Smoky Mountains Exploring Sister Park Relationship with New Icelandic Park

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The Alcoa Foundation has just announced that it is providing grants to Friends of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and The American-Scandinavian Foundation (ASF) to launch a two-year Icelandic National Parks Training Program, which helps promote and protect national parks and reserves throughout Iceland. The program is designed to develop the capacity of Icelanders working on the development, management, and conservation of Iceland’s national parks—both park staff and employees of partner organizations. Fourteen Icelanders have been selected to participate in two study programs; both will be held in the United States.

The fourteen training fellows will receive classroom instruction on topics such as managing natural resources and building partnerships, while also observing and interacting with staff at several national parks in the United States. They will return with management skills and peer networks for conservation and park development. The fall 2012 training session will be held near Washington, D.C., and the spring 2013 session will be held in Washington State and Oregon.

Alcoa Foundation is funding the program through grants of $40,000 to Friends of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and $112,000 to ASF. Friends of the Smokies raises funds and provides volunteer support to help preserve and protect Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Friends of the Smokies has previously consulted on the creation of the Friends of Vatnajokull group, and the two national parks are considering a possible sister park arrangement to guide future interaction.

ASF is a publicly supported nonprofit organization that promotes international understanding through educational and cultural exchange between the United States and the five Nordic countries. Other key program partners include the U.S. National Park Service Office of International Affairs and the Association of Partners for Public Lands.

The fourteen Icelanders selected for the training include eight park rangers from Iceland’s national parks—two from Thingvellir near the capital of Reykjavik, one from Snaefellsjokull in Western Iceland, and five from the vast Vatnajokull National Park in Eastern Iceland. Other fellows represent a mixture of agencies and non-profit organizations, including the Environmental Agency of Iceland, Friends of Vatnajokull, the Icelandic Search and Rescue Association, the Icelandic Tourist Board, and the Northeast Nature Center.

Three national parks have been established in Iceland: Thingvellir National Park that was declared a UNESCO world heritage site in 1972, Snaefellsjokull National Park, and Vatnajokull National Park, which is Iceland’s newest national park and also the largest national park in Europe. Together they contribute to safeguarding important wildlife, geological formations, ecosystem services, and outdoor recreation.





Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

Snowed in today? Drive the 'Digital Blue Ridge Parkway'

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It snowed a couple inches overnight up here at 3,100 feet -- not nearly enough to snow anyone in  -- but for those who appreciate the Blue Ridge Parkway yet can't get there as often as they'd like, there's good news: Anne Mitchell Whisnant has done it again.  The author of "Super Scenic Motorway," a myth-busting history of the parkway published in 2006 by UNC Press, and, with David Whisnant' "When the Parkway Came," a 2010  children's book that adults will also appreciate, Whisnant has collaborated with libraries at UNC-Chapel Hill, the N.C. State Archives and the National Park Service's Blue Ridge Parkway, among others, to produce an online digital history with maps, photographs and satellite view of the region through which the Blue Ridge Parkway runs.





  Like her previous works, the new project is reflective of her meticulous approach to what many of us believe qualifies as a modern wonder of the world. It's called "Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway."

In a note she sent the other day, Whisnant said, "Although the grant funding for site development has ended, we will be continuing throughout spring to publish  more and more of the NC digital photos online, as well as creating more and more interactive, georeferenced maps.  As we can, we will also be adding more of the short narrative essays we call “overlooks”.

Here's part of a news release from UNC:

The history of the Blue Ridge Parkway, America’s most visited National Park System site, is now online. The new collection, “Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina,” was created through a collaborative project based at the library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Driving Through Time,” available at http://docsouth.unc.edu/blueridgeparkway/, presents photographs, maps, news articles, oral histories and essays documenting development and construction of the parkway’s North Carolina segment. The site invites users to explore parkway history chronologically, geographically or by dozens of topics from access roads and automobiles to wildlife and workmen. An interactive maps feature layers historical maps atop current road maps and satellite images. The comparisons provide insight into the parkway’s development and its impact on pre-parkway towns, farms, roads and topography. The 469-mile parkway radically altered the landscape of 29 Virginia and North Carolina counties when it was built between 1934 and 1987, and its construction sparked intense controversy, said Anne Mitchell Whisnant, adjunct associate professor of history at UNC and the project’s scholarly adviser. Whisnant, author of the parkway history “Super-Scenic Motorway” (UNC Press, 2006) and the children’s book “When the Parkway Came” (Primary Source Publishers, 2010), was often frustrated as she combed archives and historic documents and tried to translate conflicts about routing and land rights into words. “I found myself thinking, ‘If only I could see and show what and where they’re talking about, it would be so much easier to explain the arguments,’” she said. “‘Driving Through Time’ makes the park’s history visible and accessible to historians, planners, local communities, landowners and anyone who wants to know more about this American landmark.” At the heart of the project are thousands of items from three institutions that collaborated to create the site: The Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC; the Blue Ridge Parkway headquarters (a division of the National Park Service, located in Asheville); and the North Carolina State Archives. Materials in the online collection include: Historic photographs showing construction of the parkway and images of communities it passed through; Maps depicting private land parcels purchased for the parkway, proposed alternate routes, landscape planning and the completed parkway; Letters and documents pertaining to the community of Little Switzerland in McDowell and Mitchell counties, which sued the parkway; Oral histories from parkway designers and laborers; Images by the late N.C. photographer Hugh Morton, depicting the parkway as it passed Grandfather Mountain, which he owned. Eleven essays share more insight into the building of the parkway and its impact. Whisnant and her students wrote about issues including competition between the tourism and logging industries, the parkway’s impact on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and selection of the parkway route.  Also included are K-12 lesson plans that faculty from the School of Education developed to help students use the site’s extensive primary source materials and interpretive essays. “Driving Through Time” was made possible by a $150,000 grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services under provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, as administered by the State Library of North Carolina.

There's just one hitch...

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When it snowed a couple of inches the other night, it reminded me of a chore I'd been putting off for months: hooking up the big scrape blade to the back of the tractor.The tractor was still attached to an old Haban sickle bar mower -- too short to get at all the vile-tempered briars growing along the banks of our creek but better than any of the bush-hog brutes we've got to help keep the foliage down and the fields open. So I had put off what needed to be done.

I'm the hired hand on this old farm and I've been fighting tractor hitches just long enough to have an appreciation for the mule. Nope, never plowed with a mule, but the notion of an uncooperative, stubborn, recalcitrant, mind-of-its-own beast adequately describes my view of the three-point hitch. Shoot, just getting an implement unhooked from the tractor hitch can consume more time, effort and strength than you might have for the remainder of the day.

Or used to, anyway, until I traded in two old, leaky, shackley underpowered tractors that would barely pull some of the steep hills we have up here at 3,100 feet elevation. A fellow clued me in to part of the problem -- the two lift arms on each of the old tractors weren't adjustable,  and thus all manner of levering, banging around with a nine-pound hammer and cussing in the style of a stevedore on steroids was part of any change from, say, a finish mower to a box blade. It will wear you out.

A word about three-point hitches: They're far safer than the hitches many farmers used in the early days of tractors. I've written about this before: The three-point hitch was developed by Irishman Harry Ferguson in 1926 after the British government asked him to develop a system to prevent tractor accidents caused by plows catching on rocks.

"The plow would halt but the tractor would attempt to keep going – and with the large rear wheels’ axle serving as a fulcrum, the tractor would rear up and flip over backward, killing or maiming the driver. 
Ferguson came up with the three-point hitch, a sort of A-frame shaped connection whose two lower bars would provide stability and whose top bar would apply forward pressure, keeping a tractor from flipping back when a plow hung up on a rock. He also developed the hydraulic lifters that allowed the driver to pick up the plow or bush hog it was towing. That made turning or getting to and from the fields a lot easier."  Ferguson years later became the Ferguson in Massey Ferguson Tractors.

Yesterday the wind was screaming and the mercury around 30 when I finally fetched up the grit to go out and unhook the sickle bar mower and put on the scrape blade.  We're having a relatively mild winter, but I keep remembering two years ago when there was snow and ice on the ground from early December to the first week of April, and there was no way to move that stuff around once it froze.


This time it was almost pleasant. The picture at left, pulled from a website called TractorByNet, shows part of the solution.  After I finally learned how to extend the lift arms by pulling a clip and a clevis pin on each side, the old mower miraculously slid right off the now-loosened lift arms and settled onto a couple of six-inch beam cutoffs that keep the thing out of the dirt.  It's a lot easier to slide off the power take off (PTO) link, the devilish device that transfers engine power to the farm implement you're trying to attach, than it is to put it on. Detaching the top link is a simple matter of backing off on a threaded sleeve.  And hooking up the heavy-duty scrape blade was just about as easy, especially with no PTO to reattach.  I was done in about 10 minutes, a new world record for an aging, arthritic farmhand with too much newsroom experience and not enough farmland savvy.

I wrote about three-point hitches nearly five years ago for a newspaper blog I was putting out at the time. Shortly after it appeared, I got a nice note from a Raleigh lobbyist for agricultural interests. In part it read:

"Once you master the PTO, you can move up to the manure spreader!"

Several ways to take that, of course, but I decided it was a compliment. At my age you got to take them any way you can get 'em. Let it snow.

A hoarder's story

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Woodworkers are among the worst hoarders. It's a character flaw, but there it is.  Among my conceits is the idea that one day I'll know enough about joinery and dovetails and turning and planing to make museum quality stuff from the wood I've been hoarding for decades.

 And so I hang on to the walnut coffee table top I made in 8th grade shop class, the heart pine door panels that came out of a Greensboro house William Sidney Porter (O. Henry) played in as a child, the burl, if I can still find it, said to have been cut from a tree where they hanged one of Mosby's Rangers in 1864, the rough-cut walnut from a Wake County tree bought by four college friends in 1977, the cherry that my father-in-law and I rounded up somewhere the other side of Willis back in the 1980s, the mahogany that came as part of a pallet made somewhere in South or Central America and discarded by a dealer after arrival of some gizmo or other. Even the mahogany cutoffs from a Raleigh billiards table maker.  And I always regretted not having bought some of the old maple floor from UNC's Woolen Gym, the same floor where Lennie Rosenbluth and Tommy Kearns won a lot of the 32 games they took in that 1957 run to the national championship.

But the thing that made me feel rich was the 2,500 board feet of clear Southern Yellow Pine that I got from a Chatham County, N.C. mill after a foulup over a botched order of flooring back in 2007. We were building a log home then, and had ordered pre-finished pine flooring, six inches wide with tongue and groove edges. The builder was putting it in the first week of December that year, and I was sitting in a State Board of Community Colleges meeting when the cell phone beeped with the bad news: the tongue sat a couple of hundredths of an inch higher than the groove, which meant that the flooring would not fit together in a smooth way. In fact, it would tend to rock as it dried out. It was a mess.

Long story short, that batch of flooring went back to the factory, which could not deliver a new batch for weeks.  In a sweat, we found locally-produced oak flooring in Hillsville and the contractor went on to install that.  I didn't find out until much later that the oak flooring had a similar problem, and had to be ripped out after half a room was done, to be replaced with proper flooring. When that (third) floor was finally down, it was lovely, exquisite, perfect.  And it stayed perfect for several weeks, until the appliance store tried to roll a refrigerator with a frozen caster across the floor and etched an interesting pattern in the wood. Duck fits ensued. But that's another story.

What I wound up with was some lovely 12-foot and 16-foot lengths of 1x8 Southern Yellow Pine that the mill in Chatham County sent me in exchange for the bad flooring. Mostly straight and mostly smooth, it looked mighty good. I built pantry shelves with some of it, and bookshelves in the great room with more of it. Looked fine right up until lightning struck and made a big pile of ashes and rubble in June 2010.



We've rebuilt, and my winter project this year was replacing the bookshelves. I started on the side away from the stereo system and TV and about two dozen kinds of wires that looked too complicated to even think about for awhile. Once the easy side was done, I started labeling the wires and running speaker cable beneath the floor and figuring out which speaker was going to go where. And instead of shelves that went to the floor, that side had to have a base cabinet large enough to house a receiver, CD player, Blu-Ray player and set-top box, plus a lot of CDs and the subwoofer, and hold the flat-screen TV at the proper height.

For a couple weeks I did nothing more than turn 1x8 boards into 1x18 inch boards, for cabinet sides, shelves and top.  I used every clamp in the shop and quite a bit of Gorilla Glue, and then a good-sized batch of 3x21 belts and six-hole oscillating sandpaper discs trying to get everything flat, or at least reasonably smooth.

It all came together about 10 days ago, and since then has soaked up a couple cans of hand-rubbed satin finish.  For a batch of botched flooring, these shelves and cabinet look pretty good. But you still can't walk on 'em, nosireebob.

Now, if I could just find a couple boxes of missing books....

Spring's slick snow job

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There's a reason folks up here atop the mountain advise against planting flowers or vegetables much before sometime in May.  You only have to look out the window to see why: it's snowing sideways, with fat flakes screaming along out of the northwest here on the, what, 32nd or 33rd day of Spring? The temps are in the low 40s, the wind has been howling a couple days and it looks like late January or early February, except that the trees have little leaves on them. Or did when this blow started.

About a month ago, there were a lot of daffodils and various other bulbs pushing up and blooming. Then a Saturday afternoon hailstorm shredded the blossoms, made salad out of the leaves and stripped even our tough old mountain laurels of leaves that had been there since, I don't know, the first Mills Godwin administration.  Perhaps I exaggerate.  But that storm was nasty.

Today's is nasty and cold. We hardly had a fire in March because the weather was so warm; I've fetched firewood five times from the woodlot down by the barn in the last couple days, and it looks like I've got four more trips ahead of me before we return to Spring in another day or so.

Should have known, of course, but we got spoiled by the mild weather. Driving down Belcher Mountain Road the other day I spotted the first firepinks, some impossibly red little starburst blooms near a burned-out shell of a house.  And I succumbed to the allure of some bright blooming rhododendron over at Felecia Shelor's Poor Farmers Market. I filled up the back of my pickup truck with five-gallon tubs of those beauties; now they're huddled against the wind at the back of the garage, shivering in the gale and looking doubtful about life up here on the ridgetop.

We'll look back with fondness at days like this in July, when the sun's out and flogging the daylights out of our hides while we scrabble at the weeds in the tomato patch or something,  but right now it seems like light-years away.  A man's got to believe in something, and I believe I will go fetch another cup of coffee and maybe a dollop of that snakebite potion we keep around for emergencies.  You just never know up here.

There's just one hitch...

To contact us Click HERE
When it snowed a couple of inches the other night, it reminded me of a chore I'd been putting off for months: hooking up the big scrape blade to the back of the tractor.The tractor was still attached to an old Haban sickle bar mower -- too short to get at all the vile-tempered briars growing along the banks of our creek but better than any of the bush-hog brutes we've got to help keep the foliage down and the fields open. So I had put off what needed to be done.

I'm the hired hand on this old farm and I've been fighting tractor hitches just long enough to have an appreciation for the mule. Nope, never plowed with a mule, but the notion of an uncooperative, stubborn, recalcitrant, mind-of-its-own beast adequately describes my view of the three-point hitch. Shoot, just getting an implement unhooked from the tractor hitch can consume more time, effort and strength than you might have for the remainder of the day.

Or used to, anyway, until I traded in two old, leaky, shackley underpowered tractors that would barely pull some of the steep hills we have up here at 3,100 feet elevation. A fellow clued me in to part of the problem -- the two lift arms on each of the old tractors weren't adjustable,  and thus all manner of levering, banging around with a nine-pound hammer and cussing in the style of a stevedore on steroids was part of any change from, say, a finish mower to a box blade. It will wear you out.

A word about three-point hitches: They're far safer than the hitches many farmers used in the early days of tractors. I've written about this before: The three-point hitch was developed by Irishman Harry Ferguson in 1926 after the British government asked him to develop a system to prevent tractor accidents caused by plows catching on rocks.

"The plow would halt but the tractor would attempt to keep going – and with the large rear wheels’ axle serving as a fulcrum, the tractor would rear up and flip over backward, killing or maiming the driver. 
Ferguson came up with the three-point hitch, a sort of A-frame shaped connection whose two lower bars would provide stability and whose top bar would apply forward pressure, keeping a tractor from flipping back when a plow hung up on a rock. He also developed the hydraulic lifters that allowed the driver to pick up the plow or bush hog it was towing. That made turning or getting to and from the fields a lot easier."  Ferguson years later became the Ferguson in Massey Ferguson Tractors.

Yesterday the wind was screaming and the mercury around 30 when I finally fetched up the grit to go out and unhook the sickle bar mower and put on the scrape blade.  We're having a relatively mild winter, but I keep remembering two years ago when there was snow and ice on the ground from early December to the first week of April, and there was no way to move that stuff around once it froze.


This time it was almost pleasant. The picture at left, pulled from a website called TractorByNet, shows part of the solution.  After I finally learned how to extend the lift arms by pulling a clip and a clevis pin on each side, the old mower miraculously slid right off the now-loosened lift arms and settled onto a couple of six-inch beam cutoffs that keep the thing out of the dirt.  It's a lot easier to slide off the power take off (PTO) link, the devilish device that transfers engine power to the farm implement you're trying to attach, than it is to put it on. Detaching the top link is a simple matter of backing off on a threaded sleeve.  And hooking up the heavy-duty scrape blade was just about as easy, especially with no PTO to reattach.  I was done in about 10 minutes, a new world record for an aging, arthritic farmhand with too much newsroom experience and not enough farmland savvy.

I wrote about three-point hitches nearly five years ago for a newspaper blog I was putting out at the time. Shortly after it appeared, I got a nice note from a Raleigh lobbyist for agricultural interests. In part it read:

"Once you master the PTO, you can move up to the manure spreader!"

Several ways to take that, of course, but I decided it was a compliment. At my age you got to take them any way you can get 'em. Let it snow.

A hoarder's story

To contact us Click HERE
Woodworkers are among the worst hoarders. It's a character flaw, but there it is.  Among my conceits is the idea that one day I'll know enough about joinery and dovetails and turning and planing to make museum quality stuff from the wood I've been hoarding for decades.

 And so I hang on to the walnut coffee table top I made in 8th grade shop class, the heart pine door panels that came out of a Greensboro house William Sidney Porter (O. Henry) played in as a child, the burl, if I can still find it, said to have been cut from a tree where they hanged one of Mosby's Rangers in 1864, the rough-cut walnut from a Wake County tree bought by four college friends in 1977, the cherry that my father-in-law and I rounded up somewhere the other side of Willis back in the 1980s, the mahogany that came as part of a pallet made somewhere in South or Central America and discarded by a dealer after arrival of some gizmo or other. Even the mahogany cutoffs from a Raleigh billiards table maker.  And I always regretted not having bought some of the old maple floor from UNC's Woolen Gym, the same floor where Lennie Rosenbluth and Tommy Kearns won a lot of the 32 games they took in that 1957 run to the national championship.

But the thing that made me feel rich was the 2,500 board feet of clear Southern Yellow Pine that I got from a Chatham County, N.C. mill after a foulup over a botched order of flooring back in 2007. We were building a log home then, and had ordered pre-finished pine flooring, six inches wide with tongue and groove edges. The builder was putting it in the first week of December that year, and I was sitting in a State Board of Community Colleges meeting when the cell phone beeped with the bad news: the tongue sat a couple of hundredths of an inch higher than the groove, which meant that the flooring would not fit together in a smooth way. In fact, it would tend to rock as it dried out. It was a mess.

Long story short, that batch of flooring went back to the factory, which could not deliver a new batch for weeks.  In a sweat, we found locally-produced oak flooring in Hillsville and the contractor went on to install that.  I didn't find out until much later that the oak flooring had a similar problem, and had to be ripped out after half a room was done, to be replaced with proper flooring. When that (third) floor was finally down, it was lovely, exquisite, perfect.  And it stayed perfect for several weeks, until the appliance store tried to roll a refrigerator with a frozen caster across the floor and etched an interesting pattern in the wood. Duck fits ensued. But that's another story.

What I wound up with was some lovely 12-foot and 16-foot lengths of 1x8 Southern Yellow Pine that the mill in Chatham County sent me in exchange for the bad flooring. Mostly straight and mostly smooth, it looked mighty good. I built pantry shelves with some of it, and bookshelves in the great room with more of it. Looked fine right up until lightning struck and made a big pile of ashes and rubble in June 2010.



We've rebuilt, and my winter project this year was replacing the bookshelves. I started on the side away from the stereo system and TV and about two dozen kinds of wires that looked too complicated to even think about for awhile. Once the easy side was done, I started labeling the wires and running speaker cable beneath the floor and figuring out which speaker was going to go where. And instead of shelves that went to the floor, that side had to have a base cabinet large enough to house a receiver, CD player, Blu-Ray player and set-top box, plus a lot of CDs and the subwoofer, and hold the flat-screen TV at the proper height.

For a couple weeks I did nothing more than turn 1x8 boards into 1x18 inch boards, for cabinet sides, shelves and top.  I used every clamp in the shop and quite a bit of Gorilla Glue, and then a good-sized batch of 3x21 belts and six-hole oscillating sandpaper discs trying to get everything flat, or at least reasonably smooth.

It all came together about 10 days ago, and since then has soaked up a couple cans of hand-rubbed satin finish.  For a batch of botched flooring, these shelves and cabinet look pretty good. But you still can't walk on 'em, nosireebob.

Now, if I could just find a couple boxes of missing books....

Spring's slick snow job

To contact us Click HERE
There's a reason folks up here atop the mountain advise against planting flowers or vegetables much before sometime in May.  You only have to look out the window to see why: it's snowing sideways, with fat flakes screaming along out of the northwest here on the, what, 32nd or 33rd day of Spring? The temps are in the low 40s, the wind has been howling a couple days and it looks like late January or early February, except that the trees have little leaves on them. Or did when this blow started.

About a month ago, there were a lot of daffodils and various other bulbs pushing up and blooming. Then a Saturday afternoon hailstorm shredded the blossoms, made salad out of the leaves and stripped even our tough old mountain laurels of leaves that had been there since, I don't know, the first Mills Godwin administration.  Perhaps I exaggerate.  But that storm was nasty.

Today's is nasty and cold. We hardly had a fire in March because the weather was so warm; I've fetched firewood five times from the woodlot down by the barn in the last couple days, and it looks like I've got four more trips ahead of me before we return to Spring in another day or so.

Should have known, of course, but we got spoiled by the mild weather. Driving down Belcher Mountain Road the other day I spotted the first firepinks, some impossibly red little starburst blooms near a burned-out shell of a house.  And I succumbed to the allure of some bright blooming rhododendron over at Felecia Shelor's Poor Farmers Market. I filled up the back of my pickup truck with five-gallon tubs of those beauties; now they're huddled against the wind at the back of the garage, shivering in the gale and looking doubtful about life up here on the ridgetop.

We'll look back with fondness at days like this in July, when the sun's out and flogging the daylights out of our hides while we scrabble at the weeds in the tomato patch or something,  but right now it seems like light-years away.  A man's got to believe in something, and I believe I will go fetch another cup of coffee and maybe a dollop of that snakebite potion we keep around for emergencies.  You just never know up here.

New Report Finds Annual Spending on Outdoor Recreation Reaches $646 Billion, Employs 6.1 Million

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A report released last week by the Outdoor Industry Association® (OIA) shows that outdoor recreation is a major economic driver in the United States — and one that has grown throughout the recession. According to The Outdoor Recreation Economy report, more than 140 million Americans engage in outdoor activities each year, directly delivering $646 billion to the economy and supporting 6.1 million domestic jobs.

This new study reinforces what the outdoor industry has known for a long time — outdoor recreation is a larger and more critical sector of the American economy than most people realize.

The outdoor recreation economy is responsible for:

* 6.1 million direct American jobs
* $646 billion in direct consumer spending
* $39.9 billion in federal tax revenue
* $39.7 billion in state/local tax revenue

“During a time when some American industries are struggling, we are seeing solid growth,” said Will Manzer, CEO of Eastern Mountain Sports and chair of the OIA Board of Directors. “Since 2005, the outdoor recreation economy has grown approximately 5% annually. In fact, outdoor recreation supports a significant number of jobs, on par with — or, in some cases, more than — other sizeable American industries.”

America is recognized globally as the leader in outdoor recreation. CEOs from leading outdoor recreation companies are calling on policymakers to take action to promote this critical component of the American economy.

“Outdoor recreation directly fuels major sectors of the American economy like manufacturing, hospitality and transportation. Just like any other sector of the U.S. economy, outdoor recreation needs support to continue to thrive,” said Manzer.

“This is the definition of a win-win scenario,” said Frank Hugelmeyer, president and CEO of OIA. “In this country today, we’re battling an economic recession, a healthcare crisis, and we’re trying to create safe and sustainable places for families to live. The outdoor industry provides solutions for all of this. We need to come up with a strategy to protect the industry, its jobs and our customers.”

The outdoor industry can continue to be a growing jobs generator and an economic driver in the United States if parks, waters and trails are managed as a system designed to sustain these economic dividends for America.

For a full copy of the report, please click here.


Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

Mammoth Cave NP bans all fires north of Green River

To contact us Click HERE
Superintendent Patrick Reed announced today that the park has placed a temporary ban on all campfires in the backcountry, along the floodplains, and at Maple Spring Group Campground north of Green River.

"The National Weather Service issued a Special Weather Statement today regarding increased fire danger, and like most of our area, the park has not experienced significant rainfall for three weeks," said Reed. "To protect the park, we are instituting a ban on campfires along the floodplains and all of the park north of Green River."

The temporary ban includes all campfires in backcountry camping sites and the Maple Springs Group Campground. Canoeist who camp along the Nolin or Green River floodplains are also banned from lighting campfires.

"Campfires will still be permitted in the Mammoth Cave Campground and in the Houchin Ferry Campground," said Chief Ranger Brad McDougal. "This ban will remain in effect until there is a change in the current weather situation, such as a rise in relative humidity or sufficient rainfall to reduce the fire danger."


Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

Friends of Shenandoah Day: July 28, 2012

To contact us Click HERE
On Saturday, July 28, the Friends of Shenandoah will hold its Second Annual Friends of Shenandoah Day. This day of special hikes, ranger programs and entertainment is for Shenandoah National Park Trust members and their families. Activities overlap so you can choose what you like best. All activities are suitable for able-footed children or toddlers in backpacks.

For more information on all the events offered, please click here.


Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

Great Smoky Mountains on Late Night Radio

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Every now and then I have a hard time getting to sleep - for whatever reason. Last night was one of those nights. After getting a little bored with the topics being discussed on the national sports talk station, I searched the dial for something a little more interesting. I happened upon a discussion on missing persons in national parks.

The program was on Coast to Coast with George Knapp as the host. His guest for the night was David Paulides, a former lawman turned investigative journalist. With some of his research highlighted in a couple of recently published books, Paulides has collected more than 450 cases of mysterious and baffling disappearances in our national parks over the last several decades.

The first hour, already in progress when I joined-in, focussed on missing cases throughout the western parks. However, Paulides spent the next hour discussing three disappearances in the Great Smoky Mountains, with most of that time spent on Dennis Martin, the six-year-old boy who disappeared at Spence Field in 1969. Over the years the father of the boy apparently refused to speak about the disappearance anymore, but Paulides was granted an interview at the Martin home recently. Paulides presents some interesting information about the case that was never discussed in the local press, including a quite fantastic observation made by Harold Key. I didn't know this either, but there were 80 armed Green Beret Special Forces that took part in that search for Dennis, that ultimately came up empty handed.

The interview was timely in light of the two young men that mysteriously disappeared in the Smokies back in March - just days apart from each other.

Although his conclusions as to what may have happended in many of these disappearances seems a little far-fetched, the interview and the facts surrounding the cases are quite compelling. If you wish to listen to the interview, the complete program is available here for download on the Coast to Coast website. Paulides was also featured in a fairly in-depth article recently published on a Las Vegas TV website.


Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

Snowed in today? Drive the 'Digital Blue Ridge Parkway'

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It snowed a couple inches overnight up here at 3,100 feet -- not nearly enough to snow anyone in  -- but for those who appreciate the Blue Ridge Parkway yet can't get there as often as they'd like, there's good news: Anne Mitchell Whisnant has done it again.  The author of "Super Scenic Motorway," a myth-busting history of the parkway published in 2006 by UNC Press, and, with David Whisnant' "When the Parkway Came," a 2010  children's book that adults will also appreciate, Whisnant has collaborated with libraries at UNC-Chapel Hill, the N.C. State Archives and the National Park Service's Blue Ridge Parkway, among others, to produce an online digital history with maps, photographs and satellite view of the region through which the Blue Ridge Parkway runs.





  Like her previous works, the new project is reflective of her meticulous approach to what many of us believe qualifies as a modern wonder of the world. It's called "Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway."

In a note she sent the other day, Whisnant said, "Although the grant funding for site development has ended, we will be continuing throughout spring to publish  more and more of the NC digital photos online, as well as creating more and more interactive, georeferenced maps.  As we can, we will also be adding more of the short narrative essays we call “overlooks”.

Here's part of a news release from UNC:

The history of the Blue Ridge Parkway, America’s most visited National Park System site, is now online. The new collection, “Driving Through Time: The Digital Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina,” was created through a collaborative project based at the library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Driving Through Time,” available at http://docsouth.unc.edu/blueridgeparkway/, presents photographs, maps, news articles, oral histories and essays documenting development and construction of the parkway’s North Carolina segment. The site invites users to explore parkway history chronologically, geographically or by dozens of topics from access roads and automobiles to wildlife and workmen. An interactive maps feature layers historical maps atop current road maps and satellite images. The comparisons provide insight into the parkway’s development and its impact on pre-parkway towns, farms, roads and topography. The 469-mile parkway radically altered the landscape of 29 Virginia and North Carolina counties when it was built between 1934 and 1987, and its construction sparked intense controversy, said Anne Mitchell Whisnant, adjunct associate professor of history at UNC and the project’s scholarly adviser. Whisnant, author of the parkway history “Super-Scenic Motorway” (UNC Press, 2006) and the children’s book “When the Parkway Came” (Primary Source Publishers, 2010), was often frustrated as she combed archives and historic documents and tried to translate conflicts about routing and land rights into words. “I found myself thinking, ‘If only I could see and show what and where they’re talking about, it would be so much easier to explain the arguments,’” she said. “‘Driving Through Time’ makes the park’s history visible and accessible to historians, planners, local communities, landowners and anyone who wants to know more about this American landmark.” At the heart of the project are thousands of items from three institutions that collaborated to create the site: The Wilson Special Collections Library at UNC; the Blue Ridge Parkway headquarters (a division of the National Park Service, located in Asheville); and the North Carolina State Archives. Materials in the online collection include: Historic photographs showing construction of the parkway and images of communities it passed through; Maps depicting private land parcels purchased for the parkway, proposed alternate routes, landscape planning and the completed parkway; Letters and documents pertaining to the community of Little Switzerland in McDowell and Mitchell counties, which sued the parkway; Oral histories from parkway designers and laborers; Images by the late N.C. photographer Hugh Morton, depicting the parkway as it passed Grandfather Mountain, which he owned. Eleven essays share more insight into the building of the parkway and its impact. Whisnant and her students wrote about issues including competition between the tourism and logging industries, the parkway’s impact on the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and selection of the parkway route.  Also included are K-12 lesson plans that faculty from the School of Education developed to help students use the site’s extensive primary source materials and interpretive essays. “Driving Through Time” was made possible by a $150,000 grant from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services under provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act, as administered by the State Library of North Carolina.

There's just one hitch...

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When it snowed a couple of inches the other night, it reminded me of a chore I'd been putting off for months: hooking up the big scrape blade to the back of the tractor.The tractor was still attached to an old Haban sickle bar mower -- too short to get at all the vile-tempered briars growing along the banks of our creek but better than any of the bush-hog brutes we've got to help keep the foliage down and the fields open. So I had put off what needed to be done.

I'm the hired hand on this old farm and I've been fighting tractor hitches just long enough to have an appreciation for the mule. Nope, never plowed with a mule, but the notion of an uncooperative, stubborn, recalcitrant, mind-of-its-own beast adequately describes my view of the three-point hitch. Shoot, just getting an implement unhooked from the tractor hitch can consume more time, effort and strength than you might have for the remainder of the day.

Or used to, anyway, until I traded in two old, leaky, shackley underpowered tractors that would barely pull some of the steep hills we have up here at 3,100 feet elevation. A fellow clued me in to part of the problem -- the two lift arms on each of the old tractors weren't adjustable,  and thus all manner of levering, banging around with a nine-pound hammer and cussing in the style of a stevedore on steroids was part of any change from, say, a finish mower to a box blade. It will wear you out.

A word about three-point hitches: They're far safer than the hitches many farmers used in the early days of tractors. I've written about this before: The three-point hitch was developed by Irishman Harry Ferguson in 1926 after the British government asked him to develop a system to prevent tractor accidents caused by plows catching on rocks.

"The plow would halt but the tractor would attempt to keep going – and with the large rear wheels’ axle serving as a fulcrum, the tractor would rear up and flip over backward, killing or maiming the driver. 
Ferguson came up with the three-point hitch, a sort of A-frame shaped connection whose two lower bars would provide stability and whose top bar would apply forward pressure, keeping a tractor from flipping back when a plow hung up on a rock. He also developed the hydraulic lifters that allowed the driver to pick up the plow or bush hog it was towing. That made turning or getting to and from the fields a lot easier."  Ferguson years later became the Ferguson in Massey Ferguson Tractors.

Yesterday the wind was screaming and the mercury around 30 when I finally fetched up the grit to go out and unhook the sickle bar mower and put on the scrape blade.  We're having a relatively mild winter, but I keep remembering two years ago when there was snow and ice on the ground from early December to the first week of April, and there was no way to move that stuff around once it froze.


This time it was almost pleasant. The picture at left, pulled from a website called TractorByNet, shows part of the solution.  After I finally learned how to extend the lift arms by pulling a clip and a clevis pin on each side, the old mower miraculously slid right off the now-loosened lift arms and settled onto a couple of six-inch beam cutoffs that keep the thing out of the dirt.  It's a lot easier to slide off the power take off (PTO) link, the devilish device that transfers engine power to the farm implement you're trying to attach, than it is to put it on. Detaching the top link is a simple matter of backing off on a threaded sleeve.  And hooking up the heavy-duty scrape blade was just about as easy, especially with no PTO to reattach.  I was done in about 10 minutes, a new world record for an aging, arthritic farmhand with too much newsroom experience and not enough farmland savvy.

I wrote about three-point hitches nearly five years ago for a newspaper blog I was putting out at the time. Shortly after it appeared, I got a nice note from a Raleigh lobbyist for agricultural interests. In part it read:

"Once you master the PTO, you can move up to the manure spreader!"

Several ways to take that, of course, but I decided it was a compliment. At my age you got to take them any way you can get 'em. Let it snow.

A hoarder's story

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Woodworkers are among the worst hoarders. It's a character flaw, but there it is.  Among my conceits is the idea that one day I'll know enough about joinery and dovetails and turning and planing to make museum quality stuff from the wood I've been hoarding for decades.

 And so I hang on to the walnut coffee table top I made in 8th grade shop class, the heart pine door panels that came out of a Greensboro house William Sidney Porter (O. Henry) played in as a child, the burl, if I can still find it, said to have been cut from a tree where they hanged one of Mosby's Rangers in 1864, the rough-cut walnut from a Wake County tree bought by four college friends in 1977, the cherry that my father-in-law and I rounded up somewhere the other side of Willis back in the 1980s, the mahogany that came as part of a pallet made somewhere in South or Central America and discarded by a dealer after arrival of some gizmo or other. Even the mahogany cutoffs from a Raleigh billiards table maker.  And I always regretted not having bought some of the old maple floor from UNC's Woolen Gym, the same floor where Lennie Rosenbluth and Tommy Kearns won a lot of the 32 games they took in that 1957 run to the national championship.

But the thing that made me feel rich was the 2,500 board feet of clear Southern Yellow Pine that I got from a Chatham County, N.C. mill after a foulup over a botched order of flooring back in 2007. We were building a log home then, and had ordered pre-finished pine flooring, six inches wide with tongue and groove edges. The builder was putting it in the first week of December that year, and I was sitting in a State Board of Community Colleges meeting when the cell phone beeped with the bad news: the tongue sat a couple of hundredths of an inch higher than the groove, which meant that the flooring would not fit together in a smooth way. In fact, it would tend to rock as it dried out. It was a mess.

Long story short, that batch of flooring went back to the factory, which could not deliver a new batch for weeks.  In a sweat, we found locally-produced oak flooring in Hillsville and the contractor went on to install that.  I didn't find out until much later that the oak flooring had a similar problem, and had to be ripped out after half a room was done, to be replaced with proper flooring. When that (third) floor was finally down, it was lovely, exquisite, perfect.  And it stayed perfect for several weeks, until the appliance store tried to roll a refrigerator with a frozen caster across the floor and etched an interesting pattern in the wood. Duck fits ensued. But that's another story.

What I wound up with was some lovely 12-foot and 16-foot lengths of 1x8 Southern Yellow Pine that the mill in Chatham County sent me in exchange for the bad flooring. Mostly straight and mostly smooth, it looked mighty good. I built pantry shelves with some of it, and bookshelves in the great room with more of it. Looked fine right up until lightning struck and made a big pile of ashes and rubble in June 2010.



We've rebuilt, and my winter project this year was replacing the bookshelves. I started on the side away from the stereo system and TV and about two dozen kinds of wires that looked too complicated to even think about for awhile. Once the easy side was done, I started labeling the wires and running speaker cable beneath the floor and figuring out which speaker was going to go where. And instead of shelves that went to the floor, that side had to have a base cabinet large enough to house a receiver, CD player, Blu-Ray player and set-top box, plus a lot of CDs and the subwoofer, and hold the flat-screen TV at the proper height.

For a couple weeks I did nothing more than turn 1x8 boards into 1x18 inch boards, for cabinet sides, shelves and top.  I used every clamp in the shop and quite a bit of Gorilla Glue, and then a good-sized batch of 3x21 belts and six-hole oscillating sandpaper discs trying to get everything flat, or at least reasonably smooth.

It all came together about 10 days ago, and since then has soaked up a couple cans of hand-rubbed satin finish.  For a batch of botched flooring, these shelves and cabinet look pretty good. But you still can't walk on 'em, nosireebob.

Now, if I could just find a couple boxes of missing books....

Spring's slick snow job

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There's a reason folks up here atop the mountain advise against planting flowers or vegetables much before sometime in May.  You only have to look out the window to see why: it's snowing sideways, with fat flakes screaming along out of the northwest here on the, what, 32nd or 33rd day of Spring? The temps are in the low 40s, the wind has been howling a couple days and it looks like late January or early February, except that the trees have little leaves on them. Or did when this blow started.

About a month ago, there were a lot of daffodils and various other bulbs pushing up and blooming. Then a Saturday afternoon hailstorm shredded the blossoms, made salad out of the leaves and stripped even our tough old mountain laurels of leaves that had been there since, I don't know, the first Mills Godwin administration.  Perhaps I exaggerate.  But that storm was nasty.

Today's is nasty and cold. We hardly had a fire in March because the weather was so warm; I've fetched firewood five times from the woodlot down by the barn in the last couple days, and it looks like I've got four more trips ahead of me before we return to Spring in another day or so.

Should have known, of course, but we got spoiled by the mild weather. Driving down Belcher Mountain Road the other day I spotted the first firepinks, some impossibly red little starburst blooms near a burned-out shell of a house.  And I succumbed to the allure of some bright blooming rhododendron over at Felecia Shelor's Poor Farmers Market. I filled up the back of my pickup truck with five-gallon tubs of those beauties; now they're huddled against the wind at the back of the garage, shivering in the gale and looking doubtful about life up here on the ridgetop.

We'll look back with fondness at days like this in July, when the sun's out and flogging the daylights out of our hides while we scrabble at the weeds in the tomato patch or something,  but right now it seems like light-years away.  A man's got to believe in something, and I believe I will go fetch another cup of coffee and maybe a dollop of that snakebite potion we keep around for emergencies.  You just never know up here.

How would like to be a Backpack Field Tester?

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Tahoe Mountain Sports and Boreas Gear are teaming up to get real-world feedback from hikers, bikers, campers and climbers across the country on the unique, innovative backpacks from Boreas Gear.

Five testers will be selected to put a Boreas pack to the test – whether it’s on a week-long backpacking trip or daily bicycle commute – whatever you’re adventure is, Tahoe Mountain Sports wants to know how the Boreas Backpack performs. Just head to the Tahoe Mountain Sports Facebook Page and tell them what you propose to do with a new Boreas pack.

“We’re looking for testers who can really take advantage of what our packs have to offer – whether you’re planning a big backpacking trip, you need a great day pack to haul around climbing equipment, or you live on your bike,” said Anders Johnson, sales manager with Boreas Gear.

Check out the full line of Boreas Gear backpacks to see which pack would be best for you to test, and get creative! Pack selection subject to availability.

Tahoe Mountain Sports pick five testers on July 6 and send them packs for field testing. The testers will then send 500 to 1,000 word reviews with a minimum of three photographs to Tahoe Mountain Sports by August 15th. By completing the review and photos, testers will get to keep their new Boreas pack!

“We’re excited about Boreas packs, and we want to help get the word out by putting these in the hands and on the backs of real-world users,” said Dave Polivy, owner of Tahoe Mountain Sports.


Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

Spring's slick snow job

To contact us Click HERE
There's a reason folks up here atop the mountain advise against planting flowers or vegetables much before sometime in May.  You only have to look out the window to see why: it's snowing sideways, with fat flakes screaming along out of the northwest here on the, what, 32nd or 33rd day of Spring? The temps are in the low 40s, the wind has been howling a couple days and it looks like late January or early February, except that the trees have little leaves on them. Or did when this blow started.

About a month ago, there were a lot of daffodils and various other bulbs pushing up and blooming. Then a Saturday afternoon hailstorm shredded the blossoms, made salad out of the leaves and stripped even our tough old mountain laurels of leaves that had been there since, I don't know, the first Mills Godwin administration.  Perhaps I exaggerate.  But that storm was nasty.

Today's is nasty and cold. We hardly had a fire in March because the weather was so warm; I've fetched firewood five times from the woodlot down by the barn in the last couple days, and it looks like I've got four more trips ahead of me before we return to Spring in another day or so.

Should have known, of course, but we got spoiled by the mild weather. Driving down Belcher Mountain Road the other day I spotted the first firepinks, some impossibly red little starburst blooms near a burned-out shell of a house.  And I succumbed to the allure of some bright blooming rhododendron over at Felecia Shelor's Poor Farmers Market. I filled up the back of my pickup truck with five-gallon tubs of those beauties; now they're huddled against the wind at the back of the garage, shivering in the gale and looking doubtful about life up here on the ridgetop.

We'll look back with fondness at days like this in July, when the sun's out and flogging the daylights out of our hides while we scrabble at the weeds in the tomato patch or something,  but right now it seems like light-years away.  A man's got to believe in something, and I believe I will go fetch another cup of coffee and maybe a dollop of that snakebite potion we keep around for emergencies.  You just never know up here.

Woman Stabbed on Gatlinburg Trail

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A 44-year-old woman was sexually assaulted and then stabbed several times while hiking along the Gatlinburg Trail in Great Smoky Mountains National Park yesterday.

The victim was taken by helicopter to the University of Tennessee Medical Center in Knoxville. She remains in the hospital and is in stable condition.

The woman managed to make her way to Highway 441 shortly before 3 p.m. and flag down a passing motorist.

Rangers immediately closed the 1.9-mile Gatlinburg Trail and contained an area between the Sugarlands Visitor Center and the city of Gatlinburg.

The suspect is described as a white male of thin build, in his 40s, standing 5-foot, 7 inches tall, with a crew cut and thin mustache. He was wearing black dress pants and a gray T-shirt at the time of the attack, the park reported. He has multiple tattoos, including one on his stomach.

Anyone with any information is asked to call the park dispatch emergency line at 865-436-9197.



Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

Great Smoky Mountains National Park seeks Protection Ranger

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Great Smoky Mountains National Park is recruiting for a protection ranger who is interested in working at the Little River Ranger Station within the Tennessee District.

Little River rangers are responsible for a full range of law enforcement and all-risk duties, including traditional patrol operations, EMS, SAR, resource protection and wildland fire details. The park has an active FLETC field training evaluation program and opportunities may exist to apply for a field training ranger position.

The patrol area of responsibility for the Little River workgroup includes a large portion of Newfound Gap Road, a four lane highway known as the “Spur,” Elkmont Campground, and backcountry areas, including Mt. Leconte. The area is extremely busy with a high volume of traffic-related incidents. Rangers also work closely with the Gatlinburg Police Department and their fire and rescue squads.

Interested career or career conditional rangers, who currently hold Type I or Type II law enforcement commissions are encouraged to respond by close of business, July 5th.

For more information regarding this position, please contact Little River Area Supervisor Bobby Fleming at bobby_fleming@nps.gov or call 865-430-0325.



Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

US Forest Service adds four heavy helicopters to support wildfire suppression

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U.S. Forest Service Chief Tom Tidwell announced earlier this week that the agency is adding four heavy helicopters to the aviation firefighting fleet.

The helicopters will be available this summer for large fire support and initial attack to any location in the United States.

The U.S. Forest Service successfully suppresses about 98% of the approximately 10,000 wildfires that occur each year on National Forest System lands.

Two of the heavy helicopters are S-61s owned by Siller Helicopters of Yuba City, Calif.; one is an S-64 Skycrane owned by Erickson Air Crane of Central Point, Ore.; and one is an S-70 owned by Firehawk Helicopters of Leesburg, Fla.

Helicopters are used primarily for dropping retardant or water during wildland fires, supporting the actions of firefighters on the ground. The additional helicopter assets will strengthen the agency’s capability to respond effectively to fire activity during the summer wildfire season.

The Forest Service can respond vigorously to wildfire with an array of assets that includes more than 15,000 USDA and Department of the Interior firefighters (about 70% from the Forest Service) and up to 950 engines, 14 large airtankers, eight Modular Airborne Fire Fighting Systems, one very large (DC-10) airtanker, 300 call-when-needed helicopters, and a mix of type 1, 2, and 3 helicopters.

On June 13, the agency awarded exclusive use contracts for seven "Next Generation" airtankers. Three will be operational in 2012 and four in 2013. This is the first step in implementing the Large Airtanker Modernization Strategy, which was submitted to Congress in February and recommends 18 to 28 large airtankers.

The Forest Service uses many tools for wildland fire suppression including accelerated restoration efforts that include thinning and other fuels treatments. Restoration of National Forest System lands are critically needed to address a number of threats to the health of forest ecosystems, watersheds, and forest dependent communities.

This year, as in the past, firefighting experts will continuously monitor conditions and move assets as necessary to be best positioned and increase initial attack capabilities.


Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

NC Wildlife Commission Seeks Information on Wrongful Elk Deaths

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The N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission is seeking information from the public to assist in an investigation about the deaths of three elk, found outside Great Smoky Mountains National Park in the Mount Sterling area of Haywood County.

All three elk are believed to have died as the result of gunshot wounds inflicted sometime around May 18th. Forensic tests show a bull elk was mortally wounded by a .22 caliber firearm; a cow elk was shot in the neck with birdshot from a shotgun; while an undetermined gunshot led to the death of a pregnant cow elk.

Anyone with any information is asked to call toll-free 1-800-662-7137, available 24 hours a day. Callers may remain anonymous.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park began an experimental reintroduction of elk in February 2001 and there are now nearly 150 animals. Originally found throughout the southern Appalachians, elk had disappeared from North Carolina by the early 1800s. Elk are listed as a species of special concern in North Carolina.



Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

GSMIT Announces Bird Banding Program

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The Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont is seeking volunteers to assist with bird banding projects on several dates throughout this summer.

Scientists estimate that there are nearly 230 different species of birds in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Thirty-four species considered endangered, threatened or of conservation concern have been observed in the park. With all its unusual birds, it is no surprise that Great Smoky Mountains National Park is considered one of the most important places for birds in the eastern United States.

Keeping up with all these species within the 520,000 acres of the national park is a daunting task, and for the past twelve years, Great Smoky Mountains Institute at Tremont has been assisting the park in monitoring these birds through bird banding.

The dates for these citizen science projects are: June 14, June 22, July 5, July 25, August 2 and August 8.

Bird banding sessions typically last 5-6 hours beginning with set-up a half hour before sunrise. Participants do not have to attend the entire session. Dress should be weather-appropriate. Participants should bring snacks, plenty of water and rain gear in case of sudden showers. There can be bugs, poison ivy or an occasional stream to cross, so participants should be prepared for all those situations.

Those interested in attending any of the sessions should contact Charlene Stewart at Charlene@gsmit.org (preferred) or 865-448-6709. Please provide your name, number attending, and best contact information in case of a cancellation.

For more information on the projects, please click here.


Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

Appalachian Trail Celebrates 75th Anniversary This August

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This year marks the 75th anniversary of the completion of the Appalachian Trail (A.T.), the longest hiking-only footpath in the world, measuring roughly 2,180 miles in length from Georgia to Maine. The anniversary will occur on Tuesday, August 14, 2012.

The original Trail took more than 15 years to build and was completed on August 14, 1937. Construction involved the cooperation of hundreds of volunteers, state and federal partners, local Trail-maintaining clubs, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC).

The A.T. travels through fourteen states along the crests and valleys of the Appalachian mountain range from its southern terminus at Springer Mountain, Georgia, to its northern terminus at Katahdin, Maine. Over 250,000 acres of contiguous Trail lands are protected and managed along the footpath. The trail reaches its highest point at Clingmans Dome in the Great Smoky Mountains.

An estimated 2 to 3 million people visit the A.T. every year. Hikers from across the globe are drawn to the Trail for a variety of reasons: to reconnect with nature, to escape the stress of city life, to meet new people, strengthen old friendships or to experience a simpler life. About 2,000 people attempt to "thru-hike" the estimated 2,180 miles of the Trail each year, with only one out of four completing the entire journey.

"This year marks a milestone for the Appalachian Trail," said Mark Wenger, executive director of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. "Not only does this anniversary celebrate the completion of the Trail, it also celebrates the unique collaboration and determination of countless individuals, private organizations, and state and federal agencies in their efforts to complete this long-distance hiking trail from Maine to Georgia."

The conception of the A.T. came from the October 1921 article "An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning" in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. Written by Benton MacKaye, he proposed the idea as an escape from daily life in an increasingly industrial nation. MacKaye originally called for a series of work, study and farming camps along the Appalachian Mountains, but building a trail to connect them soon became his primary objective. The Appalachian Trail Conference (now called the Appalachian Trail Conservancy) was founded four years later in 1925.

Since the A.T was first completed in 1937, it has undergone a remarkable transformation. Almost 99% has been relocated or rebuilt. Hundreds of miles of the original route were along roads and passed through private lands. Thanks to the determination of Myron H. Avery and the ATC, the passage of the National Trails System Act, and the work of many partners and volunteers, more than 99% of the A.T. is now in public ownership. Not only is the footpath itself protected, but a corridor of land, averaging one thousand feet in width, is also protected.

The Trail today is not only better protected but traverses more scenic landscapes than the original route. Many of the A.T.'s most cherished highlights were not part of the A.T. in 1937: Roan Mountain, Tennessee; the Mt. Rogers High Country, including Grayson Highlands, Virginia; the Pochuck Creek swamp, New Jersey; Nuclear Lake, New York; Thundering Falls, Vermont; and Saddleback Mountain, Maine, to name a few.

The treadway itself each year becomes more sustainable. Except for places where the Civilian Conservation Corps provided additional support (mostly in Shenandoah National Park, the Great Smoky Mountains, and Maine), the original Trail was often routed straight up and down mountains, making for rough hiking and a treadway prone to severe erosion. The ATC's trail crews and volunteer trail-maintaining clubs have relocated or rehabilitated countless miles of Trail and each year continue to improve the treadway.

As a unit of the National Park System, the Trail is managed under a unique partnership between public and private sectors that includes the ATC, National Park Service, USDA Forest Service, 31 local Trail-maintaining clubs and an array of state agencies.

To celebrate the 75th anniversary of the completion of the A.T., the ATC will host a weekend celebration on August 11 and 12 at its headquarters at 799 Washington St., Harpers Ferry, WV. Highlights include guest speakers, workshops, activities, food, music and games.

Trail-maintaining Clubs across the East Coast are also preparing events to celebrate the anniversary. The Piedmont Appalachian Trail Hikers in Ceres, Virginia, are hosting a hike on June 14 to 18, and volunteers from the Mount Rogers Appalachian Trail Club in Damascus, Virginia, have planned a day hike on August 18. Members from the Maine Appalachian Trail Club in Carrabassett Valley, Maine, also have celebratory activities planned on August 18.

For more information about the 75th anniversary of the completion of the A.T., including ways to give back and local celebrations, visit www.appalachiantrail.org/75


Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com

National Parks From Space

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Most of you are likely aware, or have seen photos of earth taken from the space shuttle or the International Space Station. However, did you know that NASA has a collection of photos featuring various national parks around the country? To be honest, many of the photos weren't all that impressive, in my opinion. There are a couple, such as Death Valley, or Crater Lake and North Cascades, that are quite compelling. However, the one photo that I was extremely impressed with was that of Grand Teton National Park:


To see other space photos of national parks you can browse through the NASA image gallery.



Jeff
HikingintheSmokys.com