AMC Outdoors, May 2008
New threats to the Appalachian Trail change the focus of preservation efforts
Just off the Appalachian Trail, south of Boiling Springs, Pa., a developer sought to build 634 houses below White Rocks Ridge, an outcropping of quartzite that forms the northern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains. To reach the new houses, the developer would build a road across the White Rocks Trail near its intersection with the AT.
Hiking past hundreds of houses was not what forester Benton MacKaye had in mind when he proposed a trail from Georgia to Maine in 1922. MacKaye’s idea was to establish “a sanctuary from the scramble of everyday worldly commercial life”—not a route defined by residential landscapes.
But MacKaye’s vision is facing new challenges. The housing proposal, which area residents and hiking enthusiasts vigorously opposed before its first phase was denied on technicalities last summer, is just one of many threats facing the AT. In addition to development pressures, declining air quality, threats to biodiversity, and climate change are jeopardizing the wilderness experience the historic trail is meant to provide.
These challenges are transforming the work of protecting the trail. From the first enthusiastic meeting of trail volunteers in Washington, D.C., in 1925 until recent years, the focus was simply on establishing and protecting the trail corridor, a tract of land no wider than 1,000 feet and, in many places, barely bigger than the treadway itself. AMC and other trail-maintaining clubs of the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (originally the Appalachian Trail Conference) worked to ensure that the route was accessible and the trail was kept in good condition.
Yet today all but about eight of the trail’s 2,175 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Katahdin in Maine are on officially protected National Park land. And while trail maintenance work remains vital, the focus of advocacy efforts has shifted outward, beyond the corridor, to the scenic views surrounding it and to the region’s air, water, plants, and animals. As the trail’s popularity draws 3 million to 4 million hikers each year, the ATC’s regional partnership committees in the South, Mid-Atlantic, and New England regions must address new concerns.
“In the old days we might have confined our comments to the footpath and a mile or two beyond the footpath,” says Cosmo Catalano, a member of AMC’s Berkshire Chapter and chairman of the ATC’s New England Regional Partnership Committee. “Now we see there is a wider world out there, and so we feel we need to be able to comment.”
Catalano, a theater production manager for Williams College who started doing trail work with AMC a decade ago, says that the partnership committees now advise the ATC on issues such as how to start a volunteer program with the National Park Service to inventory plants on the trail; how a warming climate affects hemlock health; and the possibility of larger utility lines across the trail.
“The broader view is becoming more and more prevalent,” he says. “There are still—and there will always be—a group of volunteers who are on the ground and dealing with the footpath. There are others saying, ‘I need to be thinking about global warming and power plant impacts from the Midwest.’”
EVOLVING GOALS In 2005, the ATC’s board voted to change the nonprofit group’s name from the Appalachian Trail Conference to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. David Startzell, the ATC executive director, says the name had always confused people encountering it for the first time. “I’ve sometimes joked, although it’s true, that for years I’ve been getting Meeting Planner magazine because people thought that was our business, planning conferences,” Startzell says. “So we felt—and this was borne out through some testing—that ‘conservancy’ just conveyed to people less familiar with us what we’re about.”
With ever-expanding electricity power lines, industrial and utility projects such as wind farms, housing developments, and even small-scale logging projects threatening the trail, the ATC recognized that member clubs and regional partnership committees were increasingly concerned about the land bordering the protected 250,000-acre trail corridor.
In Pennsylvania, for example, a car racetrack was approved for land near the AT, on Blue Mountain in Eldred Township, because there were no regulations against such enterprises. In response, Pennsylvania state Rep. Bob Freeman introduced a bill last year that would require Pennsylvania towns near the trail to enact land use rules protecting open space around the AT corridor. That bill passed the state House and went to the state Senate in early 2008.
The ATC has taken an inventory of threats to the land around the AT, and the most serious priorities include the following:
- Rocky Fork, a tract through which 1.5 miles of the AT passes in eastern Tennessee, one of the last stretches of the trail that remains in private hands.
- The Roan Highlands, along the North Carolina-Tennessee border, where conservation groups are working to protect 9,000 acres of adjacent land.
- Wesser Bald, a mountain in North Carolina where another AT section remains in private ownership. The ATC aims to protect 90 acres around the mountain.
AMC’s land conservation advocacy efforts also benefit the trail. For example, in the Mahoosuc region in Maine and New Hampshire, the land between the Androscoggin River area in Gorham, N.H., and the summit of Maine’s Old Speck is owned by timber and land investment companies and is under threat of sale or development in the near future. The ATC, the Trust for Public Land, The Conservation Fund, and the Mahoosuc Land Trust are working together to conserve land in the area. Recent successes include the Grafton Notch Parcel in Maine. A coalition of land trusts and other local groups, which includes AMC, the ATC, the Northern Forest Alliance, and The Wilderness Society, is also working with local residents to identify sustainable land use practices in the Mahoosuc region to bolster local economies while stimulating conservation.
AMC’s advocacy for federal land conservation funding seeks to protect key parcels bordering the AT corridor in the Northeast. As a founder of the Highlands Coalition, AMC is asking Congress to fully fund the Highlands Conservation Act, which covers a four-state region.
AMC is also seeking increased funding for the Forest Legacy program. While private funds raised by AMC for its Maine Woods Initiative have protected 37,000 acres and buffered about 17 miles of the AT corridor in the famed 100-Mile Wilderness, a Forest Legacy grant enabled the state of Maine to secure a permanent conservation easement on the property. As part of this project, AMC is also engaged in a partnership to potentially protect an additional 28,000 acres to the north, which would buffer an additional 4 to 5 miles of the corridor.
Fiscal year 2009 funds from the Forest Legacy, Highlands Conservation Act, and Land and Water Conservation Fund could conserve lands close to the AT such as the Tree Farm #1-Mount Hope Tract in Pennsylvania, the Greater Sterling Forest project in New York, and two projects in the Delaware Water Gap in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, according to Kristen Sykes, AMC’s Mid-Atlantic policy manager.
Development on neighboring lands isn’t the only threat. The number of hikers has altered the trail experience, too. That can be good and bad, Startzell says. “We do have a number of sites that have been hammered.” The ATC has researched the impacts of high numbers of campers on shelters and campsites and established standards for these areas—such as requiring large groups to get permits in some locations—to reduce damage. The ATC is also considering what Startzell calls the psychological impacts of hiking the trail in high-use seasons. People don’t expect to go into the woods and find a crowd.
ATC’s staff members in regional offices closely monitor development proposals for everything from ski area expansions to housing developments, logging encroachment, cell phone towers, and power line enlargements. AMC partnered with the ATC, the Maine Appalachian Trail Club, and Maine Audubon to successfully oppose a proposal to build a wind farm on Redington and Black Nubble mountains in Maine. The project would have affected views from the AT as well as wildlife habitat. (AMC is supporting wind projects elsewhere in the state.)
Trail Hazards, cont'd>>
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