[at-l] FYI: Ward Leonard

[truewood@my-deja.com (AT-L Guest Post)]

* Message posted to AT-L from the National Scenic Trails Website
* by our guest Joe Samson <truewood@my-deja.com>.
* Please use <mailto:truewood@my-deja.com> to reply to the sender.

I stayed with Ward this week at a shelter in GA. He is yo-yoing the AT or something similar. It took me about 15 minutes of listening to him talk
before I put two and two together and realized he
was Ward Leonard. He is calling himself "Chip" 
right now though, but if you have heard of him and the stories about him, yeah, they are honest
depictions. I really did not want to meet him and 
as luck would have it, I met him  and had the displeasure of spending a long, very cold night in a shelter with him. 

I am posting this because if anyone who meets him
can avoid camping with him, I'd suggest you do that. I can go into the reasons, but anyone who knows of him or met him has heard the stories. I really regret not listening to my intuition this past week and just tenting it before getting to the shelter. It was dark, very, very cold and I was tired, so I headed to the shelter.  Please understand that I am not here to bash or rehash a 
Ward Leonard thread.  The guy does have some psychological problems that AT hikers have been aware of for  a dozen years.