Sunday, October 29, 2006
Trail of change along the East Coast shapes AT
When the AT was finished in 1937, much of it was on private property. Today, 99.6 percent of the trail is in public ownership.
Sam Dean | The Roanoke Times
A roadside sign marks the Appalachian Trail.
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The Appalachian National Scenic Trail is a 2,175-mile footpath through the Appalachian Mountains between Mount Katahdin, Maine, and Springer Mountain, Ga.
Benton MacKaye , a forester, conceived the “AT” in 1921 as a footpath linking a series of mountain camps where people could escape the East’s industrialized cities and renew themselves in nature.
After an initial organizational meeting in 1925, the idea languished until the late 1920s when Arthur Perkins, a retired judge, and Myron Avery, an admiralty lawyer, took charge of the project.
They plotted routes, enlisted government agencies and recruited volunteers from the growing number of Americans interested in “tramping” and forest conservation.
Avery saw the AT primarily as a footpath for hikers and outdoorsmen, which differed from MacKaye’s vision of the trail as communal utopia focusing on wilderness preservation.
Avery’s pragmatic approach alienated MacKaye — they stopped speaking to each other — and MacKaye disassociated himself from the AT and later helped establish the Wilderness Society.
Hiking lore portrays Avery as a Bunyon esque figure whose volunteer corps blazed a path through 2,000 miles of dense wilderness, leaving a trail as wide as their ax handles.
In fact, some rugged sections in Virginia, Maine and elsewhere were cleared by axes, but more often Avery and his followers took the path of least resistance.
They connected some existing trails, and in uncharted areas they walked the natural lay of the land, rolling a measuring wheel, painting white blazes on trees and letting hikers’ footfalls beat down an actual path.
That approach eventually led to erosion, which was later corrected by trail construction, maintenance and relocation on more stable ground as the number of hikers skyrocketed over the decades.
The trail was completed in 1937, a monument to American volunteerism, but much of it was on private property and busy roads between national parks, national forests and state and local parks.
The trail fell into disrepair during World War II. It was resurrected afterward, but many sections had to be relocated because of the post war boom in housing developments and highways encroaching into the countryside.
The AT was designated as America’s first National Scenic Trail by the National Trails System Act of 1968.
An amendment to the act, the Appalachian Trail Bill, was signed in 1978, authorizing more federal funds to acquire lands for a protective buffer along the trail.
In 1984, the U.S. Department of the Interior gave responsibility for managing the AT to the Appalachian Trail Conference, which changed its name to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy in 2005.
Today, nearly all of the private property along the trail has been bought or donated — a small amount was condemned — putting 99.6 percent, or all but seven miles, of the AT in public ownership.
The trail is about 2 feet wide and crosses all the major elevation, latitude and ecological zones of the eastern United States. The trail corridor averages 1,000 feet wide, but its narrowest points are less than 100 feet wide.
The AT is administered by the National Park Service in a unique public-private partnership with the non profit Appalachian Trail Conservancy, the U.S. Forest Service and the 14 states the trail crosses.
The trail is managed by the ATC, whose volunteers devote thousands of hours a year to clearing brush, rebuilding trails, controlling erosion and other maintenance.
