As Larry Ott prepared for the 3-mile hike to the summit of Iron Mountain last Friday, he donned a Poway Backpackers shirt. A special shirt, for a special hike: To honor his friend Eddie.
Eddie Lindros, 81, who died on a Lake Hodges trail last week, was an avid hiker and backpacker who had shared his ion for the outdoors with thousands of others as the co-founder of Poway Backpackers, a group that has been introducing young people to nature since 1972.
“That’s what he did, and it’s what he loved,” Ott said, holding back tears. “I specifically chose that shirt in Eddie’s honor and to recognize the legacy that he established and that continues to this day. Today was a little bit special and a little bit more poignant because of Eddie’s ing.”
Lindros had left the Casa De Las Campanas retirement community in Rancho Bernardo Wednesday morning to go for a walk — a trek his wife of 37 years, Joyce, said he completed nearly every day.
“He would say, ‘See you in 50 (minutes),’ because that’s how long it took him,” she said.
Although Joyce said it had been hard for Lindros to move away from Poway last year, he’d gotten accustomed to his new home and found new trails — dusty ones. “There’s a (permanent) dust mark where he sat on the couch,” she said, chuckling.
But last week, Joyce called 9-1-1 when he didn’t return. Lindros was found unresponsive near the trail. His cause of death will be determined by the county Medical Examiner’s Office.
When she met him nearly four decades ago, Lindros was a math teacher in the Poway Unified School District who in his spare time introduced kids to nature and taught them how to backpack safely.
By 2002, when he was profiled in the Poway News Chieftain, he had already taken nearly 3,500 youth to the mountains over three decades.
One of them was Ott, who ed the group in 1974, when he was 11, and later became a group leader.
“Backpacking teaches you resilience, and it teaches you teamwork, and it teaches you perseverance, and Eddie instilled the confidence and esprit de corps and the camaraderie that all made us better people,” Ott said, nearly 50 years later. “His legacy is something that’s going to last for generations to come because of the fact that he helped us to be better people.”
Dozens of other Poway Backpackers alumni across generations shared the same sentiments as they gathered Monday evening at Tierra Bonita Elementary School in Poway to welcome home about 75 kids from a nine-day backpacking trip in the Sierras.
“He’ll be sorely missed by hundreds of kids, and those hundreds of kids will look back at his ing and think how incredibly important he was to them,” said Dennis Bueker, who taught alongside Lindros and co-founded Poway Backpackers with him.
Bueker said he has been in awe of what Lindros could accomplish when it came to teaching kids about life through an activity like backpacking. “The skills that he possessed were a rare thing, and that he could communicate the way that he did was amazing,” he added.
Many in attendance Monday were reuniting for the first time in decades, coming together from across the country to honor Lindros in the best way they knew how.
Although Lindros had since retired more than two decades ago, he still made sure to meet the bus of backpackers each year upon their return.
This week, since he couldn’t show up to honor them, they did the same for him.
“He doesn’t want (memorial) services, so a lot of people were asking what they could do to pay tribute,” said Paige Rinehart, whose husband Scott took over the program when Lindros retired. “This is the first time that Eddie won’t be here. … So I thought, ‘What better way to honor him?’”
As she waited Monday evening outside the school for the bus to arrive, Lindros’ daughter Vickie Horton said it was comforting to see everyone gathered there in her father’s honor.
“It’s very poetic,” she said. “He knew how much he meant to everybody, and it was certainly his greatest joy connecting with these people and connecting them to each other and connecting them to the wilderness.”
Joyce Lindros pointed to the crowd as an obvious show of her husband’s impact. “It was always for the kids,” she said.
However, it wasn’t just kids who felt his impact.
Ott’s mother, Janice Ott, fell in love with backpacking on her first trip with the group to the Grand Canyon in 1974. She would then serve as his assistant with the organization for nearly a decade.
“Eddie was probably one of the most influential people in my life,” she said. It was Lindros, she said, who gave her the strength to know she could do whatever she set her mind to.
Many spoke of his love of John Denver — the only music he’d play on the hours-long bus rides to and from the mountains — as well as the challenges of their first backpacking trips and their gratitude for Lindros’ help overcoming them.
“It was like learning how to be a more well-rounded adult masquerading as a camping trip,” joked Jeff Vallee, who started backpacking with Lindros 36 years ago, when he was 10.
“Not too many 10-year-olds think they could cross a mountain range with everything on their back,” Vallee added. “But when they descend the trail into Yosemite Valley, they have a confidence and lessons learned that you cannot teach — it’s learned by doing.”
A nearly full moon crested a hill as the bus approached the school. Some in the crowd began singing Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” — replacing “West Virginia” in the lyrics with “San Diego” — while others cheered and hoisted signs with lyrics or Lindros quotes like “We’re going up.”
“He had all these spirit-raising things to say to help people find their true selves,” said Scott Rinehart, who succeeded Lindros as Poway Backpackers’ program director.
After 32 years of taking local students backpacking through the Sierras, Lindros ed the torch to Rinehart, a former student at Meadowbrook Middle School. To Rinehart, Lindros “was my dad — not by blood, but just by the time and love that he gave to me.”
The bond they had extended far past the sixth and seventh grades. Lindros even flew Rinehart to college at Sonoma State University in his own airplane.
“I don’t even know if I would have known what the wilderness was without him,” Rinehart said. “It’s been my home, really, every summer since I was 12 years old.”
Although the school bus that Lindros once drove kids to the mountains in has since been upgraded to a charter bus, Rinehart has otherwise kept the program the same. Since he took over, the program has helped thousands more youth start backpacking.
“He had such a profound impact on my life and who I became as an individual that I had to figure out a way to (give back), and that’s why I do it,” he added.
Larry Ott says the outdoors — especially the Sierra Nevada — was the perfect classroom for Lindros to teach lessons that have lasting impact for his students of all ages.
In lieu of flowers, the Lindros family has established a scholarship fund in Eddie’s honor. Donations can be made at powaybackpackers.com/payments.
