia creeper being one of them, but it often grows beside poison ivy. Best not to take a chance. Given that I’m writing this several days after the hike, and I’m not scratching red bumps, maybe it was not poison ivy.

What I did see was an emerging lady’s slipper directly across from my lunching rock, its pink bulb still compressed as it began to burst forth into a full blossom. This is the time of year when the forest is radiant with wildflowers, many of them tiny but stunning if you pause to look closely.

On we went, 401 now following the Narrows but with the river shielded from view by the terrain and the foliage, already thickening with the progression of spring.

I took a break to bushwhack over and see a waterfall. It was quite a sight, with white water cascading in a mad rush over one boulder and between others. It was hard to imagine even a kayak getting over this, much less a canoe. I stood mesmerized for a time.

John Curtin waited for we. The others went on. He was by this time nursing a sprained Achilles from some minor misstep. Bill had fallen on the way in, more or less face-planting in front of me after navigating a four or five foot drop on the trail down to Cane Creek — about three miles from our cars. He twisted his knee, which would remain sore for the rest of the trip and in need of ice, which we did not have, and ibuprophen, which we did. 

John and I kept thinking we’d catch the others but we did not. We came to a water crossing. It was a short shelf of water, creating a sort of drizzle of waterfall. The shelf was maybe 20 feet across. “Be careful,” John warned me, “it’s slick.” And so I tried to walk with care, but on the last step one foot slid out from under me and down I went, catching myself with my left hand and arm.

“You ok?” John asked. “It’s slick!” “I am,” I replied, “I think so at least.” Then, as I tightened my left hand on my walking stick, I heard, and felt, the upper joint of my left pinkie snap back into place. I had dislocated it, and it would be sore for several days after, including, mildly, today. I would later notice some deep scratches on my forearm. Nothing serious.

There is a context for this story that puts it in perspective. Our twist, strains and dislocations were of no consequence compared to what would happen to a close friend a few days later. Walking down the steps to the basement of a home under construction, Patrick Flannery fell, hitting his head fatally on the concrete floor. He and his wife, with whom he was extraordinarily close, had just stopped for a few minutes to see and admire the home under construction. And in an instant, the world lost a man who loved his family, God, Ireland, and Democrats with a joy I cannot describe. 

All of us, when we go to the doctor, are asked — because of age now — if we have had any falls lately. It is comic when the answer is, “Yes, doc, I was hiking back country and slipped and twisted a joint.” It’s not comic when the story is tragic, and Pat’s story is tragic. In addition to his wife, Sonya, a bright light on this earth as was Pat, he left children and grandchildren, who were dear to him and he to them. Rest in peace, Patrick. Life is so fragile. So unpredictable. So cruel at times. If we felt fortunate to still be hiking before we learned of Pat’s death, we felt even more fortunate now. The next day is not a guarantee.

WALKING AND 'WATCHING'

On down the trail, still behind the others, John and I stopped for drink of water, and I looked at my watch to check the time, which also allows me to estimate our mileage. It wasn’t there. I tried to think through where I might have lost it. Of course. The fall.

I tried to go back while John waited, but we had gotten here somewhat off trail because of deadfalls that blocked the trail.  The further I went back, the more I knew I was going to wrong direction. So I turned back, thinking, “Well, I’m out a watch.”

But couldn’t quite let it go. My wife, Kate, gave me the watch, and leaving it in the woods felt as though I would be leaving something that mattered to me. It felt, too, like giving up without trying hard enough. 

John and I made back to the base camp 45 minutes or so later, and BIll offered to go back to the crossing and look for the watch with me. It was getting late, and that might take a couple of hours, so I thought it best to just let the watch go. However, I asked them if they had made that crossing, and they had, so that confirmed that the crossing was on Trail 401. All I would need to do is carefully follow the trail blazes back to the crossing and see if the watch was there. I resolved to do that in the morning. The planned departure time was 10:15 a.m. If I got up and packed and got out of camp by 9 a.m., I should be back about the time they were ready to leave. I did so, the watch was there, and I got back just before 10:15 a.m.

...OH, AND NOTHING HAPPENED 

We hiked out without incident, drove to London to the Sonic, ordered burgers, ate at picnic tables in the sunny spring afternoon, and then headed home. 

And with that, our “last” backpacking trip was in the books. Let us hope it is not.

And thus ends another of my accounts of a Patio Boys hike during which nothing much happened. May it not be the last.

—-

SYNOPSIS: Spring 2026 hike: April 19-21 (Sunday, Monday, Tuesday). Departed from Ky 192 intersection with the Sheltowee Trace at Cane Creek, and hiked 4 miles to a campsite just past Vanhook Falls. Base camp for two nights. On Monday, we took a day hike of about 6 miles to the Rockcastle Narrows Loop, primarily on Trail 401.