Pony Express: A Step-by-Step Guide : History: With his five-month trek, Joe Nardone of Laguna Hills becomes first to walk nearly 2,000-mile famed route in its entirety.

By his account, Laguna Hills historian Joe Nardone logged nearly 2,000 miles, 15 blisters and five rattlesnake encounters in the five months it took him to walk from St. Joseph, Mo., to San Francisco, retracing the fabled Pony Express trail.

On Friday, the 53-year-old retired real estate agent became the first person to walk the trail in its entirety, according to the Sacramento-based Pony Express Assn.

“Now that it’s done, I feel relieved,” he said Friday before boarding the Oakland ferry that would transport him to the final five blocks leading him to the Montgomery and Merchant streets terminus of the historic trail.

“I have so much to do that I’m glad this journey is over so I can get to it.”

Nardone started his adventure on April 3 at the former Pony Express headquarters in St. Joseph, Mo., where the trail and the short-lived business had started 134 years ago that day.

From there, he walked the length of the trail that riders on horseback used to deliver mail from April, 1860, to November, 1861.

Nardone said he has been fortunate to have the time and freedom to pursue his dream.

In 1971, he moved from Chicago to Costa Mesa and later to Laguna Hills. At first, he operated a flight school at what is now John Wayne Airport and, in 1976, switched to selling residential real estate.

When Nardone, a bachelor, retired in 1982, “I could do pretty much what I wanted to do,” which meant devoting himself to study of the Pony Express trail. “I was really lucky.”

On his most recent trek, he was backed up by a one friend in a van, walking an average 20 miles per day through rain and snow, crossing creeks by canoe and bays by ferry. Along the way, he put monuments at six station sites and gave 28 lectures on the trail’s history.

The story of the Pony Express has been greatly embellished over the years, like a lot of Western history, Nardone said in a telephone interview from Oakland.

As with the modern Federal Express, the aim of the company was to take high-end delivery from the U.S. Postal Service, which had contracted to a stage coach company, the Overland Mail Co. Delivery of a letter on the Pony Express cost $5 per half ounce, the equivalent of $80 in today’s dollars, Nardone said.

“I doubt there were very many love letters at that price,” Nardone said.

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Most of the company’s customers were wealthy business correspondents and news organizations, he said. The Japanese government used the service to send messages that arrived by sea in San Francisco to their embassy in Washington.

And while the service lasted less than two years, it was never expected to survive completion of the transcontinental telegraph or, nearly a decade later, the transcontinental railroad.

The fabled speed of delivery--10 days from St. Joseph to San Francisco--was only reached six times, he said. The average was 12 days. To achieve that mark, riders probably moved at a lope, rather than a gallop, Hollywood versions notwithstanding.

“They were not not really going that ‘hellbent for leather,’ ” Nardone said. “They did get the mail through, and their tenacity in doing that was outstanding.”

Similarly, the movie version of riding into the stations and practically jumping from a tired mount to a fresh one “wasn’t really done much of the time,” he said. “More likely, they came into the station for a bite to eat.”

Despite its danger, there were few reported deaths among the riders, whose average age was 22. One was killed during a war with Native Americans; another froze to death in a Nebraska snowstorm.

Now that Nardone’s trek is over, he doesn’t plan to take a break from his obsession with the trail and its history. He said he plans to return to Orange County next week, where the first thing he will do is sit down at his computer to complete a wall map and book about the trail that he has been working on for years.

Nardone’s fascination with the West and its history goes back to his childhood. His father was a history professor, but he preferred to see historic sites himself, rather than reading about them, he said.

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He decided to do an in-depth study of the Pony Express trail 11 years ago when he realized that books and pamphlets on its history were full of undocumented and romanticized information.

“I love to be able to dig and do research,” he said. “I found a bunch of errors.”

Another of the misconceptions that he wanted to clear up is the actual end point of the trail.

Many historians say the trail began in St. Joseph and ended in Sacramento, where riders put the mail on a ferry to San Francisco. Nardone contends it actually ended in San Francisco, because on 19 occasions, the riders missed the ferry and completed the route on horseback.

That is just one piece of controversial information he said he has uncovered during more than 22,500 hours of research on the route, the riders and the schedules. He has scrutinized aerial maps and newspaper clippings and even rode the length on horseback in 1991 and traveled it once by car in 1992.

Nardone said he knows it “like the back of my hand,” and next year plans to lead a small car caravan.

Nardone acknowledges his single-mindedness about the topic is unusual. He tells the story about an encounter with a farmer in Kansas who, after chatting politely for a few moments on the way, cut to the question foremost in his mind.

“So, don’t you have anything better to do with your time?” the farmer asked.

Nardone replied that he was one of those rare people in this world who have the courage to pursue their dreams, no matter how strange. That, alone, made it worthwhile, he reasoned.

Besides, he added, “I wanted the credibility of being more than an armchair historian. I wanted to go out there to get the sense of the trail, the feel. For that, it worked.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report.