Jon King is 2022 Ernie Maxwell Community Spirit Award recipient

The votes have been tallied and the recipient of the 2022 Ernie Maxwell Community Spirit Award is biologist Jon King. The award is given to recognize those who have demonstrated a tangible, perhaps physical, effect on the community. The honor is given to an individual or group who represents EMax’s spirit of community and volunteerism. Prior awardees took actions that created a spark sufficient to bring others into the fray just as Maxwell did with his activities involving the environment.

The wider world knows King as “San Jac Jon,” and his “San Jacinto Trail Report” is available to the world at sanjacjon.com. It dovetails with his volunteer work for the Pacific Crest Trail Association, the U.S. Forest Service and local search and rescue operations. King has spent hundreds of hours searching for missing Pacific Crest Trail (PCT) hiker David O’Sullivan, and will soon be part of a foundation created by O’Sullivan’s father.

The trail report began as “hard copy” bulletins he provided to local rangers to distribute to hikers. It has since become easier for the whole world to access through the internet. A reader described the trail report as “an archive of conditions on the mountain.” King said that in addition to hikers, it is, “Hopefully of value for historians, water managers, foresters, (the agencies at state and forest consult it) search and rescue teams, and interested residents. I have a lot of readers who don’t hike the trails but experience them through the report.” Indeed, the reports are readable and engaging, and you don’t need snowshoes to tag along and find out what it is like to be on the peak during a blizzard, or follow the ever-declining state of the springs and high-country water sources.

King has received a fair amount of media attention, and can be quite talkative about his trail report and the things he learns while making it, but he is not one to blow his own horn, and speaks little about himself. Those who talk to him or watch his videos sometimes take him for Australian because of his accent and his time “down under” managing a field station, but he is British. The Crier was able, with some coaxing, to pry loose a bit of Jon’s back story.

TC: “You were born in England?”

JK: “I was born in Kenya.”

TC: “What about your family?”

JK: “Parents met there, both British.”

TC: “What brought them there?”

JK: “Back in those days, in the 1950s, it was an employment opportunity for young British people. I basically grew up in England.

“I became a biologist. That started back in Africa; the whole family had a fascination with wildlife. We came back to the UK. I used to hike since I was a few years old, hike with my dad, and started wildlife watching. I was able to turn that into a career.”

TC: “Where are some of the places you worked?”

JK: “I did postgraduate work in Spain. Then I took a job in Canada, which then led to a similar job in Northern California. I worked on the Farallon Islands.”

TC: “That is pretty isolated. There are no people there?”

JK: “Among the few there was Anne.”

TC: “What were you doing there?”

JK: “We worked on great white sharks and migrating whales and bird biology. It was the early days of great white shark research. We worked with pioneers in GWS [great white shark] photography. That’s where I met Anne; we’ve been married for 26 years.”

TC: “You were a team after that?”

JK: “Yeah.”

TC: “After the Farallons?”

JK: “We worked in the Northern Sierra around Lassen National Park, the Southern Cascades. Anne and I trained Forest Service and National Park Service staff in wildlife monitoring techniques. Then we moved to Sacramento for a decade. We ultimately both worked for large international environmental consultancy companies. Then we quit that and went to Australia for two years to work for nonprofit wildlife conservation organizations.

“Then we traveled, overlanded, in South America. The same pickup that I drive now, we had a camper on the back. We spent just over three years looking for rare and endangered wildlife in the remotest parts. We spent significant time in every Central and South American country.”

TC: “Then you retired here?”

JK: “Anne’s family lived in the area since at least the 1950s. Sadly, my mom-in-law had passed away and we came back to sort things out.”

One of King’s claims to fame is his recent record for ascents to San Jacinto Peak; in December 2021, he logged his 644th. It should be noted that the previous record was set by Palm Springs resident Sid Davis, who began most of his hikes from the Aerial Tramway’s Mountain Station, reducing the route to a “mere” 12-mile round trip with more than 2,300 feet of elevation gain. Although King has done the tram-based “Cactus to Clouds to Idyllwild” route, his counted ascents were completed without mechanical assistance beyond snowshoes and crampons, and add up to an estimated 3 million feet of elevation gain. He takes a special interest in storms and snow. As he told the Palm Springs Desert Sun last year, “The worse the conditions the more likely I am to be up there.”

JK: “We’ve been here for the last nine years. But I started hiking the peak 25 years ago. I didn’t start counting the ascents until much more recently, once I started doing the trail report. I wasn’t counting ascents to count ascents, the trail report came first. Three or four years ago the realization came that I was going up into the high country a great deal to produce the trail report.”

TC: “You began a count?”

JK: “I had always kept a hiking log, I was able to reconstruct a tally. People are obsessed with records and numbers; it’s like a sports thing.”

King wanted to draw attention to Ernie Maxwell’s life work and the debt the community still owes him.

JK: “I think it’s an honor to be associated with him through this award. He’s an icon in the hiking and environmental community up here. For me as a professional wildlife biologist, he was decades ahead of his time in terms of environmental activism, working to preserve the mountain’s communities to the greatest extent possible. I feel related to and can find parallels with what I am trying to do, in different eras. He spent a lot of time on the trails, a lot of time on the mountain. With that background, you see the changes probably more clearly than others. That is one of the advantages of what we do, and also a disadvantage, because sometimes ignorance is bliss.”

Gently, judiciously and without editorializing, King presents quantitative data about these changes. “I put the data points out there and trust people to draw the lines between them. I hope people understand the significance of the trends that are clear from the meteorological and water data that I provide in the report.”

JK: “I wanted to give some numbers on website traffic. My view of the community is not just Idyllwild and Pine Cove; it’s viewed by thousands of hikers in Southern California and PCT hikers. The average viewership is 100,000 a year. That equates to about 20,000 to 25,000 actual people per year. Probably as many as 90% of the people hiking the PCT every year look at the website; page views from over 60 countries because of how international the PCT is these days.”

King pulled out his phone and scrolled through the stats. “So far this year, 73,000 …” He showed the list of countries. “Just this year it’s 76 countries.”

King kept bringing the conversation back to his favorite topic: “The bottom line is the trail report work; the more people who know about it the more people it helps.” Even a superficial reading can save a hiker’s life. “The key parts I want all readers to take home I put in bold.”

The report is written so anyone understands the basics, but there’s always more there. The report has grown in importance in recent years for two reasons; first there are more people, some inexperienced, attempting the PCT, of which the San Jacinto Mountains are the first real alpine stretch. Second, the conditions in the mountains are changing and people who may have read material about the trails from even a few years ago may be surprised. The heat comes sooner, the water is harder to find and trail maintenance is inconsistent.

King brings trail maintenance issues to the attention of the relevant agencies and is sometimes gratified to see teams out clearing downed trees, as for example, after tropical storm Kay. He advises hikers to report these issues to the Forest Service or State Park. “The squeaky wheel gets the grease.” Readers of the report also will discover that trails listed by Forest Service as “not maintained” may in reality no longer exist, having become completely overgrown. A good thing to know before setting out.

King asked to include a few “thank yous. “Thanks to my family Anne and Anabell [their dog], everything I achieve is thanks to them, to Mark Dean for nominating me, and to the supporters of the trail report who read the paper and voted.”

King allowed the Crier to include the personal note that Saturday was an eventful day: Within two hours he received news from England of his mother’s death and the Maxwell award. King’s San Jacinto Trail Report is supported by readers’ donations.