What if we had a chance to let our new president know what is important to us. How do we want to change the direction of the country?

Change.org is doing just that. It allows anyone (who registers, of course) to put forth ideas. The most popular idea will be sent to the Obama team. Anyone can vote on it.

One of the proposals that caught my eye is from Anne Whisnant, a historian and author of Super-scenic Motorway: a Blue Ridge Parkway History. Anne proposes to revitalize our national parks by employing young people in a new type of CCC (Civilian Conservation Corp.).

I don't know why they have to be young and they certainly don't have to be male, but other than that, I think it is a great idea.

Look at her idea and if you agree, vote for it.

The Bush administration has finalized a decision to allow concealed, loaded firearms at 388 of 391 national park sites. That includes the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
The administration did not listen to the vast majority of comments from people who said "no" to allowing guns in National Parks. Nor did they listen to the professionals such as the Coalition of National Park Service Retirees, the Association of National Park Rangers, the Ranger Lodge of the Fraternal Order of Police, and the nonprofit National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA).

What gets me upset is that these folks have never spent a night (as an adult) sleeping cheek to jowl in a shelter or discussed (argued??) about where to put up a tent. I wonder when and if they've ever camped or backpacked in a national park.

Look at the ruling. Yes, that can be overturned with the next administration but are we going to have the will and energy to do it? Again, write to the Secretary of the Interior:

Dirk Kempthorne
1849 C Street, N.W. Washington, DC 20240
Dirk_Kempthorne@ios.doi.gov
   

On Thanksgiving day, Lenny and I walked our A.T. trail for the last time this year. We have a five-mile section from Rice Gap to Devils Fork Gap on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee. It's not a particularly outstanding section, more like a typical A.T. section in the South.

The day started out cold and we had overdressed. By midmorning, with clipping and sawing, we had shed most of our top layers. We got a new hand saw, a Silky, which worked so much better than our old bow saw. Still we found at least two blowdowns that we couldn't handle. We needed to report it to the CMC trailcrew. They have the big guns, or at least, the power saws. We also break up fire rings that are on the trail; those are illegal. Yes, we did hear hunters because our trail is in the Pisgah Forest. We wore orange and hoped they got a deer.

We met a southbounder, Mountain Goat, a young woman who had graduated college and started on the trail in Maine  in July. She seemed in good spirits and eager to get into the Smokies. I offered to take out her trash, which is the best thing to offer a long-distance hiker.

I did give thanks that I live so close to the A.T., and that we are entrusted with taking care of it. That's the way most trails in the U.S. are maintained, by volunteers. This is the hardest physical work I do. Hiking 19 miles in the Smokies is not as hard on my back as the bending, twisting,  reaching I do when I maintain the trail. That evening, I slept on the floor, still thankful. 

The National Park Service is considering a plan to relax their regulations that govern bicycles on trails - a change potentially made without public notice, review or comment which would allow Park Superintendents to designate trails and trail use. That means that you could be meeting a cyclist coming down the hill on the Alum Cave Trail in the Smokies as you huff and puff up.

That scenario in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is admittedly far fetched. But there are good reasons why bikes, dogs and guns (did I leave anything out?) are not allowed on the trails. The National Parks are meant to preserve the environment and leave it unimpaired for future generations. You want to bike with your dog and gun, go to the National Forest where hiking is just one of many uses.

I have nothing against cyclists, hunters or dog owners - well maybe dog owners if they can't control their dogs. Just not in the National Park.

You  may want to look at this article and write to Dirk Kempthorne, Secretary of the Interior at
1849 C Street, N.W. Washington, DC 20240
Dirk_Kempthorne@ios.doi.gov
 

Last week, I went on a hike on the Rocky Fork track in TN with the Southern Appalachian Highlands Conservancy. We met at the first rest stop on I-26 in Tennessee to contemplate the track of land we're trying to save. See the picture above. According to SAHC, this is the largest remaining, unprotected piece of land in the Southern Appalachian mountains.

Then we drove to the Rocky Fork track to hike and learn about its pedigree and its future. Right now, the land is owned by Timber Vest, a timber investment company. It is always important to me to know who the sellers of a piece of land. For every buyer who may want to develop the land, there's a seller who is getting a good price for the property. This 10,000 acres is being sold for $40 millions.

The Conservation Fund  will actually buy the property and turn it over to the state of Tennessee and to the US Forest Service. As we hiked, we saw that the land had been heavily logged. Roads and even flat homesites were obvious. But there were also plenty of sweet moments such as the tiny triple waterfall - nothing like the Triple Falls in Dupont State Forest.

The loop was 8 miles and 1,200 ft. of ascent - difficult enough for some that we ended up in three groups - all spread out. Although it is private land, you can hike it and groups like the Johnson City hikers plan hikes here regularly. But there are no maps yet!

How do trails get maintained? Not easily in the Smokies. Because of the network of trails, it's more difficult for volunteers to get to the internal trails than it is on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail, for example.

This is the reason for the Trails Forever program, a four million dollar program that will provide a permanent trail crew to work on big trail projects in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Two millions dollars have already been committed and there soon will be a major capital campaign by Friends of the Smokies to raise the matching funds.

In the meantime, work has been done on the Jakes Creek and Baskins Trail and continues on the Forney Ridge Trail to Andrews Bald. The picture above shows a trail crew that I met on top of Clingmans Dome, getting set to go toward Andrews Bald. The park is calling this Trails Now.

To volunteer on the Trails Forever crew or for more information, contact Jeremy Sweat.

If you go on the Little Cataloochee Trail now, you'll see some great improvements. Previously the trail from the Dan Cook Cabin to Davidson Gap was a sorry mess; it was rutted and muddy. It's a steady uphill made harder by the state of the trail.

Now, the park has turnpiked the tread above areas where water was accumulating, trucked in 70 tons of gravel to replace material of the former road that had eroded away, then added water bars to keep the new materials from eroding also. The resulting trail is smoother, looks better and doesn't allow silt and sediment to wash down into streams, so there's an environmental component to the work as well.

Turnpiking is a new word for me. The fellow in the picture is Tobias Miller, the North Carolina Trail Supervisor. He's standing on a turnpike section with logs on both sides.  The other picture is of very long, shallow steps, designed for horse traffic. Hopefully, all this work will withstand the onslaught of horses.

Sometimes I have to break away from my Smokies project and go somewhere else in the Southern Appalachians. Last weekend was the first weekend I didn't spend any time continuing my goal. Instead I led a hike for the Carolina Mountain Club to Linville Falls and Table Rock Mountain.

The morning was spent at Linville Falls, where we did all the trails - about four miles. In the afternoon, we drove to Table Rock Mountain on a dusty dirt road. The drive was much harder than the hike. We had a fantastic day with blue  skies and visibility for miles. So it was not surprising that we had lots of company - people up and down and on top.

Then we climbed the other side of the parking lot through the Chimneys, an rocky area with unusual rock formations. This was in the Linville Gorge Wilderness Area so we had to limit the number of people to ten. Here we had few hikers but met rock climbers who were also taking advantage of the great weather.

It's back to the Smokies again this coming weekend - rain or shine. And it looks like it will be mostly rain.

What's happening to the  tower on top of Mt. Mitchell? The old tower was taken down last year and a new one was promised "soon". The top picture is an artist's rendition of the new tower. The bottom picture is what it looks like now.

I drove to the top of Mt. Mitchell yesterday to see how the new tower was coming along. Well, in short, it's getting there but it's not finished yet. The park had hoped for an open house in November but now they're planning it for the Spring.

I kept calling the Mt. Mitchell State Park Office every week for weeks and all I got was "We're working on it." When I got up there, there was a buzz of activities. Mostly they need to finish the trail/ramp up to the tower. Also, the safety fence around the tower has to be installed.

The tower looks very similar to the one on Clingmans Dome in the Smokies but without the long walk. In fact, one of the main reasons the N.C. State Park system decided to replace it was to make it handicapped accessible. There is a short ramp up to the tower. Rangers will be able to take disabled people up to the tower in a golf cart. Walkers will find that the ramp is shorter and smoother than the one to the old tower.

The Blue Ridge Parkway is closed just south of the Mt. Mitchell Rd. so you need to approach the road from the north. From Asheville, that means taking Rt. 80.

Five days in the Smokies, probably the longest I stayed just to do Smokies miles. I'm getting there, folks, I'm getting there.

The first three days I was with Sharon McCarthy, shown here with her favorite warm hat. She's a hiker from Charlotte, who's doing all the Smokies in a year, her fiftieth-year. She's also raising money for the Girl Scouts since getting girls out in the woods and hiking is so important. She wrote about our three days together so well, there's no need to repeat our exploit. Check out her website and contribute to the Girl Scouts.

On the fourth day, Saturday, I walked Little Bottoms Trail and saw five dogs – with their owners. I approached a middle-age woman picking up a dog so small I first thought it was a piglet. “Hi,” I say, “You know, dogs are not allowed in the Smokies. I’m not a ranger but if he saw your dog, you would be fined.” She looked at me as if I had horns. “Well, it depends on the trail, doesn’t it”? Before I could say “actually no,” she picked up her doglet and went back to the river bank and the safety of other people. I took a photo of her and her dog. She was probably thinking, who made her sheriff? Dogs are not allowed on the trails in the Smokies. They're not allowed on the trails in any National Park for good and proper environmental reasons.
The far western Smokies, west of Cades Cove, may be the forgotten part of the park, yet on this sunny autumn Saturday, the tiny Abrams Creek Campground was full. I followed the Abrams River upstream to Abrams Falls, a popular spot most tourists reach from Cades Cove. The falls were an emaciated version of what they were before the drought but the water still barreled down forcefully. Two men with three boy scouts in uniform threw rocks in the pool at the base of the falls. A couple snuggled close to eat their sandwiches. A young Chinese man struggled to lift his one-year old boy out of his backpack while his wife chased after their two older children heading for the water.
    A sixty-plus gray pony tailed throwback to the 1960s crossed the bridge and looks around. He wore a denim shirt and jeans and carried a hiking pole that he might have carved himself. His external frame backpack was much too big for the few miles he walked but it probably was the only pack he owns. He looked around for someone to take his picture and I volunteered. With a big smile, he said “I want to show my girlfriend that I was here.” I love watching people come here maybe for their first time and being truly awed. “Well, I hope you come back. There are heaps of other great places in the Smokies.”
 

The state of North Carolina has agreed to buy Grandfather Mountain's backcountry area. This is wonderful news for hikers. The 2,600 acres will comprise the state's newest park. The backcountry was already protected with conservation easements. It's the area that most of the 250,000 visitors never see.

Making that area a state park will ensure that it will even more protected. Hopefully, the State Park system will add new hiking trails as well. The state will pay $12 millions which is a bargain, considering that we paid over $20 millions for Chimney Rock Park.

The  604-acre tourist attraction which includes the Swinging Bridge will be taken over by a nonprofit corporation run by the Morton family. They say that nothing will change in that section. Now the state of North Carolina has 34 state parks.