A series of tragedies steered Joe Morris toward the Appalachian Trail—and a new calling.
Photo Above: Joe Morris says he “started coming with a regular Thursday crew and now it’s exploded. It’s essentially the entirety of my life.”
Photos Courtesy of Courtesy of Joe Morris.
For four long, difficult years, Joe Morris had endured one loss after another. His father died of cancer, a close friend in a car accident. The family defense contracting business, Morris’s primary source of income for 27 years, closed its doors. He and his wife divorced and his daughter went off to college.
“My life completely fell apart,” he recalls.
So in 2010, the Greeneville, Tennessee, native started hiking the Appalachian Trail. Along the way, Morris took lots of photos and compiled some of them for a book.
“I was a very lost person trying to fill time, and the trail, as it does for a lot of people, represented a transitional point. A lot of people that go to the trail are healing from one thing or another or they’re transitioning from one period of life to another. I just walked. I didn’t have anything else to do except walk, pray and cry.”
Wrapping up one of his section treks in the spring of 2012, he headed back to the parking lot where his truck was parked in Burke’s Garden, Virginia. Out of the blue, a couple of volunteers handing out water and oranges to the weary hikers asked him where he lived. “There’s a trail club there called Tennessee Eastman Hiking & Canoeing Club,” they told him. “They build trails and clear them and do maintenance. They could use some help.”
“I had no idea that volunteers did 95% of the work on all these pathways,” Morris says. “That applies to state parks, most greenways, the AT, you name it. It’s done by all-volunteer labor.”
He decided to give it a shot. What more, after all, could he lose? That summer, he joined a crew spreading gravel on the trail at Round Bald near Roan Mountain.
“I worked like a mule, not only figuratively but literally,” he jokes. “The belt was around my waist because we had to pull this thing uphill. You had to kind of lean back and walk backwards pulling this large, vibrating gravel compactor. I could not get out of bed the next morning.”
Several years later, the volunteer coordinator confided to him with a laugh, “I didn’t really think you’d come back.”
“That was how it started for me,” Morris says. “It was not really any fancier than that. I started coming with a regular Thursday crew and now it’s just exploded. It’s essentially the entirety of my life. I spend most of my days planning or doing outreach for some trail system somewhere. It’s been the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Now the Southern Projects Coordinator for TEHCC, one of 31 clubs under a volunteer service agreement with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Morris oversees a crew that maintains a 134-mile stretch of the AT from Spivey Gap, North Carolina, to the Virginia-Tennessee state line.
It isn’t a desk job, either. Twice a week, he accompanies a small group of volunteers to repair damaged trails and build new ones. He is constantly searching for fresh recruits through his Trail Maintainers podcast, Facebook, Meetup and other social media outlets “to try and find new people to energize them to come out. There’s a job for everybody, male, female, young, old. … It doesn’t have to be demanding physical labor. It can be something as simple as reporting accurately the location of a downed tree, what size it is, where it is, with a picture with something in it to give it spatial reference so we know what materials to bring to remove it.”
The need is much more than cosmetic, Morris points out. Heavy rain and winds topple trees throughout the spring season, blocking trails and forcing hikers to climb over or find a way around. Delicate soil and sensitive vegetation are easily damaged by muddy boots.
“If you don’t maintain those really high-use areas, people begin to wander all over the mountain,” he says. “Were it not for the dedication of a very, very small group of people, trail systems as we know them would simply go back to the earth very quickly.”
Many trail maintainers initially join because they love the outdoors and the chance to connect with like-minded hiking enthusiasts. What they don’t expect, Morris says, is the sense of belonging it gives them.
“For many of them, they don’t have any family left so we take care of one another. We reach out to one another. There’s a guy named Bob Peoples, an Appalachian Trail Hall of Famer who lives in Hampton, Tennessee. I call him every week. Since my parents have died, he’s like my surrogate big brother/father. I check on him without fail, and likewise.”
To Morris’s delight, the hands-on skills he learned as a boy have transferred perfectly to his volunteer work for the AT. His grandfather, who built his own rock walls and homes in southeastern Kentucky, taught him how to replace chair bottoms, shape wood with a drawknife, and use other traditional tools.
“For me, a deep connection to the mountains and specifically the land and anything I could do manually associated with that is paramount for me,” Morris says. “It was an easy step over a specific line, not hard at all. As it turns out, it appealed to my sense of spatial acuity as well.”
Ultimately, his newfound mission has done so much more.
“The Appalachian Trail saved my life,” he says. “It gave me purpose. It gave me a reason to get up in the morning. I owe that community my very best effort every day. … I loved my jobs and I loved my career, but I’m a trail maintainer. That’s what I was born to do and that’s who I am.”
Joe Morris’s 3 Favorite Hiking Trails in Northeast Tennessee
“I really am energized by pathways that lead to waterfalls, overlooks, things that families use,” says Joe Morris, Southern projects coordinator for Tennessee Eastman Hiking & Canoeing Club, which maintains part of the Appalachian Trail. Here are his three favorites:
Margarette Falls Trail, Greeneville.This 2.7-mile out-and-back trail features a 60-foot-tall “beautiful waterfall and it’s not a long walk,” Morris says. “It’s used mostly by families. So when we work on that, we see grandparents with 6-year-old kids in flipflops or Crocs. That does it for me, that I can make that treadway safe for those kids and their grandparents to make memories with each other.”
Whitehouse Cliffs Trail, Rocky Fork State Park, Flag Pond. Built by all-volunteer labor, Morris’s group was given artistic license to create the steep trail as they saw fit. “So we built this magnificent 2-mile-out-and-back to a 360-degree overlook, which is absolutely stunning. And it also started at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s amazing.”
Kingswood Treadway, Bean Station. After his mother’s death five years ago, Morris, who’s adopted, launched the J.C. Morris Family Foundation to help foster kids. In 2020-21, volunteers and students from Kingswood Home For Children constructed the family-friendly loop on the north shore of Cherokee Lake near Morristown. “It’s used by the kids at the foster home, but it’s also open to the public,” Morris says. “It’s 1.6 miles right now, but we’re actually going to start extending that this year and make it larger because it’s become rather popular.”
The story above first appeared in our May / June 2023 issue.
