You’ve heard his voice over the radio. You’ve seen his work to help the island prepare for emergencies. Perhaps you’ve bought a raffle ticket from him.

After a career in broadcast news and international crisis management, Rick Wallace brought his energy to Vashon and roles in several island institutions (most notably Islanders for Ferry Action, VashonBePrepared and Voice of Vashon, the latter for which he sells raffle tickets in front of Thriftway).

But beyond supporting our community Wallace has another passion: long distance walking.

When hundreds of bicyclists gather in the early morning hours of Saturday, Sept. 14 for the annual Passport2Pain (P2P) ride, Wallace will be walking the last 20 miles of the course. He will start in the dark at Jensen Point on Wednesday and finish there with the cyclists on Saturday afternoon, in time to enjoy a taco feast and a well-deserved beverage.

This year will mark the seventh time that Wallace has walked P2P — more times than most cyclists have tried it.

Safety is a keystone concern of road walkers, especially in this era of distracted driving. Wallace reports that so far, he has not had any close calls; probably due to an overabundance of caution with approaching vehicles and being dressed like a space alien, with head-to-foot flashing lights.

“The worst situation is when a car is approaching from behind in the opposite lane and another car is coming towards you in your lane,” Wallace said. “I look for an exit when that happens.”

P2P is really hard (11 out of 10 Idiots who ride the full 80 miles and 10,000 feet of elevation gain will attest to that), but for Wallace it really doesn’t compare with some of his other endurance treks. Last year after his P2P walk, he decided that he was in top shape and that it would be an ideal time to walk the fabled rim-to-rim traverse of the Grand Canyon. He and his wife, Karen Baer, journeyed to the north rim.

In the early morning dark, lugging seven liters of water and with headlamp ablaze, he started down into the canyon. Normally water is plentiful on this trail (there is a massive spring high on the north side which provides water along the trail down to the river and all the way up to the south rim on the other side) but the piping for this water source had failed and the water was being treated with an undrinkable concentration of chlorine.

The 24-mile trail is rough and loses more than one vertical mile down to the Colorado River. Temperatures at the rim were in the 40s but at the bottom, in what the Park Service calls “The Box” (but which Wallace renamed “The Oven”) the temperature was well over 100 degrees. Wallace confessed that he had made a tactical error in concentrating his training on endurance rather than agility, so the going was slow and he fell further and further behind his intended pace.

Just above the river lies Phantom Ranch, an oasis with food and lemonade, and teeming with park rangers. The rangers have honed their assessment techniques to spot potential trouble, and Wallace fit their profile.

It was four in the afternoon before he was released from his cautionary trip to the clinic to proceed, but admonished to stop for help if necessary.

It is “only” about 10 miles and 4500 vertical feet from the river up to the south rim, but by the time Wallace got about halfway on the upward journey and the next ranger check-in, he was out of gas. He was able to sleep in the ranger station and recover to finish the hike the next morning.

Fortunately, Wallace was able to stay in contact with Baer, who had driven around to meet him at the trek’s end. She knew he was not in trouble, but he said he was so tired that he would have slept alongside the trail if the ranger station hadn’t been there.

Back country walks have not been Wallace’s staple. Most of his walks have been along roads and pathways laced together by some historical theme. Earlier this year he walked 400 miles along the coast of Normandy, France and visited the landing beaches of D-Day, before ending at the monastery of Mont Saint Michel — which dates to the ninth century. The monastery sits on an island just off the coast and is alternately high and dry and then totally surrounded by water, due to the forty foot plus tides.

In 2019, Wallace walked about 300 miles from Kingston, Ontario in Canada to Niagara Falls. The theme for that trek was the electrification of the eastern US and Canada and the battle between Nikola Tesla (no relation to Elon Musk) and Thomas Edison over the form of electricity to be used for transmission — alternating current (Tesla) versus direct current (Edison).

With over a thousand US patents, Edison had a lot riding on the selection of his mode of transmission, which led to a circus-like set of performances in which, to demonstrate the danger of AC electricity, Edison electrocuted a number of animals up to (and including) an elephant in size.

Nevertheless, Tesla’s invention won out, and the story of the U.S. era of industrialization is told along Wallace’s selected path. Ironically, in the present day, after numerous generations of technological evolution, it is direct current transmission that ships power long distances. Those transmission lines you see coming from the dams along the Columbia River are 750 kilovolt DC lines.

Wallace did the Ironhorse Walk from Seattle to the Columbia River in Eastern Washington in 2015, a tour back in time following the history of the development of the railroads. In 2014, he walked the Southwest Coast Path starting in Cornwall and ending in Devon, England; 650 miles and elevation gain (and loss) equivalent to 4.5 times Mount Everest. Tin mines were the theme there.

This fascination with long distance walks started in 2012 with a late July stroll from Portland to Walla Walla. That route followed one of America’s first scenic highways through the Columbia River Gorge. Pavement temperatures got so hot that the soles of his walking shoes melted.

Through more than a decade of noteworthy walks, 77-year-old Wallace — who has a heart condition — epitomizes the slogan “keep on keepin’ on.” One bout of plantar fasciitis in 2022 took him off the roads for about a year of rest; stretching and physical therapy got him back on his feet.

You might ask what motivates such a pursuit. Wallace himself says he is not sure – but it’s probably the innate value of persisting at something hard. Overcoming obstacles. A journey of the soul. Those are the ideas that come to his mind.

What’s next? Maybe a 750-mile walk in Wales that he previously had to skip with the foot problem. Maybe a section of Route 66. There are a lot of interesting walks out there.

Pat Call is a masters rower who writes about non-traditional sports activities.