Strength, Will and Inspiration

There are many things to be aware of when hiking. Proper gear, food, water, and a clear plan. Not many hikers anticipate a violent attack by a stranger. It is an exceptionally rare occurrence. That holds true of the Appalachian Trail. In its 83-year history, 12 hikers have been killed by another person. None of these murders have been in the back country. They occur when the trail is near civilization.

In 2019, the most recent murder took place.

Kirby Morrill, age 28, of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, has been tenacious from the start. At the University of New Brunswick, she was a rugby star, known for her “off-the-charts” tackling, and sustaining two broken noses. Morrill is also a powerlifter who loves to kayak the rivers and lakes of coastal Canada and cycle her province’s trails. Her bucket list included completing a thru-hike of the 3,500-kilometre Appalachian Trail.

In March 2019, shortly after defending her Master of Science thesis at the University of New Brunswick, a survey of sea lettuce species in Canada’s Bay of Fundy, Morrill flew to Atlanta. This was the start of a solo hike that would take 5-7 months. The trail ends on Mount Katahdin, a final scramble up Maine’s highest peak.

All was great for the first several weeks. She loved the trail, experiencing the best sleeps of her life. Fellow American hikers provided her with the trail name, Toque, a Canadian word for stocking cap they had not heard before. Then in May, a mobile app used by hikers was issuing warnings of man threatening people on the trail. Descriptions of the man and his dog were posted. By May 10, Morrill, had passed the quarter-way point.

Kevin Bissett of The Canadian Press interviewed Morrill for a first-hand account, “I stopped at a restaurant because another hiker was going to meet me there with a new food bag for me.” Seated at the restaurant, she saw the hiker she now refers to as “the crazy guy with the knife” walking down the road. His real name is James Jordan. Morrill Googled his name based on the app’s warnings and confirmed his image from a previous mugshot.

Grayson Haver Currin of Outside Magazine writes, “for weeks, Jordan had harassed hikers in North Carolina and Tennessee, wielding a guitar and a 17-inch knife and making violent threats, prompting his arrest near that state line. For him, it was just the latest in a lifelong string of legal troubles. Despite efforts to buy him a bus ticket and send him home upon his release from a Tennessee jail, Jordan—who had dubbed himself “Sovereign”—returned to the AT just south of the Virginia border.”

After spotting Jordan, Morrill left a note at the restaurant register warning people and set out to get ahead of the man. As it turns out, he was ahead of her. She says, she went, “full Canadian,” pouring on pleasantries and petting his dog, Felicia. They parted ways and was grateful to meet three other hikers who all camped together that night.

Among them was Ron Sanchez, who she had met a few days earlier. Sanchez, age 43, was a U.S. Army veteran. “He was really comforting. He was a really great guy,” she said. “I really appreciated him, so it was nice to see him at that campsite again.”

Then the “crazy guy” showed up.

“As far as I know he didn’t have a tent, and he wandered around the campsite talking to himself,” she said. He sang to himself for half an hour by the campfire. “And then he came around to the tents threatening to kill us in a variety of ways and telling us why we deserved to die.”

Jordan retreated into the woods. The four hikers decided to pack up and get the hell out of there. It was not fast enough. He came back. Two managed to escape, Morrill and Sanchez, were confronted. Jordan then attacked Sanchez with a knife. He would later die.

Then Morrill was fallen upon, “I was pinned. Because we had packed up and tried to get out of there with all our things, I had everything on me. I had a 30-something-pound pack on my back, and when he came at me, he came at my front, so I fell onto my back like a turtle, and he was on top of me,” she said. “There was nothing I could do.”

Thankfully, it was pitch dark. The killer may have thought she was dead and left. She got up, deciding to head where she knew other hikers were camped, about 10 kilometres away. Morrill did not know the extent of her wounds, “I had so much adrenaline coursing through me at that point, I barely felt it. It was just kind of a general feeling of badness, like something is wrong here.”

It took about three hours to reach the next set of hikers. She was flown to a hospital in neighboring Tennessee. Morrill had suffered nine stab wounds and 40 individual lacerations, requiring about 50 staples and 10 sutures across her face. Her right hand barely worked, there were multiple wounds to her left leg, and gashes across her face and fingers. Her mental toughness shines through, “I look like scarface now.” Yet, she mourns for Sanchez.

James Jordan, age 30, from Massachusetts was arrested just hours after. He was charged with murder and assault with intent to commit murder. He underwent treatment after being found unfit to stand trial by a federal judge.

Recovery for Morrill involved physiotherapy, exercise and weightlifting in an effort to restore feeling and the use of various muscles, especially in her arms. Despite the pain, she was back on the Appalachian Trail in September that same year, although just for a day. While in hospital, she had promised a woman she had met on the trail to join her at Mount Katahdin and do that last peak together. And, Morrill did, through a great deal of discomfort balanced with joy.

Currin writes, “When she made it to the summit, she didn’t simply turn around and descend the mountain the way she had come. True to form, she bid her old trail-family member goodbye and pressed on, heading east across Knife Edge, the infamously steep, thin, and exposed trail that traverses two more of the massif’s peaks. “Coming down the Knife Edge, I thought, Now this is Katahdin. When I reached the bottom, I was exhausted. My knee hurt. My right hand was barely functional. Yup, that was a good day.””

Since that terrible night, James Jordan, has been deemed fit to stand trial. His lawyers plan to claim insanity with the trial scheduled for July, 2021.

Morrill had planned to finish what she began, to complete the entire Appalachian Trail in 2020. Covid-19 interrupted those plans. Yet, there is no doubt that Morrill, based on character and ability, will get it done, “I am statistically more likely to die in a car crash than I am on the trail. It’s just pretty bad luck, a complete fluke, that I got stabbed. I wasn’t scared the first time, and I won’t be scared the second time. And even if I was scared, are you really going to let a little fear stop you from what you want to do in life?”