Whit Benson

Today is my father’s 77th birthday. To celebrate, I’m reprinting an article I wrote about him for the April 2005 edition of The Georgia Mountaineer – the monthly bulletin of the Georgia Appalachian Trail Club.

Happy birthday Dad!

Spotlight on Whit Benson

By Christopher Benson

I’d like to thank several key members of the GATC who helped me significantly. In 2000, I met with former President Rosalind Van Landingham, former President Joe Boyd (whose recent passing was a great loss to the Club), Helen Boyd, and Gale Benson. Recently, I met again with Rosalind Van Landingham and Gale Benson. All of their insights and contributions were invaluable to this article.

Whit Benson has been a member of the GATC for 3/4 of the club’s total history. Only Charlie and Mary Gafnea and Arline Slack have been members longer. Some of his closest friends, including Rosalind Van Landingham and Joe Boyd have told me that Whit has had as much impact on the GATC as anyone since he joined in January 1950.

Born in Atlanta on May 1, 1932 during the depression and raised during World War II, Whit’s family moved to the mountainous countryside just outside Ashville, North Carolina just after the War. At the age of 13, Whit fell in love with the outdoors and spent as much time as possible hiking through the backcountry. He lived there for less than a year, but when he left to return to Atlanta, he took with him a newfound passion that would last a lifetime.

Whit joined the Boy Scouts, taking every opportunity to hike and camp, and eventually earned the highest rank of Eagle Scout. Along the way, he finished high school and began his undergraduate studies in Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech. In the Explorer Scouts, he began hiking with his friends Frank Gordon and Norman Batho. The three Explorer Scouts were finishing up an 80-mile hike in September 1949 from Wesser Bald in North Carolina to Tray Gap in Georgia, when they met up with a hiking party from the GATC led by Jim Proctor that was hiking from Dick’s Creek Gap to Tray Gap. The Explorer Scouts were a perfect fit for the GATC, and soon thereafter Jim Proctor asked Whit Benson to join the GATC. Whit was only 17 years old, but he said that nobody ever asked him his age. Whit quickly acquired a reputation as a hard-worker and a tough hiker.

1950 started off with a bang as Whit and the others that were known within the Club as “the younger contingent” rebuilt the Tray Mountain shelter over a period of weeks. This was followed in June 1950 by a work trip that lasted nearly a full week. The work party, consisting of Whit Benson, Norman Batho, Jim Proctor, and two guests, left Lake Winfield Scott and hiked up into Slaughter Gap. From there they headed north on the AT doing trail maintenance the entire way. They eventually made it to Addis Gap where they decided that they’d had enough and ceased operations, hiking out to Dick’s Creek Gap.

Larry Freeman had been GATC President from 1947-1948, and was credited with rebuilding the Club after its near-demise during World War II. Today he is best known as the namesake of the Freeman Trail around Blood Mountain, an honor he richly deserved as one of the giants in our Club’s history. In 1951, Larry asked Whit to join him on a hike in the Smokies from Davenport Gap to Newfound Gap. During that excursion, Larry and Whit became the best of friends and remained so for 19 years until Larry’s death in September 1970. In the years since, when asked to recount his experiences with Larry through the 1950s and 1960s, a curious half-smile comes across Whit’s face and he begins by noting that, “Larry was a bit eccentric…” He goes on to recall that Larry was an extraordinary secretive person who never let anyone know where he lived, and was only reachable via a post office box; no telephone number or home address. They would arrange by mail to meet each other at various locations to depart for their excursions. Once complete, Larry would have Whit drive him into Atlanta and drop him off on an apparently random street corner – each time a different place. This was simply the normal modus operandi with Larry.

In 1953, Whit and Larry produced the first GATC yearbook in the basement of Whit’s parent’s home.

Whit graduated from Georgia Tech with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and entered the U.S. Navy as an officer in February 1954. In the Navy, he had the opportunity to work with several of the first computers ever built. These experiences would lead to an entire career working with and programming computers as an engineer.

During his time in the U.S. Navy, he was stationed at various locations outside of Georgia, and was therefore unable to participate in GATC activities. However, he and Larry would arrange excursions to various places while Whit was on leave.

In 1954, Whit and Larry went to Mexico and climbed Popocatepetl, a 17,887 foot high volcano in central Mexico west of Puebla, which became active again in January 1994 after being dormant for decades. During the long drive through Mexico on their way to the mountain, their car continuously coughed and sputtered and threatened to die. They determined that the fuel pump was going bad and purchased a replacement, but decided to climb the mountain before tackling the job of changing it out. Two weeks later, after achieving the summit while suffering from altitude sickness, they returned to their car utterly exhausted and Whit collapsed into the back seat and fell fast asleep. He awoke to discover that Larry had managed to remove the old fuel pump, but was too exhausted to get the new one installed. About that time a Volkswagon Bug came along, and an immaculately dressed Mexican fellow in a coat and tie hopped out to offer help. He didn’t speak English and neither Whit nor Larry spoke Spanish. Despite the language barrier, the Mexican gentleman quickly realized the problem with the fuel pump, and proceeded to install the replacement. The car was fixed and the immaculately dressed Mexican gentleman departed with Whit and Larry’s sincere gratitude.

In 1955, Whit and Larry embarked on another week-long trip to the Sangre de Cristos, north of Santa Fe, New Mexico to summit Truches Peak. While they did successfully bag the peak, they spent most of their time lost because neither one of them thought to bring a map. On their second night out, they camped by a beautiful stream with the most delicious water. They drank their fill. The next morning, they broke camp and started upstream. About a hundred yards upstream from camp, they were shocked to discover a dead, bloated cow lying in the middle of the stream, with the water running over and through it.

About this time, Whit met Dorothy McCaleb, a mathematician, and they were married in October 1955. A year later, their first daughter Julia was born. Whit was honorably discharged from the U.S. Navy as a Lieutenant in June 1957 and moved back to Atlanta. He started a career with Lockheed Georgia Company as an aeronautical engineer that would span over four decades. He programmed computer simulations of the C-5 Galaxy, the C-130 Hercules, and eventually the brand new F-22 Raptor that will be introduced into active duty in the U.S. Air Force in 2005-2006 as the most advanced air superiority stealth fighter in the world.

At the same time he started his career at Lockheed, he began his graduate studies in Electrical Engineering at Georgia Tech in the fall of 1957. He resumed his active participation in GATC activities, and quickly reestablished his credentials as a hard working outdoorsman with good instincts and a tough hiker who frequently participated in or led backpacking trips and work trips. Over the next five years, he had two more daughters – Kathy and Holley, and earned his M.S. in Electrical Engineering. From 1964-1965 he held his first officer position in the GATC as the Club’s second Trails Supervisor.

The next few years were a roller coaster ride. Lockheed began building the largest airplane in the world – the C-5 Galaxy, and the number of hours required for his job nearly doubled. Then his wife died of a heart attack in January 1967, leaving Whit alone to raise his three young girls. A year later, Whit began dating Gale Whiten, a physicist and engineer at Lockheed, and they married a few months later in April 1968. Gale would quickly become an active member of the GATC, and soon prove herself an excellent outdoors person in her own right. They remain married to this day, and had two children together – my younger sister Alyssa and me.

After spending a year during 1971-1972 recovering from a major spinal fusion, a new side of Whit Benson began to emerge that would eventually rival his ironman image. He began holding offices on the Board of Directors, and his peers began regarding him as a knowledgeable, yet unassuming leader and an insightful administrator. He was the Membership Director in 1976, Vice President of Activities from 1977-1978, President from 1979-1980, and Trails Supervisor again from 1985-1986. He served for several years as a Director at Large. According to Joe Boyd and Rosalind Van Landingham, his 30 years of experience (by the late 70s) hiking and maintaining the Appalachian Trail in Georgia gave him a grasp of the pertinent issues that was exceptional by any standard. He knew what was on the ground – knew the entire Georgia AT so well that he was able to blend the nuances of policy with the realities of life on the Trail to the betterment of both.

During his two terms as President, Whit Benson would do two things that would positively impact the GATC forever afterwards. He and Bob Slater coauthored the Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Forest Service which spelled out the responsibilities of the GATC and the U.S. Forest Service regarding the Appalachian Trail in Georgia – including trail maintenance, construction, and relocation. It also included provisions enabling the U.S. Forest Service to lend tools to the GATC for trail maintenance.

Whit and Joe Boyd were largely responsible for coauthoring the Plan for the Management of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia. This document spelled out every aspect of how the GATC would manage and maintain the Appalachian Trail in Georgia, and being the first document of its type, served as the model thereafter used by the other Appalachian Trail clubs. Joe noted afterwards the logical nature of Whit’s thinking, and the fact that Whit always kept the big picture in mind. These two documents established the way the GATC would operate all the way to the present day.

When the threat arose that the Blue Ridge Parkway might be extended into Georgia across the crest of the Appalachians where the AT was located, Whit helped scout an alternate route for the Trail. Eventually the threat passed unrealized, and as the GATC’s President, Whit appointed a task force to work with the U.S. Forest Service to determine which of the two routes would be official.

During the mid to late 70s and into the 80s, Whit worked with a talented group of peers in the GATC that the rest of the Benson family thought of as his closest friends. “The Oldtimers” as they came to be called were tight then, and those that survive continue to be so. One friend in particular stood out, at least from the perspective of Whit’s family. That person was Joe Boyd, who passed away a few months ago. Joe & Helen Boyd joined the GATC in July 1975. Whit and Joe became close friends very quickly. Both were engineers at Lockheed, seasoned outdoorsmen, and tough hikers. They seemed to be cut from the same cloth, often seeming to think alike when considering various issues and problems, and Whit seemed to enjoy hiking with Joe in the same way he enjoyed hiking with Larry Freeman. In addition, over the past 30 years the Bensons have come to regard Rosalind Van Landingham as one of our family. She has always been there for us with her special brand of friendship.

Whit, Gale, and the other “Oldtimers” have been on too many incredible excursions over the decades to name. As Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, they were literally rappelling for their lives off of the Grand Teton during a terrible lightning storm. In Glacier National Park, their group was caught high on the continental divide in a surprise blizzard. Joe Boyd managed to assist Whit out of a glacial crevasse in the Austrian Alps after Whit broke through the ice. Later in the Cascades, the group actually practiced rappelling into crevasses. There were three trips to the Bridger Wilderness in Wyoming, two trips to the San Juan Mountains in Colorado with their 14K foot peaks, and a trip across the entire Sierra Nevada mountain range that was concluded at the top of Mount Whitney. As I became old enough, I began joining my parents on some of these long backpacking treks, and they were truly magical experiences.

On one trek in Wyoming, we were camping high above treeline when a horrific lightning storm swept down upon us. Whit realized what was about to happen and told everyone to get in their tents quickly. “We’ve got 5 minutes”, he said. It was the worst storm any of us has ever experienced – before or since, and we learned later that it killed some people a few miles from us. After huddling atop our inflated Therm-A-Rests to stay insulated from the ground strikes occurring all around our tests, Rosalind remembers Whit coming around afterwards to everyone’s tent to make sure each of us was OK.

Two examples of Whit’s toughness and perseverance come to mind. Once while he was scouting a trip, he fell in a creek and cut his leg open. He was alone in the mountains, bleeding badly, dizzy, and fainting from shock, but made it the 5 miles to his car. Separately, during the annual marathon hike in 1992, Whit celebrated his 60th birthday by hiking 36 miles along the AT in Georgia, which his family felt was not bad for a senior citizen.

Both Rosalind and Joe have claimed that Whit has the best knowledge of the mountains of North Georgia and the Smokies of anyone, and that he seems to “have topo maps in his head”. Joe claimed that he once heard Hillrie Quin comment that Whit was the only person Hillrie knew that “dreams in topo maps”. Rosalind noted that Whit’s hikes are always challenging, interesting, usually unorthodox, and often include lots of cross country. She went on to say that in addition to being an excellent outdoors person in every regard who can hike just about anything, Whit makes it possible for others to do things they would never have thought they’d have been able to do.

Whit Benson has dedicated much of the past 55 years of his life to the GATC and hiking in general. His wife Gale and all five of his kids will tell you that it’s not possible to be a Benson without feeling a close association with the GATC. Over the years, at least ten members of the Benson family have participated in Club activities, most as members themselves. As Whit approaches his 73rd birthday on May 1st, he remains strong and vibrant, and although his recently diagnosed pulmonary fibrosis is forcing him to slow down a little, he continues to hike three times a week. 60 years of hiking has made him an outdoorsman with knowledge and an instinct that most of us simply can’t fathom. His efforts on behalf of the Club have left a lasting legacy that will be felt for years to come.

Whit Benson’s website is at http://www.whitbenson.com.