West Virginia daily

Adkins showed off his place of work, so to speak, as he stretched his legs the other day on a short trail along Smith Mountain Lake near Roanoke.

"Leonard is one of those guys who has done what many hikers wish they could do -- just keep on going," said Bill Cochran, a Roanoke County outdoors writer who admires Adkins' work.

Many trail guides are dry as a dirt path, offering little beyond "turn-right-here" directions and clinical descriptions of flowers. But Adkins peppers his books with anecdotes, folklore and conservation tips.

His "Wildflowers of the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains" came out in May. In it, Adkins says the white flowers of the plant galax, clustered along the top of a long stalk, "appear to be small stars bursting from the wand [of a] fairy."

His "Wildflowers of the Appalachian Trail" in 1999, stunningly illustrated by photographers Joe and Monica Cook, received a National Outdoor Book Award.

Adkins' career path has wound like a mountain trail. After studying political science and sociology in college, he held numerous jobs, including selling stereos in a store in his native Charleston, W.Va. When he was 28, an old friend asked him to hike the Appalachian Trail with her.

"I said, 'OK, that sounds good. What is it?'" He had never heard of the Appalachian Trail, a mountainous footpath of roughly 2,170 miles from north Georgia to northern Maine.

The friend pulled out, but Adkins got a leave from his job, went to Georgia and hiked by himself. "I only did 900 miles that year . . . It was tough because I didn't know what I was doing."

Back selling stereos, Adkins found himself "thinking about the places I'd seen and the people I'd met." When February rolled around, Adkins got another leave, and he finished the trail.

"It was a beautiful day . . . I walked through the front of the store, and the door closed. You know how it is in the those prison movies? That's what it sounded like . . . Clang-a-lang-a-lang! And I thought, 'I've got to go back down to Georgia.'"

"We had the same hiking pace. We would end up at the same campsites, same shelters, along with other people . . . One thing led to another, and we ended up hiking all the way to Maine together," a trip of about five months.

Five years later, in 1987, they married at the Peaks of Otter on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Bedford. They live in rural Botetourt County near Fincastle.

The two have hiked thousands of miles, including the Allegheny Trail in West Virginia, the Ozark Highlands Trail in Arkansas and the 2,800-mile Continental Divide Trail along the crest of the Rockies from Canada to Mexico.

They have no children, but their mixed-breed dog, Mac, has logged a few thousand miles, too. Mac is still active at 12. "We all come back stiff" after a hike, Adkins said.

In the mid-1980s, Leonard, Laurie and her parents toured the Caribbean on her father's 42-foot sailboat. Leonard and Laurie discovered trails on island beaches, deserts and volcanoes.

The two worked various jobs over the years to maintain their freedom to hike, including summer stints in 1988 as naturalists at Seashore State Park in Virginia Beach.

A short hike in 1988, near Afton Mountain, inspired Adkins' third book, "Walking the Blue Ridge: A Guide to the Trails of the Blue Ridge Parkway" in 1991.

After that book, "it just sort of developed" that Leonard would write and Laurie would work a regular job, he said. Today, Laurie is a physician assistant in Salem.

Laurie said she misses the long hikes but still gets out on vacations and weekends. "Like the good book says, there's a time for everything under the sun and right now is the time to work" for future security, she said via e-mail.

On this fall day by the lake, Adkins needed to leave the woods early to write a column. He finds writing hard -- nowhere near as easy as hiking 17,000 miles.

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