The Smartest Businessman on the Appalachian Trail

It's raining in the mountains of north Georgia, and it's 40 degrees out, with a cold fog crawling along the piney slopes surrounding Neels Gap outside of Blairsville. Still, Steve Jennette is quite willing to stand out in the weather and testify. "Winton," says Jennette, a wiry 56-year-old lawyer and hiker, "Winton is the kind of guy who, if you were up on Blood Mountain, freezing and hypothermic, he'd come get you, even if it was midnight. And his book, it touched me, like few others have. I was determined to meet him."

Nearby, there's a lanky, scraggly-bearded fellow who has an almost ethereal take on Winton Porter and Mountain Crossings, the hiking store and hostel that Porter owns in Neels Gap. "It's a cosmic force that draws people here," says this individual, an itinerant odd-jobs specialist who goes by the single name Lumpy. "It just feels like all the cosmic tumblers come into place here."

Mountain Crossings, which is housed in a sprawling and historic stone building, sits on the nation's most storied and popular hiking path -- the 2,179-mile-long Appalachian Trail. The AT, which stretches from Georgia to Maine, is such a cultural institution that next year it will be the subject of a film, A Walk in the Woods, starring and produced by Robert Redford. Each year it draws some 1,500 "thru hikers" intent on walking the whole trail. Almost every single one passes by Mountain Crossings. In 2009, the business grossed $780,000 selling hiking gear, bunk space, and (for motorized tourists) souvenirs. But its status as an actual commercial business seems incidental right now. You simply expect the proprietor to emerge wearing flowing white robes as he clutches, sagelike, at a gnarled hiking stick older than Abraham.

But wait -- here's Porter now, lumbering up the stone steps to the store, a big old Georgia boy in long shorts and sandals. Porter, 44, is 6 feet 4 and 225 pounds, with a kid's doughy face and a plug of Copenhagen bulging in his cheek. "What's up, bruthah?" he asks each of his workers. The faithful mill around him -- 20 or so mangy characters who smell, collectively, like wet socks, or like something rotting in the forest. It's mid-March, the optimal time to start the six-month journey north. Some of the visitors here are thru hikers. Others are nonhikers or former hikers who are hanging out here for a week or so to participate in a group love-in -- Porter's annual birthday bash, the Blaze of Glory party, two days away. In their idleness, and in their cohesion, they seem like so many Grateful Deadheads awaiting the resurrection of Jerry. Porter weaves through them, clutching a coffee mug and giving everyone a warm, conspiratorial grin. In time, he cranks the hi-fi up loud and wiggles one finger skyward, disco style, to the delight of the crowd, as he mouths the words, as sung by Jesus Jackson: "You got me running on sunshine/ Ain't no clouds getting in my way."

For a moment, you think, Jeez, this guy's kind of a bubba.

But then Porter plunges into his closet-size backroom office and bends over some papers. And for a moment, he's all serious, and his brow furrows under his reading glasses as he spits a brown stream of chaw into a cup.

There is definitely some ratiocination going on with Winton Porter. The man has deftly pulled off a trick a lot of entrepreneurs would die to emulate. He has turned himself into a guru. He has attained such loftiness and leverage that if he, say, recommends Leki trekking poles, it has a ripple effect up and down the AT.

Porter knows the power of branding. He knows that he is, for his customers, an almost mythological character -- an emblem of freedom who has wriggled free of the gray trappings of the flatland grind to live his dream in the mountains. And he likes to build up the myth of himself. He gives inspirational speeches to civic groups. In 2009, he published a memoir, Just Passin' Thru, about his first eight years at Mountain Crossings. In marketing the book, he has described it as "a story of one man's willingness to leave the corporate world, clear his bank account, and uproot his family from the picket fences and golden retriever life of suburbia."

The rhetoric has the feel of a cheesy movie trailer, and I went to Georgia fearing that Porter would be kind of an operator -- that his whole good ol' boy thing was a put-on. Porter, after all, has been inventing himself since the age of 14, when he began reading (and underlining) the works of self-help titans Dale Carnegie and Zig Ziglar, and in recent years he has polished his highly marketable "picket fences" story.

The story begins when Porter was a kid, and spending almost every weekend hiking in the mountains of north Georgia with his dad. At 21, Porter launched B. Bumblefoot and Co., which sold wooden hiking sticks to outdoor shops. Next, he went into outdoor retail, as a store manager for REI and then Galyan's Trading Company -- and burned out on it. The 90-hour workweeks were bad, and the corporate politics were worse. So in 2000, he began jockeying to buy Mountain Crossings, which was already a successful hiking store. On the day he closed the deal, he handed his boss a note. My dream begins now, it read, and my life is returned to me. My resignation is tendered, effective immediately.

Today, that note sits, framed, by Porter's cash register, and customers often stand by it, posing for photos. A lot of AT hikers are on a mission to reclaim their lives. People take to the trail, usually, amid a time of personal change: after college graduation, or after they have fought with their parents or gotten divorced or watched a loved one die.

Porter has these people right where he wants them. Mountain Crossings, which sits within the stone Walasi-Yi Center at Neels Gap, may be the most strategically placed hiking store on earth: It sits right on the AT. Indeed, the trail actually cuts through a stone breezeway adjoining the store, and when hikers reach it, they have just completed the "walk of humility," as Porter calls the trail's first 30 miles. They have damaged their knees and scraped up their backs carrying ungainly old tents. They have shivered in crappy sleeping bags, and they have arrived at Porter's doorstep eager to lay out hundreds of dollars for the latest ultralight gear.