Bend’s Rue McKenrick uses a marker to trace the route of the American Perimeter Trail, a 14,000-mile loop that circumnavigates the continental U.S.

Rue McKenrick was finding his groove as he walked across North Dakota and approached the Montana border last spring.

Then, he received a devastating phone call. His older brother had been struck by a vehicle while walking and was on life support.

He died before Rue could make it back to Pennsylvania to see him, but he attended the funeral and stayed with his parents for a few weeks.

McKenrick then made the decision to head back out on the trail as part of his three-year push to scout the American Perimeter Trail , or APT. The sudden death of his brother provided even more motivation to establish and promote the 14,000-mile route that circumnavigates the continental United States using a combination of existing trails and undefined routes.

“I want to honor his life by doing something positive in this world before I check out,” McKenrick said of his brother.

McKenrick, 41 and a Bend resident since 2012, has spent the past three years hiking the route and working to form the Bend-based nonprofit American Perimeter Trail Conference (americanperimetertrail.org), which has a mission “to create a protected corridor of land and natural resources available for recreational use roughly tracing the contiguous United States.” The nonprofit is now accepting membership and has members from 20 states and several countries, according to McKenrick, the executive director.

McKenrick completed the Triple Crown of hiking in his 20s — thru-hiking the Appalachian Trail (more than 2,100 miles from Georgia to Maine), the Continental Divide Trail (more than 3,000 miles from Mexico to Canada through the Rocky Mountains) and the Pacific Crest Trail (more than 2,600 miles from Mexico to Canada through the Sierra Nevada and Cascade ranges).

McKenrick, who was raised in Pennsylvania, has spent most of his adult life traveling and working for outdoor education nonprofits, including Outward Bound as an AmeriCorps volunteer.

But he said he felt like he was missing something in his life, and he wanted to return to the trail. And more than that, he wanted to create something new.

McKenrick said he first thought about the perimeter hike years ago, shortly after completing the Triple Crown.

He first set out from Bend to scout the APT in July 2019 and walked down the West Coast, across the Southwest and the South, up through the Appalachians and across the Upper Midwest before his journey was cut short in North Dakota due to illness. He estimates that he made it more than 9,000 miles on the 15-month trek.

McKenrick mailed packages of food and supplies ahead to himself to post offices along his predicted route. He camped most nights under a tarp that weighs a half pound and that he could roll up into the size of his fist.

McKenrick returned to Bismarck, North Dakota, in May 2021 to finish where he left off. The trek was interrupted for three weeks by his return to Pennsylvania for his brother’s funeral, but he made the decision to return to the route.

“In hindsight, I probably wouldn’t have done that,” McKenrick said. “I would have just come back to Bend.”

When he reached the Montana plains, record-high temperatures led to heat exhaustion for six weeks.

“I was only going 10 to 12 miles a day,” McKenrick recalled. “It should have been 30 miles a day because it was flat.”

When he reached the Pacific Northwest Trail (which connects Glacier National Park and Olympic National Park) nobody was hiking it because temperatures were above 100 degrees and more than 100 wildfires were burning across Montana, Idaho and Washington.

“I continued around the fires every day, every week,” he said. “I made it into Washington, and I was going to start turning south. I was navigating all over the place to get around the fires.”

McKenrick said he was “really sick” by the time he reached Washington in early September. He was only a three-day walk from reaching the Pacific Crest Trail and technically connecting the entire APT loop. But he called his doctor and described his symptoms. He was told he was in pre-organ failure.

“I got back to Bend, and I’m still in the process with my doctors,” McKenrick said. “My labs are better and I feel better, but my (gastrointestinal) situation has not resolved. I would have continued down into Bend for a celebration and event with gear sponsors. That all got canceled.”

He now plans to return to where he left off next June to complete the three- or four-day trek to the PCT, then follow the trail back south all the way to Bend.

“I want to close the whole loop by ending in Bend, and that requires another 400 miles or so,” McKenrick explained. “I will leave in June and complete the piece between here and Washington and finish in Bend sometime between July 15 and Aug. 1. We’ll have an event and a celebration in Bend.”

But more important to McKenrick than completing his three-year saga of scouting the entire APT is getting more members to join the American Perimeter Trail Conference, which will help create the conservation corridor that goes around the U.S. and connects communities.

“I’m trying to grow the executive board, but we need serious support, and we have not broken through in Bend at all,” he said. “We’re just not well known here. The fact that it’s 14,000 miles long and it goes around the country, this is a huge thing that’s happening in this community, in Bend. I just want people to know that we’re here.”