>La Grande Observer | Union and Wallowa Counties' News Leader

Hiking solo, Rick Bombaci hopes to complete his Canadian Rockies trip in 65 days.

This will be included with other lightweight, high-energy foods in the backpack of an Enterprise man and also at 10 resupply points along 750 miles of remote and rugged terrain that he hopes to traverse, alone, in 65 days.

Rick Bombaci also spent some $300 on maps.

He thinks that few people have accomplished what he is attempting.

The challenges he expects to face include route finding and bushwhacking through willow patches and muddy bogs, because the trails disappear in places.

Also, he won’t have a lot of fresh food to eat, because seven of his resupply points are in remote areas. Several are in mountainous regions like ski areas, he said.

Three others will be in the towns of Coleman, Field and Jasper. Between the last two is the only place that he will cross Highway 93.

“I’m not going to see many roads on this hike,” he said.

Friends and park personnel will help with the food resupplies.  

Wet, cold weather is expected to be a challenge. Bombaci has seen it snow in August in the Canadian Rockies.

Bombaci is 52 — “and, I feel every bit of it,” he said.

These are but some of the challenges he expects.

In turn he challenges people to make pledges for his hike in an effort to eradicate polio worldwide.

Bombaci is a member of Rotary International. That organization has been fighting polio since 1985.

Since then, in its Polio Plus campaign, Rotary has immunized 2 billion children — preventing an estimated 250,000 deaths and innumerable paralyses.

In November 2007, Rotary announced a partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The Gates Foundation provided $100 million in advance, which Rotary has pledged to match over the next three years.

This is one of the largest challenge grants ever given by the Gates Foundation and the largest received by Rotary in its 102-year history.

Bombaci has already raised at least $3,000 for Polio Plus. He did so when he headed up that project locally as the 2002-03 president of the Wallowa County Rotary Club.

Under his leadership the club raised $6,000 for the Rotary International Foundation that implemented the Polio Plus program.

Bombaci now hopes to raise another $150,000 for Polio Plus with his hike. This will happen if he makes the 750 miles, and each club in District 5100 meets his $3 per mile challenge.

Bombaci also appeals to the general public for pledges or contributions. Those can be made by contacting Rotarian Jeanie Story at 432-9095 or This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

Bombaci has been quite active in Rotary. In March 2007 he headed up a Group Study Exchange to Australia for a cultural/vocational interchange.

There he and four non-Rotary professionals, ages 25-40, met and compared experiences with their counterparts in that country.

In 2006, Bombaci headed up a project where the local Rotary Club established a water system for a poor rural village in El Salvador.

He became inspired for that project by a friend nicknamed “Gilligan” while hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Bombaci is an avid backpacker. He grew up in rural Connecticut where his parents took him hiking regularly, he said.

A formative experience for him was hiking in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the Northeast’s greatest expanse of alpine terrain, he said.

Then he saw his brother’s pictures of sliding in snow in summer in Montana’s Bob Marshall Wilderness Area.

Bombaci had never seen snow in summer.

“I though that was pretty neat. I thought that I’d like to experience that,” he said. He was a high school freshman.

Bombaci then attended the University of Connecticut

After finishing there, he finally had his chance to come West, and he moved to Portland for 1 1/2 years. That was his only urban experience, he said.

In June 1980 he found Wallowa County.

“I came here because of the outdoor opportunity, and I’ve lived here ever since,” he said.

In 2000, Bombaci hiked the 2,167-mile Appalachian Trail in just short of seven months. He made a DVD of that experience called “Seven Moons on the Appalachian Trail.” It is available for $20 at the Bookloft in Enterprise, and on Bombaci’s website, mossyoldtroll.com.

He also plans to produce a DVD of the Canadian Rockies experience.

The two will be very different, he said, because the Appalachian Trail is established, well-maintained and goes through towns.

“In places it (Appalachian) is almost a pastoral experience. This (Rockies) will be a much more remote and wild experience,” he said.

Bombaci’s solo trek will begin in Canada’s Waterton Lakes National Park, just across the international border from Glacier National Park in the U.S.

Bombaci will travel through six provincial parks, five national parks and a number of wilderness areas.

The hike will end 150 miles north of Jasper National Park at 54 degrees north latitude, near Prince George, British Columbia.

In the trek more than 100,000 feet in elevation will be gained and lost.

Bombaci must carry a tent, and clothing for all conditions. This will include a poncho for himself, and one for his pack.

He will have mosquito netting to cover his head and bear spray for any grizzly encounter. He is sure that he will see bears.

The spray is supposed to be more effective than a pistol, because shooting a bear may only wound and aggravate it, he said.

The $50 spray lasts about nine seconds, he said.

Bombaci expects some stream crossings to be waist deep.

Not the least of his challenges will be industrial forests, criss-crossed with networks of roads and ATV tracks, making it difficult to know what is the trail.

He will not be carrying a GPS, but will navigate only by map and compass.

“I think it’s a risky enough undertaking that I don’t feel assured by any means of completing it. But I will give it my best shot,” Bombaci said.

Maybe toughest of all will be the last 12 days where he will have to go that long with whatever food he can carry on his back from his last resupply point.

He’ll need to ration out just right that jerky and those chocolate and Cliff bars.