About the Author

Dave Pruett is a long-term resident of the Shenandoah Valley who, following his semi-retirement in 2012, section-hiked the entire AT through the Virginias over nine summers, completing it in 2023 at age seventy-five. Pruett previously worked in the aerospace industry at NASA Langley Research Center (LaRC) and taught mathematics and computational science at Virginia Commonwealth University, the College of William and Mary, and James Madison University (JMU). In 1996, Pruett received the Robert T. Knapp Award of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, for pioneering computer simulations of high-speed flows, work conducted in collaboration with world-renown scientists at NASA LaRC. As a full-time faculty member in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at JMU, Pruett garnered numerous teaching awards, including the first Mengebier Endowed Professorship and the first Provost's Award for Excellence in Honors Teaching, the latter for a groundbreaking honors course that explored the interface between science and spirituality. His first book, Reason and Wonder (Praeger, 2012), received a Choice Award from the American Library Association.

About the Contributor

Mills Kelly is a Professor of History at George Mason University and Senior Scholar at the award-winning Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. He has been hiking the AT since 1971 and is the archivist for the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club, co-maintainer of a historic cabin in Shenandoah National Park, and the maintainer of the Manassas Gap Shelter—one of the original shelters built along the AT during the 1930s. Professor Kelly has received numerous grants and fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Delmas Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and U.S. Department of Education. His books include Virginia's Lost Appalachian Trail (The History Press, 2023), Teaching History in the Digital Age (University of Michigan Press, 2013; 2016), World History Matters: A Student Guide to World History, with Kristin Lehner and Kelly Schrum (Bedford/St. Martin's Press, 2009), Without Remorse: Czech National Socialism in Late Habsburg Austria (East European Monographs/Columbia University Press, 2007), and a forthcoming history of the Appalachian Trail as told from the perspective of hikers.