Keith and Sally grab a selfie on a fire tower north of Hot Springs, N.C. Sally is the daughter of Clark and Janie Keller of Cullman. She has a brother in Gadsden and a sister in Cullman. Keith’s parents, Kevin and Carol Gilyard, live in St. Cloud, Minn. “It’s beautiful,” she says. More recently she worked at Yellowstone Club, a high-end, private ski and golf resort in Big Sky, Mont. Keith grew up in St. Cloud, Minn., and went west to earn a BFA from Montana State with an emphasis in ceramics. He throws he Appalachian Trail is a pottery and lays tile for a living. twisting, roller-coaster ribbon of Sally and Keith met through rock, earth and occasional toemutual friends in Bozeman in stumping roots that laces it way 2009 and fell in love. Over the along the highest ridges of Georgia, course of three years or so, they North Carolina, Tennessee, talked about marriage, but it Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, remained a maybe-someday thing. Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Keith and Sally’s “ultralight packs,” parked on Max “I thought maybe after the trail, York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, if we were still together, we’d Vermont, New Hampshire and a Patch Bald, N.C., weighed 25 and 20 pounds each. probably get married,” Sally says. final 282 miles through Maine. It “We figured if we could make requires 5 million steps – marked it six months on the trail together, by 2x6-inch white blazes painted laugh, could sum up their relationship. we could make it through a lot of things,” on trees and rocks – up and down enough Sally grew up in Cullman where she Keith says. mountainsides to equate to 16 round trips graduated from high school in 1997. from sea level to the summit of Everest. She attended Wallace State Community It’s not for the feint of heart. The effort ated 1934, the plaque bolted to College for a few years before striking out is as mental as it is physical. But Sally and the exposed rock spine atop Springer to Montana for a summer job at Glacier Keith were game. Love at first hike, they Mountain reads: A Footpath for Those National Park.
Keith’s situation in Bozeman. They had no mortgage, kids or dogs, no jobs they couldn’t leave, no confining anchors at all. “Can we do that?” she asked. “Well,” Keith said, fully understanding her “that.” “Sure.”
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