KTA Board Nomination: Ben Cramer

​Ben Cramer has hiked more than 4,000 miles on Pennsylvania hiking trails and has completed many of the state’s major backpacking trails multiple times. He has been a lifetime member of KTA since 2000 and served as editor for the KTA book Pennsylvania Hiking Trails, 13th Edition in 2008. He has since written four point-by-point trail guidebooks: Guide to the Allegheny Front Trail (2014), Guide to the Quehanna Trail (2015), Guide to the Elk Trail (2015), and Hiking the Susquehannock Trail (2017). He recently embarked on a project to write the first-ever guidebook for the Donut Hole Trail. Cramer is also a volunteer maintainer on various segments of the Allegheny Front Trail, Quehanna Trail, and Susquehannock Trail System, and in 2016 he spearheaded an effort to rehabilitate and reopen the dilapidated North Link and South Link Trails in Potter County. He lives in State College and teaches at Penn State University, where one of his research specialties is the environmental impacts of advanced telecommunications networks.