Portraits of Adventure / BTA / Cindy Sommers
Cindy Sommers
Ash Cave, Hocking Hills, OH
October 2025
Cindy likes to joke that she is “not a speaker,” but her work carries a steady voice across the Buckeye Trail. As chair of the Central Ohio chapter, most of what she does happens far from the public eye. She is the person reading every email, answering questions as they come in, tracking event registrations, checking weather, and making sure each hike has the right details in place. It is quiet work, but without it, the community would drift. The newsletter would not go out, people would not know what was happening, and engagement would slip away.
Her own story with the trail began the same way she hopes others will find theirs: through a simple introduction. She remembers not being able to hike long days, not understanding how big the community was until she showed up at Trail Fest and felt the scale of it. That memory shapes how she plans things now. Her new project, Scioto Saturdays, breaks a full section into six shorter hikes so beginners can take the trail in smaller steps. Finish one section, she says, and people fall in love. Then they get involved.
Cindy’s work may be administrative, but its outcome is physical. It shows up as new hikers, new volunteers, and new reasons for people to care about the trail.
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