Christina O'Connor | Special to The Roanoke Times

Fred Coughlan (yellow coat) and first-time trail builder Anita Finkle work with other members of the Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club to repair the Appalachian Trail at McAfee’s Knob, weathering the sleet and ice.

Want to go?

• What: Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club Work Hike
• When: Feb. 18
• Where: Sawtooth Ridge on Catawba Mountain
• Contact: Maurice Turner at 344-2128

On a cold Sunday morning, Charles Parry woke up early, at 6:20. He looked outside the back deck of his home atop Brush Mountain in Montgomery County.

Snow fell.

"That might kill it," he said.

Parry, a trail supervisor for the Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club, scheduled his monthly work hike on Catawba Mountain that Jan. 21 morning. He planned to plant water bars, dig up rocks and clean up parts of McAfee Knob that tend to get waterlogged on rainy days.

That is, if the weather would cooperate. "You sort of take your chances at this time of year," he said.

When daylight came, he went up the road in his beat-up Toyota to pick up the newspaper. The forecast: snow.

He decided then -- should he stay or should he go -- that he, and the club, "might as well go and give it a whirl."

The Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club hosts weekly hikes and a monthly work hike. Parry, a Virginia Tech mathematics professor, often leads the work hikes with a co-leader in Roanoke. He is 64, or "2 to the sixth power" as he likes to say, and physically fit. Parry has been trail supervisor of the 117-mile section the club oversees in Southwest Virginia for 28 years. He averages about 300 hours of trail maintenance a year.

A bout of bad weather, which closed schools the next day, would not stop him. He didn't want to cancel the work hike. So he drove to the Catawba Mountain parking lot and hoped a good crowd of volunteers would show.

"Good morning, Charles," his co-leader, Laurie Adkins of Fincastle, said when he arrived at 8:45 a.m. "So, we're going to do some ..."

"Yeah," Parry responded. "We'll try."

White specks of snow fell. Good thing, Parry thought, it wasn't rain or ice. That would wet the hikers and make the roads hard to get home.

Nine people showed. Some of them were longtime hikers while others wanted to log in volunteer hours.

Parry took the group up Catawba Mountain and looked for spots to place some timbers. He wanted to plant water bars, which push the rain to the side of the hill and do not flood it. He found three spots to plant timbers.

At 10 a.m., it stopped snowing. Rain commenced. It sizzled like water hitting fire.

Club volunteers busily dug rectangular holes into the ground to fit the 8-foot-long timbers.

At 10:15 a.m., they were done. Parry walked up to his truck to load up the tools to drive to the next site up the road. He noticed the windshield and windows turned to frost. There wasn't much time left, he thought.

He drove up the road and found a spot where the group could plant the remaining timbers. The rain turned hard and fell down in strips of ice. It was sleet.

"Let's put in the other one," Parry said after one group of volunteers fixed a timber into the ground. "Let's not worry too hard. The weather's not so good."

At 10:30 a.m, they finished. They drove up to the parking lot, and Parry addressed the group.

"Sorry we didn't have good weather," he said. "But those are the breaks."

Parry wanted to move a bunch of rocks and boulders on the trail, but the weather didn't allow it.

He brought five timbers with him to the site. Three were used for water bars. Two for a check step and a check dam.

It wasn't quite what he planned. But at least he didn't have to unload the timbers that night.

He said he'd likely try the rest of the work-- moving rocks, clearing brush along McAfee Knob -- in March.

Maybe then, he figures, the weather would cooperate.