As the founding editor of America’s first major hiking magazine and co-founder of the American Hiking Society, Kemsley, who died earlier this month at age 98, spent decades fighting to protect and preserve America’s wild places.
William Kemsley (Photo: John McCauley)
Published on June 18, 2026 02:00 pm
when he founded backpacker in 1973, Bill Kemsley wanted to give the hikers some new heroes. He could not have imagined that he would become one of them.
One morning in 1963, Kemsley was finishing breakfast on the Appalachian Trail when he learned that another party had broken into their camp and left behind burning fires and piles of garbage. Annoyed, he spent the next hour cleaning up the garbage vermin, fantasizing about punishing them.
“I entertained all kinds of sadistic thoughts, such as, shooting them, strangling them, or at least throwing them in a pokie until they learned better manners,” said Kemsley, who died on June 8 at the age of 98. wrote in a 2006 article in the journal Appalachia. “But then compassion won the day. I realized they were clearly young people new to the trails and clearly didn’t know how to behave in the wilderness.” The experience left Kemsley wondering: “‘What can be done to make newcomers more respectful of our backcountry?'”
Kemsley answered that question 10 years later when he founded backpacker, America’s first major magazine devoted entirely to hiking and backpacking. Published 21 years before Leave No Trace was founded, that first issue featured what Kemsley called “a new trail ethic” with a profile of conservationist John Burroughs and an essay by backpacking pioneer Colin Fletcher. For Kemsley, it was the beginning of a long career of protecting and preserving America’s wild places, and another step in his lifelong fascination with them.
William “Backpacker Bill” Kemsley Jr. was born in Detroit in 1928, at the beginning of the Great Depression. In a 2018 interview with the American Hiking Society, he recalled how his father, who lived in Canada, would take the family on weekend wilderness hikes. But it wasn’t until Kemsley served in the Army during World War II and used his GI Bill benefits to go to Columbia University that he discovered the magic of the mountains on a trip to the Catskills.
“I’d go to the Catskills on the weekends, and I’d never see anyone,” Kemsley told. New Mexico Magazine In 2021. “I never got to hike with anyone, and that’s why I hiked alone, and I still hike alone.”
This began to change in the 1960s, when the Baby Boomer generation found their way to America. By 1973, backpacking was on the rise, with Kemsley noting that the number of brand new backpackers on the trail exceeded the total number of backpackers four years earlier. With these new hikers came new impacts: trash, abandoned fires, trampled vegetation.
It was his confrontation with those scenes that inspired Kemsley, who was working in a corporate communications job in New York, to start publishing. Backpacker. In the lead up to that first issue, Kemsley picked the brain. newsweek’s staff and consulted with trail icons like White Mountain guru Guy and Laura Waterman.
The magazine was an immediate success, attracting over 80,000 subscribers in its first year, beginning a run of success that lasted 53 years. While Kemsley sold the magazine in 1980, he spent the rest of his career advocating for the preservation and protection of America’s trails. In 1974, he testified before a Senate committee about preservation of the Appalachian Trail, and in 1976 he co-founded the Appalachian Trail. American Hiking Society With Jim Kern and Paul Pritchard. Kemsley, who moved to Taos, New Mexico in 1993, continued hiking until his mid-90s.
“Nature is not a hobby for me, or anything I really think about,” he explained. backpacker In 2022. “It’s just a part of who I am. I live in the woods, on a secluded road a mile from any sidewalks. I walk in the woods every day, and that’s where I exist – out there with the squirrels and the pine trees.”
to celebrate backpackerOn the 50th anniversary, former editor-in-chief John Dorn meets founding editor Bill Kemsley to talk about the magazine’s origins.
“With great reluctance I started the magazine, because it was a lot of work that took me out of the forest. But it needed to be done, and we did it for the right reasons – to be guardians of the forest.”
