Trail Notes

• Men’s Journal (June, 2001) ran an article on cabins the Potomac AT Club rents to the public along the AT from central Virginia to southern Pennsylvania. Rates for non-members of the PATC range from $10 to $55 a night. The club maintains 28 of them. One, Highacre, an 1886 Victorian in Harpers Ferry, WV, has electricity, heat and plumbing.
• Developers of the partially complete American Tobacco Trail had an exhibit at the June/July Eno River Fest in Durham, N.C. The 23-mile trail, along an abandoned rail line, will eventually traverse urban, rural and suburban landscapes in the Durham area. The trail was once a route tobacco farmers would use to get their crops to Durham for processing.
• Appalachian Life Magazine is a publication hikers and lovers of the mountains might enjoy. PATH was sent a complimentary copy of the April/May 2001 issue. Articles included a story, poems, an article on mountain music, historic travel and a profile of little Vardy, Tenn. A one-year, six-issue subscription is $20 (to “OSF Publishing”). For information, contact the magazine at www.appalachianlife.com or 423/639-2031. Mailing address is OSF Publishing, P.O. Box 1442, Greeneville, Tenn. 37744.
• PATH member and hiking author Allen De Hart was guest speaker at the Barnes & Noble bookstore in Winston-Salem in June, promoting his “Hiking North Carolina’s Mountains-to-the-Sea Trail” book and telling people about the1,000-mile trail. His lecture chronicled the 25 years it has taken to bring the trail this far in its development. He shared some of the stories and photos of his two-month trek of the trail in 1997. Want an easy $150? That’s how much money he found in small bills along the highways and roads he walked as part of the trail. A box of memorabilia he found on the trail, which he showed, included a Sept. 1968 Playboy, a garter belt thrown by a bride to him, eyeglasses and a pocket calculator. For information on Friends of the Mountains to Sea Trail, contact 3585 U.S. 401 South, Louisburg, NC 27549 (phone - 919/496-4771).
• Billy Bob Medlin deserves a big hug (or pat on the back) for finding several electrical fixtures for the storage room at the Forest Service station in Wytheville. He saved PATH several hundred dollars.
• Hard-working PATH members may soon be cool in the summer and toasty warm in the winter, thanks to Comfortemp, a new, nonwoven fiber developed by Frisby Technologies, a Winston-Salem company. The material can be used in outdoor clothing to help regulate body temperature. Mount Rogers: Outdoor Recreation Handbook by Johnny Molloy (Menasha Ridge Press. 320 pages. $16.95. paper), has created a thorough guide to this 140,000-acre park in southwest Virginia. PATH’s maintaining responsibilities start in this area.
• Blue Ridge Country magazine’s July/Aug 01 issue offered an interesting column by editor Kurt Rheinheimer entitled “Trail Magic: It starts with your first step.” He describes his experience with the AT when taking his 19-year-old son to Amicalola Falls State Park in Georgia so the son can begin a 1,250-mile trek to Virginia. He mentions some of the characters he runs into who are embarking on their thru-hike and describes the experience the AT can provide as a valuable one.
• Smithsonian magazine’s July 01 issue features “Bed and Breakfast,” an article detailing the comforts of the AT’s Fontana Hilton shelter at Fontana Dam, 163 miles north of Springer Mt., Ga. Included in the article are brief profiles of thru-hikers winding their way north, including PowerBar, a hiker determined to save food weight by packing only PowerBars.