Hiker’s film is where it’s AT

By DAN KEGLEY/Staff

Dave Hauver spent six months in 2005 through-hiking the Appalachian Trail. He took with him a digital video camera “just to see what might happen,” he said this week.
Making a film about his trip was perhaps in the back of his mind, but he said, “It was all about the hike. If I got enough for a film, great.”
He got enough, all right, enough for a 90-minute production chronicling his adventure and the people he met along the way.
“It’s what I shot as I hiked the trail,” Hauver said. “It’s the AT through my eyes.”
Hauver said he knew early on he didn’t want to limit his filming focus on fellow through hikers. “I wanted to include anyone in the trail community,” from day hikers to die-hards going all the way.
As a result, the highlight of his film, now in DVD format, is “the variety of people, how the AT touches a wide cross-section of people,” he said.
This was Hauver’s first through-hike. The 1997 graduate of Marion Senior High School was accustomed to shorter excursions, he said.
Hauver works as a software engineer for NatureServe in Washington D.C., a non-profit organization that provides “the scientific basis for conservation programs,” he said. “It swung off the Nature Conservancy seven or eight years ago.”
NatureServe coordinates the work of about 80 other agencies, he said, “creating a common vocabulary so one state can be compared to another” along lines of ecological assessment and need. He’s been with the organization about a year.
Hauver’s coming home this weekend with his film and a hometown debut scheduled for Sunday, July 15, at 6:30 at First United Methodist Church. Capturing and sharing the AT experience is the payoff for the decision to pack the extra gear on the trail.
“When you decide to carry an additional two pounds, you hope to get as much out of it as you can,” Hauver said.