[at-l] Fw: AT Connection in Alabama

[JPL]

Interesting news article recently in the Birmingham News:

      Hiking to Maine? Start in Alabama
      Sunday, March 09, 2008 
      THOMAS SPENCER
      News staff writer 
      CHEAHA MOUNTAIN STATE PARK - The rumble of the front-end loader died away, the 10,000-pound limestone and granite boulder finally in its place. 

      The fog had cleared, and from the rocky overlook, the land fell away to the wooded valley that stretched out west 2,000 feet below. The shadowy humps of mountains to the north and to the south touched the low clouds. 

      And snaking into the woods was the Pinhoti Trail, marked with blue blazes, heading toward the ridges beyond, a continuous footpath that is now connected to the Appalachian Trail and can take a hiker up the spine of the mountains from Alabama 2,504 miles to Mount Katahdin in Maine. 

      Tom Cosby, a hiker and the marketing director of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce, watched the boulder placed in its spot, marking the Pinhoti Trail's highest point in Alabama. It was a crowning moment of more than two decades of work, and the fulfillment of a vision first articulated in 1925, a feat that will be celebrated next Sunday with the official opening of the Pinhoti Trail's connection to the Appalachian Trail. 

      "This puts Alabama on the map as a mountain hiking destination," Cosby said. 

      The Pinhoti also stretches south and will eventually be completed to Flagg Mountain in Coosa County, the southernmost mountain of the Appalachian mountain system. Backers hope eventually to make the case for getting the Alabama extension recognized as the official southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, which would require an act of Congress. 

      334 miles to AT: 

      From Cheaha, Alabama's highest mountain, it's 334 miles up through the remote regions of the Talladega National Forest and through the Chattahoochee National Forest in northwest Georgia to the beginning of the Appalachian Trail at Springer Mountain. 

      Currently, the trail takes about six months to hike. Adding the Pinhoti connection would extend that hike by about a month. 

      "For those hardy souls who want to hike the length of the Appalachians, you really ought to start in Alabama," Cosby said. 

      An Alabama extension was envisioned even when the Appalachian Trail was just an idea. At the founding meeting of the Appalachian Trail Conference, the father of the trail, Benton MacKaye, laid out a vision for a trail that would run 1,700 miles from Georgia to New Hampshire, "with extensions proposed to Katahdin in Maine, in the north and, in the south, to Lookout Mountain in Tennessee and then to Birmingham, Alabama." 

      A senator from Maine had the trail extended into Maine in the 1930s. But it wasn't until the early 1980s that the real work of making the Alabama connection began. 

      That's when Mike Leonard, then a lawyer at the Birmingham firm Cabaniss, Johnston, started looking at a map and dreaming. 

      "When I was a teenager and in college," the North Carolina native said, "I spent a lot of time hiking on the Appalachian Trail. When I got to Birmingham, I was looking at a map and I thought, "Gee, it would be interesting to link the Pinhoti Trail to the Appalachian Trail." 

      He got involved in the effort to have the national forest land around Cheaha protected as a wilderness area. When that work was completed in 1983, he started trying to put the route together on paper, determining the possible paths and landowners. 

      Overcame roadblocks: 

      Plenty of people said it couldn't be done, Leonard said. There were roadblocks, such as a piece of property that took four years of negotiation to secure. 

      In 1986, Leonard returned to North Carolina but stayed active in the effort to connect the trails, lobbying Congress and working with Georgia groups and Alabama's land conversation fund, Forever Wild, for money to support land purchases. 

      Leonard estimated that the project, with the help of Forever Wild, the Georgia Conservation Fund and the USDA Forest Service, has led to the acquisition of about 7,000 acres in Alabama and 400 in Georgia. 

      "I've spent more time hiking around Capitol Hill and Goat Hill talking to people about the Pinhoti Trail than I ever did hiking it," Leonard said. "I'm hoping to solve that problem. I'm 55. I'm in pretty good shape. I've got some hiking left in me." 

      Leonard said others, such as Pete Conroy of Jacksonville State University, deserve credit for pushing the project along. The late U.S. Rep. Tom Bevill championed the trail in Congress, and other members of the Alabama congressional delegation were helpful, as were landowners such as former state Rep. Gerald Willis, who donated a key eight-mile trail easement through land he owns in Cherokee County. 

      But as important as those efforts were, the trail wouldn't have come about if not for the countless volunteers with Alabama and Georgia trail groups who hacked through the woods and hand-built the trail. 

      "I can't understate the importance of that," Leonard said. 

      Pristine wilderness: 

      Hikers in the know have been taking advantage of the route. Wendi Merritt, a self-employed investigative consultant, has hiked from Sylacauga the length of the Alabama Pinhoti and across the border to Cave Springs, Ga. 

      That trek takes seven to 14 days, during which you never pass through a town, most of it spent climbing and descending the pine-topped mountains of the Talladega National Forest, past waterfalls and mountain streams and small valley lakes. There are ridgetop views where the only thing you see are other forested mountains with no sign of human civilization, breathing in smog-free air, rich with the smell of pine and earth. 

      "The Pinhoti ... Oh, my goodness. It is the place to get away. To me it is solitude," Merritt said. 

      Highlights for Merritt included the Lower Shoal Creek Shelter, where two creeks merge and border the shelter on three sides with rushing water. Then there is the rocky, steep climb up the "Stairway to Heaven" in the Cheaha Wilderness, which arrives at a rocky overlook called Heaven. 

      "It's very exhilarating to reach the top of it," Merritt said. It is a magnificent experience. People don't realize this is here. There are mountains here in Alabama." 

      For Cosby, that's been a long-running frustration. 

      When he can persuade people to come take a look at central Alabama, what they see confounds their expectations. 

      "They see the hills and they're surprised it's not flat cotton fields, that we have these beautiful mountains here," Cosby said. 


      E-mail: tspencer at bhamnews.com 



      © 2008 The Birmingham News
      © 2008 al.com All Rights Reserved. 
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