The following article is part one of a feature series by contributor Caitlyn Oliver.
Half a face, a busted knee, and five dollars.
This is how Seth Orme and Paul Twedt finished their first Packing It Out mission on the Appalachian Trail 3 years ago.
Finding a Purpose
Orme is an energetic person with a deep desire to leave an impact. After a car crash at the age of 18 that hospitalized him with no idea whether the internal bleeding would kill him or not Orme realized he wanted to accomplish something meaningful.
“That next summer in May I put my 17 foot sea kayak into the headwaters of the Mississippi River. I was going to make this dream of adventure a reality. The plan was to kayak from Lake Itasca in Minnesota 2300 miles to the Gulf of Mexico,” Orme said at a presentation at Georgia Southern University.
His trip made him realize that he wanted his career to be working outdoors. Knowing he didn’t have the skills he would need, he enrolled at Georgia Southern in 2011.
Having heard about the Outdoor Recreation program at Georgia Southern University, Orme’s mother called the head of the department, Dr. John Peden. The program seemed to be the best fit for her active son and she was looking for more information.
“My first contact with him was actually through his mother who called me inquiring about information on the program and she was telling me about her son who had decided to paddle the Mississippi river in a sea kayak instead of going straight into college and this seemed like something that would be up his alley,” Peden said.
He heard from Orme several months later and after many emails, Seth Orme’s name appeared on several of his course rosters.
“He was a good student, he was involved, he worked well with other people in class. Other people kind of gravitated toward him,” Peden said.
When Orme deviated from his planned speech at Georgia Southern, his gestures became more expressive and closer to his active personality.
With Orme’s quick smile, easy going attitude, and never-ceasing movement, these characteristics are easy to believe.
Peden’s classes learned to how to plan and lead trips and the outdoor values that would influence Orme’s later expeditions.
“In the classes that I teach I try to think about the things that are going to be the most impactful on them in terms of forging their own land ethic and sense of purpose in the field of outdoor recreation,” Peden said.
Orme kept in contact with his former professor and told him when the concept for Packing It Out was first created, which Peden wholeheartedly supported. He viewed it as an innovative idea and knew Seth would accomplish whatever he said he planned to do.
One of the values instilled by his professor is the importance of having a mission. From this came the mission of Orme’s project, Packing It Out: Inspire a greater sense of environmental stewardship withing the community by raising awareness for litter conditions along America’s trails.
The Beginning
After graduation from GS in 2013, Orme immediately started working for Wilderness Inquiry in North Carolina, a company that facilitates outdoor experiences for people with disabilities.
“Many of our clients had been told that they could not go camping, canoeing, or dog-sledding because, well, they were blind. Quadriplegic. Diagnosed with autism. At Wilderness Inquiry our motto was ‘Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.’,” Orme said.
Winter seasons are the toughest on outdoor jobs but Orme was offered a full-time position refinishing canoes. The easy nine-to-five hours gave him time to think. Even with his unique experiences and impact in people’s lives already, he still wanted to do more.
“I realized I had gotten a taste of doing something good. It was like sugar, it had me hooked. I want to do something more. I don’t know what, I’m only 24. There’s not much more I can do at 24, I’m already carrying people up lighthouses and pulling people on sleds across lakes, but I still want to do more,” Orme said.
Orme leading a canoeing trip in NC. Photo Credit: Seth Orme
His new position gave him the chance to take time off to visit family and friends. While at home, he went on hiking trips with his friends and picked up trash as he went, averaging a pound of trash per mile.
After spending 200 days outside the outdoors feel like home; seeing so much trash on the trails made it feel like people were leaving trash all over the house.
Orme noticed that when he picked up trash, the people he hiked with would do the same without him saying a word.
Immediately he thought of doing the same thing on a larger scale by hiking the entire 2,189.3 mile-long Appalachian trail to do just that – pick up all the trash he could find.
The idea for Packing It Out was born.