Or go small and go short! That’s one of the many beauties of the Appalachian Trail through the Southern mountains—you can walk as little or as much as you like.
“Living has been considerably complicated of late in various ways—by war, by questions of personal liberty, and by ‘menaces’ of one kind or another. There have been created bitter antagonisms.”
Those words, perhaps as applicable today as when they appeared in The Journal of the American Institute of Architects in 1921, were written by one Benton MacKaye near the opening of “this little article,” as he called it, entitled “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning.”
One hundred years ago, Benton MacKaye proposed “a new approach to the problem of living . . . the development of the outdoor community life—as an offset and relief from the various shackles of commercial civilization.”
The project was to have four aspects in its setting of “the Appalachian skyline from the Northwoods to the great Carolina hardwood belt,” the first of which he lists as “The Trail, with each section . . . in the immediate charge of a local group of people.”
And so very soon began to come into existence what we know today as the Appalachian National Scenic Trail, almost half the miles of which are in the Southern Appalachians. MacKaye’s plans and vision—built around a series of trail-connected shelter camps, community camps and food-and-farm camps—soon clashed with those of another A.T. pioneer, Myron Avery, whose vision emphasized the footpath aspect of the ridge-line park.
These 100 years later, the Southern Mountains are deeply enriched by the fruits of both visions: Our 1,030 or so miles of trail are a stunning, challenging and beautiful realization of the footpath; and the accoutrements of hundreds of connector trails, of 28 trail communities, of a dozen trail clubs dedicated to maintenance of trail and shelters are a latter-day manifestation of the “camps” perspective.
For those of us lucky enough to live near the corridor and its accompanying assets, it’s not trail philosophy or perspective that counts so much as does the existence of a wonderful place to go outside and play. The hundreds upon hundreds of access points can open an outdoors day to walks ranging from just getting out of the car and putting your foot on the trail for the first time to challenging, summit-including loop walks lasting an hour, that day or longer.
There are so many versions of the perfect outdoors day in these mountains . . . the trout stream, the long run, the sail upon the lake, the rail-trail bicycle ride, the river paddle and more. But for some of us in and of these Southern mountains, the fullest manifestation is out upon something conceived 100 years ago, with your feet on the geography of famous vistas and placenames, and upon the footsteps of all of those—famous, family and unknown—who have walked before us on The Great Trail.
The story above first appeared in our July/August 2021 issue.
