It was raining hard when I started out for Cataloochee yet again. I scheduled a hike for the Elk Bugle Corp people. Actually, only two women signed up and I wondered if they would show up in this weather.

I got there early to photograph flowers but found elk in the fenced-in area next to the ranger station. Four bulls were grazing happily. When it rains, the hikers aren't happy but the elk and photographers are.

But Teresa and Barbara did show up and we started on the Boogerman Trail, a classic Cataloochee loop. It's the trail that visitors ask about the most; EBC volunteers should know about. It's an easy loop but some of the bridges are challenging in the rain.

I like to do the long part of Caldwell Fork Trail first, getting the 10 bridges out of the way. Then we can climb on Boogerman Trail and see the root cellar, walls and the hollowed out tuliptree.

It's familiar, yet so new each time. But after we got on Boogerman's property (Robert Palmer), we could not find the signature wheel.

I couldn't find it last time I did it, a couple of years ago but I thought I had missed it but this time I alerted the other two hikers to look for it but we couldn't find it.

Does anyone know what happened to this wheel on the Boogerman Trail?

While I was gone, the Elk Bugle Corp folks adopted a highway. Well, it's not exactly a highway; it's the road up to the park boundary.

That's the only picture I have since my batteries died after that. So I missed photos of asters, yellow wood tickseeds and outstanding Turk's cap lily. There are still rosebay rhododendron and bee balm in bloom.

Going up the road, I met a woman with a plastic water bottle in hand, walking the dusty road. I stopped and asked her if she was OK. "There's a whole park up there to hike in." She said that she just wanted some time away from her family. I knew enough to move on.

The E-car was out for repairs - the second equipment malfunction. So my shift mates were at a loss on how to organize themselves. Finally two piled into a truck while Mark was on his own to watch that visitors did not get too close to an elk just on the road.

Based on the number of elk that was spotted, it really felt like fall. Many visitors told me that they had seen bull elk but I was skeptical. Males don't come out until it's almost rutting season. you know when they're needed. But there were four in the fenced in area next to the Ranger Station. They were just sitting there, not going after the females. Yet, there are still pregnant cows. The score is - 18 calves were born so far and 15 survived.

I walked to campsite #40 and saw lots of people. I also encourage people to walk there. I've now updated my little photo album and tell them to take Rough Fork Trail to the Woody House and beyond.

I met three women on horseback who warned me that there was a "hunting" dog that was spooking the horses. I was ready for my first confrontation. By the time, I found the dog, it was leashed and walking with a older couple. I explained that dogs are not allowed on backcountry trails in any National Park. "But horses are?" is always the retort. Dogs are predators and give off a scent that disturbs the wildlife. Horses are not carnivores, even though they may mess up a trail.

The guy flashed me the peace sign. That was supposed to make it all OK. I escorted them out but we talked about his experience volunteering in the National Forest in Virginia. "That's different! Dogs are allowed in the forest. We're in a National Park."

When I got back to the World Headquarters and signed out, I joked with Gini about my first reportable offense but she told me to report it by making a note. Gini and her husband, Pete, are the den parents of the rest of the volunteers. They live in an RV in the Cataloochee campground and live and breathe the Elk Bugle Corp.

On the way out, I saw two female elk #18 with her calf and #60 who according to Gini, lost her calf to a bear.

Who has not had to read Walden by Henry David Thoreau in high school? Let's face it; his writing made Charles Dickens fun. But he is an icon so I took the opportunity to see what Walden Pond was all about.

For those who have been spared his dry prescriptive writing, here's a synopsis.

In 1845, when he was about 27, Thoreau went to live at Walden Pond outside of Concord, MA. He built a cabin and stayed for two years, keeping a journal of his thoughts and observations. He was hardly a hermit and had many visitors. He lived on a wooded lot owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Thoreau admired Emerson's essay, Nature, which said that each person should find a relationship with the natural world.

He also wrote Civil Disobedience in 1949. Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King used his writings for their work.

It's a small pond in Walden Pond State Reservation. I met a woman working on her laptop on the shores of the pond and wondered what Thoreau would have thought of that juxtaposition. Children swam in the roped off area and others did laps, looking like they were serious swimmers.

I walked around the pond which took less than an hour. This is the cabin site which was rediscovered in the 1940s.

The ATC Conference biennual business meeting was on Monday morning. And to make sure that everyone attended, nothing else was scheduled. This was the time to give the financial report, nominate new members to the ATC board and give out service awards for ATC staff members.

Carolina Mountain Club was recognized for being a club for 85 years (in 2008). In addition, Larry Luxemberg became an honorary member for creating the A.T. Museum.

In the afternoon, I gave my workshop on Writing a Guidebook - It's more than hiking. The workhop, similar to the article I wrote for the Mountain Xpress was very well attended and there was lots of discussion. Several folks were perturbed about how little money one makes writing books.

Tuesday - Finally a hiking day. Lenny and I hiked with a group who went from USFS 10 to VT 140 on the A.T. south of Rutland. It was only 8.9 miles, but these were New England trail miles. Rocks, rocks and more rocks. The group was not very speedy on top of it and the leader really kept the group together.

Highlights included Little Rock Pond where we met a group of children swimming. We had all walked in two miles and I imagine that it was going to be difficult to pull them away to hike some more.

We had lunch at an old logging camp and village. There were rocks and rusted metal artifacts still left and displayed.

Toward the top of White Rocks Mountain, we found a whole village of little people - rocks piled up in various designs as pictured above. On our way down, it started raining seriously. Lenny and I said goodbye to the group and stepped on it back to our car. That was our last day of the conference.

Hawk Metheny (on the right) and I gave a workshop at the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) Biennial Meeting titled: Climate Change and the A.T.

It was a tag-team approach. Hawk, who is an educator for Al Gore’s Climate Project, started with a brief description of how human activities affect the climate system and some of the potential global impacts.

I followed with a summary of two different climate model estimates of the amount of climate change that might occur over the A.T. in the next 50 years. Hawk then came back with a discussion of the climate change resolution that ATC Board of Directors passed in Nov. 2008. He and I had been the authors of the resolution. I finished with a description of the activities that ATC has undertaken to implement the resolution.

The discussion after our presentations surprised me. The issue people were most interested in was public transportation to the A.T.

Could ATC do a better job of telling members what was available? The issue has been on my ATC “to do” list, but not with a high priority. It now has high priority. I am a member of the ATC Stewardship Council’s Climate Change and Energy Subcommittee, and have been focused on creating a climate change webpage for ATC.

(See www.appalachiantrail.org/climatechange.) Once this task is done, in a few months, I’ll see whether we can added more comprehensive information about public transportation to the website. If that’s what the members want, that’s what we should supply.

I went on a photography field trip for a small group of people who attended the workshop yesterday. We drove to a private field and woods with a small waterfall and shot everything in sight and on the way.

This was a good workshop since the leader reviewed all the manual settings I had ignored since I bought a digital camera - Aperture and Shutter speed preferred, allowing extra light, and changing the ISO speed. Most of the time, you don't need this but it's very handy when you do.

I also became fascinated by checking the light histogram of my picture.

The photo above is of a typical Vermont grassy field, just before we entered the woods.

By Western North Carolina standards, this is a small and insignificant waterfall but it allowed us to practice our various camera settings.

The ATC Conference can be very intense. Many people live and breathe the A.T. as if there's no other trail worth hiking.

Tonight, we'll hear Cindy Ross on her Pacific Crest Trail journey. This is the only event which charged an entrance fee. I'm curious to see if it's worth it.

This is an example of the historic buildings at Castleton College.

I went to workshops today - photography and yoga for hiking. I also was the greeter for the ALDHA readings co-sponsored by the Appalachian Trail Museum Society and the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association.

Most read from their book detailing their A.T. experience. J.R. Tate who wrote Walking with the Ghost Whisperers came with his grandson and said, "Your children may slow you down on the trail but your grandchildren will keep you going." What a great line! His book emphasized the history on the A.T.

Larry Anderson wrote a biography of Benton MacKaye who first envisioned the A.T. MacKaye was a thinker and writer, not a doer. That was left to Myron Avery. MacKaye and Avery had a falling out over Skyline Highways, like the Green Mountain Parkway that I referred to yesterday.

I read a section from my book Hiking North Carolina's Blue Ridge Heritage on the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Most of the audience knew little about the Smokies and that it was the 75th anniversary of the park. The session ended with Gene Espy, the second person to thru-hike the trail in 1951.

The last workshop that I greeted was on the Lebanon Mountain Trail, which goes from the Syrian border to the Israeli border. ATC staff and volunteers went to Lebanon to consult on the 275 mile trail. ATC has a great tradition of sharing their knowledge with other trail systems.

I'm writing this after the evening program. The keynote session was presented by Dayton Duncan, who wrote and produced National Parks: America's Best Idea. He showed a small piece of the 12-hour video that will be shown on PBS in September. The small piece just happened to be about the Smokies.

After two exhausting days in New York City, we headed to Castleton, Vermont for the ATC Conference. If you've been following this blog, you know that this is the purpose of this trip.

Castleton is a small town west of Rutland. I don't know much else about it yet since I headed directly for the campus. Castleton State College is the oldest college in the Vermont State system, though the college started as a grammar school, so I don't know if that counts. I registered, got my meal tickets, red volunteer t-shirt and headed for the dorms.

The dorm rooms are cosy and bare. We knew we had to bring our linen or rent it but I didn't realize we had to bring a garbage can and hangers. I never lived in a dorm since I went to Brooklyn College and lived with my parents but I've stayed in them enough to know the drill.

The Green Mountain Club, (GMC) the host club, will be celebrating its 100th anniversary next year. It maintains the 270-mile Long Trail which includes 105 miles of the A.T. in Vermont. In the evening program, a speaker told the history of the Long Trail. The most fascinating to me was a proposal during FDR's New Deal to build a Green Mountain Parkway from peak to peak on what was already the Long Trail. It was supposed to be like the Blue Ridge Parkway. GMC fought it and so did the people of Vermont and it never happened.

Tomorrow I'll have some photos. Please come back!

I'm heading up to Vermont to the ATC Biennual Conference. But first a few stops along the way.

We checked out the site of the 2011 conference at Emory and Henry College at Emory, VA. It's a tiny 900-student private college but it's beautiful. Only two hours from Asheville, I hope that more Carolina Mountain Club members will come.

Our destination was Roanoke, VA and the Winston Link Museum. O. Winston Link was a Brooklyn photographer who decided to photograph the last days of the Norfolk and Western railroad during the last days of steam. Between 1955 and 1960, he took thousands of photographs of trains and train employees. His greatest achievement was lighting up the scene exactly as he wanted by using hundreds of flash bulbs. He was a true engineer. He was really not known until he had his first one-person show in 1983.

There's no point in my copying Link's photos and putting them on this site. Check out the Museum collection.

On Tuesday (July 7), I got to Cataloochee about an hour late since I had a book signing at Oconaluftee Visitor Center. I sat or stood for three hours greeting visitors outside the Visitor Center, gave them a bookmark and told them about my books.

At one o'clock, I left the Visitor Center and drove to the Cataloochee Valley. It took me as long to get to the Valley as driving from home in Asheville, which gave me a visceral sense about how physically isolated residents were.

I immediately picked up my two antlers, drove to the end of the Valley and walked to the Woody House.

The Rosebay rhododendron was still in bloom.Bee balm was out as well, a flower that always reminds me of Phyllis Diller's crazy spiked hair. Walking back, I saw a woman standing still in the middle of the trail. It could only mean one thing - an animal on the trail. I assumed that she would not be standing so still if it was a bear, so it must be an elk. Finally, I saw elk on my shift.

There were two elk. With a telephoto lens, someone else spotted the tag number - #104 and another elk without a tag. Both have radio collars but the second one must have rubbed her tag off. Later, the elk experts identified her as #60, a two year-old pregnant female. The animals browsed on bushes and ambled across the trail. "Why did the elk cross the road?" because the "grass is always greener on the other side."

At the end of my shift, I met Joe Y., the biologist for the project. He confirmed that 13 calves were born this year so far and we still have 12 calves. Not bad odds. Now if I can see a young one.

Last Sunday, the Carolina Mountain Club led a hike to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Art Loeb Trail (ALT). Art Loeb was a business leader in Brevard and an active member of the Carolina Mountain Club. He died in 1968 and the trail was dedicated the next year.

This 30.1 mile trail is the spine of the Pisgah District of Pisgah National Forest. It starts at the Davidson River and heads north to cross Pilot Mountain and then the Blue Ridge Parkway. The most spectacular part climbs up Black Balsam Knob, then Tennent, and enters the Shining Rock Wilderness. It continues past Grassy Cove to Shining Rock Gap, misses Shining Rock and goes to Deep Gap below Cold Mountain and down to the Daniel Boone Boy Scout Camp.

The plaque shown above is a new, more modest plaque what was put up last year when the original was vandalized.

We certainly didn't do the whole ALT in one day. Rather, we did a Shining Rock loop. To reach Shining Rock, we left the ALT at Shining Rock Gap and took Shining Rock Trail. The top with the "Shining Rocks" is being filled in by bushes. Soon you won't be able to see any shining rocks.