Bodacious, Peoples, Ballard & Rosen

Today's episode consists of interviews with and about some legends of the A.T. The first is John Beaudet. John, known as Bodacious, is a four time A.T. thru-hiker and well known artist in eastern Tennessee. He carves the unique hiking sticks that the Museum awards to each inductee into the A.T. Hall of Fame. Find out more about Bodacious at https://bodaciousat.com/

Next is Bob Peoples. He's the owner of the Kincora hostel in Tennessee and the originator of the Hard Core trail crew. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2018.

The late Ed Ballard was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2024. We speak with Ed's son Bob and grandson Tim.

Finally we speak with Ron Rosen. Ron is widely recognized as one of the most effective volunteers in the history of the A.T., serving in several trail-wide positions as well as with the New York New Jersey Trail Conference for more than 50 years.

Transcript

SPEAKER_06 0:07

This is a Trail of History, a podcast of the Appalachian Trail. A Trail of History tells the stories of the Appalachian Trail. It is a production of the Appalachian Trail Museum. The museum, located in South Central Pennsylvania, near the AT's midpoint, tells the stories of the founding, construction, preservation, maintenance, protection, and enjoyment of the trail since its creation. Today's episode consists of interviews with and about some legends of the AT. The first is John Baudet. John, known as Baudacious, carves the unique hiking sticks that we award to each inductee into the AT Hall of Fame. Next is Bob Peoples, the owner of the Kincora Hiker Hostel in Tennessee and the originator of the hardcore trail crew. He was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2018. The late Ed Ballard was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2024. We speak with Ed's son Bob and his grandson Tim. Finally, we speak with another 2024 inductee, Ron Rosen. These interviews were recorded during the 2024 Hall of Fame celebration. They are interviewed by Jim Foster and Larry Luxemburg of the museum. Hi everybody, my name is Jim Foster, and uh we are here uh at the Iron Master's Mansion at Pine Grove Furnace State Park, which is just on the road, a piece from the Appalachian Trail Museum, and it's induction day for our 2024 class of the uh Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame. It's hard to believe, but it's the 14th uh class. I think, Larry, this is 64 people that we've inducted, uh, which is which is great. And we are uh having interviews today of uh some of the honorees. Um the first person is technically not a uh Hall of Fame inductee, I would say, yet, but he's an honoree because he is receiving uh Larry's uh Lifetime Achievement Award. And uh and and uh he is to my uh uh left uh John Burret, whose trail name is Bodacious. So welcome, Bodaceus. Thank you, thank you. Thank you. Um so I know you you live in is it Flagpond, Tennessee? Is that did I get that right? Um and is that where you grew up or or where did you grow up?

SPEAKER_05 2:50

Well I grew up uh in Texas. Okay, but my mother lived my mother's from Harrisburg. Oh really? So when I started hiking the AT, I always sent her a picture of the building that's now the museum because she knew where I was because she came to Pygrove Furnace to hike. So I kind of have a there's a there's a house out in these woods around here somewhere that was my grandfather's house, but I don't know where it is. What's no, I moved I moved to Tennessee after hiking a lot.

SPEAKER_06 3:20

Well, there is a guy who is the uh uh and we're getting a bit off the subject, but uh there is a guy who's the head of the Friends of Pine Grove Furnace who basically knows all the history of this area. We uh sometime we should have you meet him, and uh I bet he could figure out if you give him any kind of idea where of where that is, I bet I bet he could figure that out. But uh back to the AT, his name is Andre Weltman. Uh but you should you should get to know him, and I I bet he might have an idea of uh of where that is. So you hike the AT twice, is that correct? Uh and and then two more. And then two you didn't okay, so I I sold you short. Okay. When did you hike the AT?

SPEAKER_05 4:08

2001 first, then uh again in 03, 2010, and then I did a section hike during all those years that so I did four.

SPEAKER_06 4:18

Okay. Well, great, because I only did it once. What made you decide to hike the Appalachian Trail?

SPEAKER_05 4:27

Actually, we when I was a little kid, we we were we were in a hiking club, and we went hiking, I think, once a month with a hiking club, and we had that National Geographic book about the AT, which I still have, and it's got a it's got a copy of a newspaper article in it about acquiring the lands in the Cumberland Valley because my mom was from here, you know. So I looked at that book when I was a kid, and we went hiking a lot, and I looked at that book all the time, you know. Uh we used to go to the Smokies. My birthday's in the summer, we would go to the Smokies for my birthday, and I remember being at Klingman's Dome and saying, Well, what are those people doing with the packs? And that told me what that was. So, you know, I knew since I was a kid, well, that that would be pretty neat, you know. So when I had a chance, I went and did it.

SPEAKER_06 5:23

Cool. So I think I may have left out in the introduction why you are receiving the uh Lifetime Achievement Award, and that is since we began the AT Hall of Fame in in uh 2011, you have uh carved hiking sticks as the sort of trophies or Oscar or what have you for the inductees into the Hall of Fame. You've you've done them since since the very beginning, and we're extremely grateful about that. By the way, uh for those of you who uh are watching this online, um we have a display room at on the first floor of the uh uh Iron Masters that has several of the hiking sticks, and you can see uh Baudacious's handiwork. How'd you get into carving?

SPEAKER_05 6:14

Well, I mean I I had I hiked all my life, and I when I started hiking, I realized driving up here that was 60 years ago. Everybody had a wooden walking stick. Uh and I was kind of a bad kid. I would I would the group would keep going and I'd go over here looking for something, but I knew I could always find them because those walking sticks make a little dimple in the ground, you know, and I could follow the group and catch back up to them. But uh I carved walking sticks, I always had a nice walking stick, you know, and just uh over the years, you know, I you start with just sitting around a campfire with a pocket knife, you know, making a nicer walking stick than you one you have, you know. And I it was always it seemed like you were more likely, I was more likely to go take a hike if I had a nice walking stick to take, you know. So I was always making a nicer walking stick, you know, and I just over the years got more tools, more different ways to make them, and just it's just became a hobby. Uh started making them and giving them to my friends.

SPEAKER_07 7:26

So that's uh when you do when you do trail maintenance with them on the way out, you always have to look up because you're looking for straight sour wood branches so you can make more sticks.

SPEAKER_06 7:40

Well, that was the next thing I was gonna ask. So uh thanks, Bob. Um just I you and I have talked about the process of selecting uh the wood and and uh tell us what that is, and so so kind of walk us through the process from selecting the walking stick to actually carving it and and what goes what goes through that.

SPEAKER_05 8:06

Well, I mean, probably a lot of y'all have carved a nice walking stick for yourself, and you probably find out, oh, I'm not like yours, though. But I mean you get a nice piece of wood and you maybe carve a little handle, make it nice, and and uh a year or two later you see that it's got a big crack going down the side. You know, most woods will dry out and crack. So uh I actually learned from one of our Hall of Famers, Horace Kiphart. If you read Horace Kiphart's Our Southern Highlanders, he talks about how all the mountain people in the Smokies at that time had a good walking cane. That's what they called them back then, a walking cane, and that they were made out of sour wood. Because sour wood will not split. Uh you can actually carve it when it's green, it's still wet with sap, and as it dries out, it won't crack. If you get a piece of ash or something and you carve it away and make it real nice, and then you set it in the corner, over the next six months it's gonna dry out and crack all the pieces, so your work is ruined. So if you're gonna, you know, you wouldn't want to spend a whole lot of time carving a stick if it's some kind of wood that's just gonna crack all apart. So the sour wood is sour wood doesn't, you know, you you you can pretty much count on a sour wood won't crack all the pieces on you, so if you put a lot of time into carving an elaborate stick, you know it's gonna last a while. So I learned that from Horace Kepphart. Okay.

SPEAKER_06 9:40

Uh so you've you've selected your your sour wood uh stick, and what's the next step then after that?

SPEAKER_05 9:50

Well, uh people that make these sticks have you know all have a unique collection of tools, but it's mostly you start with a draw knife, which we use in trail maintenance a lot, taking the bark off of logs to use in for on the trail. Well, for a walking stick, you use a draw knife and you I mean you have to go out in the woods and find the nice piece of wood to begin with. Uh, sour wood is particularly good also because the you know the woodsmen say you can't kill a sour wood if if a if a big tree falls and it knocks a sour wood down as it comes down, sourwood's an understory tree. Well, the sour wood won't die. It'll lay flat on the forest floor and it'll put up shoots and and continue to grow. So those are little shoots growing with a big root system from a mature tree, so they grow really fast and straight. So that's what you're looking for because it doesn't have many knots in it. But you take that home and use a draw knife and shave it down, get it down to the size you like. Uh then you start with different carving tools. I've got a whole box of I've got half a dozen draw knives and a and a whole box of everything from pocket knives to I even my dentist gave me some of his tools. I have some little tiny dentist tools that you could put uh wrinkles in a in a face on a stick with uh uh a lot of them are called uh uh micro gouges. You know, you you you've seen people building cabins with a gouge. A gouge is a chisel is flat, a gouge is curved. So you could you, you know, if you're cutting notches for a cabin, you can use a gouge and chop out a lot of wood. Well, I have what they call micro gouges for the lettering that are I mean they're tiny. You know, without glasses, I can't even tell which one I have in my hand because they're so small. So you just have to collect a you know a lot of tools.

SPEAKER_07 11:54

Just to give you an example of his talent, he uh carved a three-dimensional lady swipper for his wife, a pink lady swipper, and a couple years later he carved a three-dimensional yellow lady swipper with the beards, which is the man is an artist.

SPEAKER_06 12:15

Well, for those of you who've never seen Baudacious's sticks, they are truly works of art. They are they are amazing. That's his bear carb in the the uh children's section of the of the uh museum, too. Uh well that that's a good segue into my next question. Um what uh what other things other than hiking sticks have you carved that we might like to know about?

SPEAKER_05 12:44

I carved a lot of fish, fish and birds for a lot of years. Uh there's kind of a thing with trout fishermen that you don't have to kill the trout you just caught. You can release them, take a picture, take some measurements, and get different artists who will carve you a replica of that fish, so you can let your fish go. I saw some of those, so I made a I like those. I made a lot of those, I made a lot of birds. Uh started doing chainsaw bears. Uh they're getting a little hard to carve. That chainsaw is heavy. So I I I've I I keep trying to get smaller, so I've been carving, actually carving wildflowers, like Bob said. Uh lady slipper orchids are particularly neat to carve. Uh trying to do smaller things that aren't so hard on a person's bod.

SPEAKER_07 13:42

The uh in uh the West Wing uh the hostel, my hostel, he's carved an old man of the woods detected one of the buildings of that hostel.

SPEAKER_06 13:52

And I think you've carved the old man of the woods in some of the hiking sticks too, haven't you? Uh I believe so. I've I've I know I've seen that. Larry, yeah. Uh any questions you have?

SPEAKER_02 14:04

Um John, can you talk about how long it takes you to, you know, wandering around the woods, how many miles to identify the wood, and then the time frame for curing the wood, and then how long it takes you to to carve each one of the sticks?

SPEAKER_05 14:24

Yeah, I I mean I I have friends in the neighborhood and they'll always they'll come over and they'll see those sticks and they'll oh I I want you to carve me one. So they're always surprised because I tell them, okay, here's the deal. I I got lots of work to do around here, so if you'll go do what I need to be doing, I'll sit on the porch. It'll take eight hours. Does that work? Does that work? Nobody's ever taken me up to I wasn't sure that was gonna be chemo grass, pullweeds in the vegetable garden. I'll be on the porch work your walking stick, and uh they don't they're not putting in eight hours, but uh it's about eight hours, and that's not including finding the wood in the woods. You you can walk all day and only find one or two, or you can walk up to a sour wood that's been knocked down that has three perfect ones on one tree, you know. You just never know. But uh as Bob attests, I'm never in the woods, I'm not looking for them. I bring them back from trail work.

SPEAKER_07 15:28

Anybody's walking out with them, they have to walk too.

SPEAKER_05 15:31

But I mean it's it's probably an hour or two for every one you find in the woods. It takes it takes a while to find them uh to get nice straight ones.

SPEAKER_06 15:43

Well, every year uh Bacious asked me how many people are getting in next year so that I know how many I have to go get in the woods, uh, as he just described. So rather than having to send you an email, since you're right here, I'll tell you we're we're doing four next year. So so uh and uh well they they can crack.

SPEAKER_05 16:08

So, you know, uh the first year, I I'll never forget the first year because Larry called me and said, Oh, we're gonna have this Hall of Fame, and you know, could you make walking sticks? And it was only maybe six weeks' time till that was gonna happen. And uh I had to think about could I make that many sticks in that short a time? And then, of course, the curmudgeon Earl Schaefer stick cracked twice. I made his I made his stick three times in like six weeks because it kept cracking. I know I never heard that. So interesting. I I uh I already have some sticks that I've brought home for next year because they can crack, and I uh arthritis is slowly ruining my hands too, so it takes me a long time to get them made. So I've already started. I see I I need to know ahead of time just so I know. Okay, didn't you get the wrong spelling for Jan?

SPEAKER_07 17:03

Pam underwood stick, or what are the sticks?

SPEAKER_05 17:06

Uh we I think we had a we had a one that I yeah, I think I still have that. I have a stick that I couldn't get the letter off of there without it being noticeable, so I still have that stick and I I use it to lay out the next batch, you know.

SPEAKER_07 17:23

Yeah, he not only carves the four to the recipients, he also can carves the one that's out here in the rack. Yeah. The year stick for the uh each year for the for the four recipients. Yeah. Which where did yours go, by the way? There's Larry took it.

SPEAKER_06 17:40

Yeah, that sounds like something the replacement for Bob's year has been with the sticks for this year, so and and I I believe maybe I shouldn't uh mention this on video uh because it's incriminating, but uh it we used to have the sticks over at the museum, and then they came over here, and when they came over here, we discovered that one of the year's sticks was gone. 18. Yeah, 18 is gone the year that Bob got in. It had nothing to do with Bob. And maybe Bob took it, who knows? But uh Bob may have taken it. But but uh you know, we we we still are counting on a replacement stick for 2018 because we cannot find it. So this is at the post in the shelter. It could be.

SPEAKER_05 18:31

We brought it with us this year. It wasn't Bob, he already had a stick, so he would take it.

SPEAKER_02 18:38

There are other groups you've also done sticks for, Alda and ATC as well.

SPEAKER_05 18:46

Yeah, this was something uh that I I mean I made I I've made sticks for different people just because they had done a lot of a lot for the trail or for conservation efforts in my area. You know, I I know I had made Bob a stick before he got in the Hall of Fame. Uh I I remember making one for Larry and brought it to Alda before we had a museum. Uh I remember giving one to Gene Espy, um Lori Pottinger, different people that I knew that had done a lot of work that I appreciated I would make them one. I've made them for different, I mean we like we had a bunch of issues with the Rocky Fork area where I live and the different people, mostly lawyers that helped us straighten that out. I made them a walking stick. Cool. Uh I make them sometimes for some of the nonprofits down there, and they'll auction them off at a at a fundraiser or something. So it was something I just did to people I knew.

SPEAKER_07 19:54

So that's that's why I'm people joined me back in.

SPEAKER_06 20:02

Well well, thank you, Bod Asian. Yeah, Bill had one too. I got one. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 20:07

I uh just speaking to that uh at Trail Days one year uh you uh the board lost uh one of its founding members this year, Nol De Capacante, who died in uh July, I think it was. And uh one trail days a few years ago, Audacious walked up to Noel and presented him with one of these uh you know uh sticks that he did just for Noel. And Noel stood there, you know, he's holding it, and he couldn't believe it. You know, he just it really, really meant a lot to Noel. He was all he was basically speechless. He he just he was dumb about it. He couldn't believe that you had done that for him. And he kept it in his little uh office down in Florida here that was surrounded by a trail memorabilia, and so where that stick was was right there all the time. So that's it means so much to people get that operation.

SPEAKER_07 21:07

So there's so many people in Noah's a good example that do so much for the trail and the trail organizations and get no recognition, and John Stick just recognized them, and that's that's super.

SPEAKER_06 21:25

Well, I I did not know Baudacious before he started carving sticks for us, and we don't see each other uh all that often, uh just occasions like this. And I have to say, you're you're one of the kindest and most gracious uh people that I know, and uh I'm I'm really glad to have gotten to know you in and uh you have to stay in good health uh because I mean we we envision having this Hall of Fame for a hundred years or more, so uh and we're counting on you to be carving sticks uh for for all of those.

SPEAKER_05 21:58

That's nice of you. I'd like to carve them for a long time. If anybody has the secret cure to arthritis, let me know, because that's that's what I need.

SPEAKER_06 22:09

Thank you. Thank you very much. We're we're delighted to finally get you here and inter interview you. We've been talking about this for a while. So the fellow who was who was piping up uh uh during uh the talk with uh Bacious is Bob Peoples. And for any of you who've hiked any distance on on the AT, particularly in uh in the southern part of the trail, but uh I I I said when when we inducted Bob into the Hall of Fame in in 2018 that uh the word uh living legend gets thrown around a lot and and probably unjustifiably, but but Bob is truly a living legend on the Appalachian Trail. So welcome back to the to the museum and to the Iron Masters. Uh and we never you're another one that we have never had a chance to interview, and so we're first gonna talk uh about you a little bit, and then we're gonna talk about the person uh that you're here representing. Um I'm going way out on a limb here and and saying that you're not from uh from Tennessee based on having heard you talk. Um where where are you originally from, sir? Do you don't think I'm from the northeast of Tennessee?

SPEAKER_07 23:24

The extreme northeast, perhaps tenement housing, streets of Boston. Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_06 23:31

Yeah. Go Red Sox. Go Red Sox. Go Go Bruins. Well, I'm a Penguins fan, so so that now you're getting into dangerous territory. Um so um what what uh what did you do before you went down south and got involved with the Kincora hostel?

SPEAKER_07 23:53

I'm retired Air Force, uh aircraft maintenance officer, uh, 21 years. That's why I talked to Rush. And uh well, um then after I retired, the kids graduated from college and uh married, uh, the wife and I figured our responsibility was over. Uh I was a maintainer for the Green Mountain Club. So I decided I'm getting out of the snow country, I'm going to the hills of Tennessee and left my blade in Vermont, and that was a mistake when I moved down there because there was a lot of snow in the mountains of Vermont in Tennessee. But uh we took a road trip in '94. It went from Davenport Gap to the Pennsylvania line. Every place the AT crossed pavement. And my only criteria was the land that I bought had to be within a half a mile of the trailhead. And so I'm at Dennis Cove because it's two tents from the trailhead, and that was the closest. Being a hiker, and Larry, I think, will back me up and Bill. If the hostel or the shelter's over half a mile away, my tent is going up. I'm not doing extra miles. So that was my criteria, so that's how I ended up where I am with Kinkora. And Kinkora means kinship at the heart. That's Celtic. And when you get together with hikers, we're all coming from the same place. We all have the same interest, we all have the same desires. That's why it's immediate friendship and family when you deal with hikers. Well said. Um when did you start the King Coral Hostel? Um, I bought the land in 94 and started the hostel in 95. It took me a little over a year to build it. And uh, so the first year was actually March of 97. Okay. And uh I didn't know if I could get 200 hikers because I was Vermont and didn't know how many hikers were on the Apache Trail.

SPEAKER_08 26:03

And wow.

SPEAKER_06 26:07

I have my own story about uh about uh staying at the Kincora Hostel in 2003 when I did my through hike. What Bob used to do, and I assume still does, is uh he takes a group of hikers into town to resupply in the in the and and we all get in the back of his truck, and and I almost uh threw up in the back of Bob's truck going there, bouncing on the roads. So that's that's my I have to say, you were very hospitable, but that's the the the biggest thing that I remember from staying at the King Court Hostel was almost throwing up in the back of your truck.

SPEAKER_07 26:46

That's not normally the complaint. Usually the complaint is you got in the back of the truck and I didn't take you grocery shop and I gave you a tool and you had trail maintenance to do. I can do that.

SPEAKER_06 26:57

Maybe you knew that I already maintained a section of the AT. You can answer that. Maybe you knew that I already maintained a section of the AT when I hiked it. You escaped. Yeah. Um so that's only a part of what you do for the trail. Uh you're also incredibly well known as uh the the recruiting for recruiting uh people to do trail maintenance, and in particular the hardcore crew. Can you briefly describe what the hardcore crew is about?

SPEAKER_07 27:30

Yeah. When you started hardcore, what the concept was, and I still feel the same way, it's awfully difficult to recruit, get young people involved. We've got to get people behind us that'll pick up the burden. And consequently, started hardcore and already had one foot up because those people were hikers. They were hiking on the trail. Who made that for them? And consequently, how do you make it better for the next hiker? So hardcore was the Sunday and Monday after trail days, and it involved most years a hundred hikers. 50 of the current year hikers, 50 returning hikers. So in 15 years, um we picked them up Sunday morning at Damascus, take, have a day pack in the trucks, and they would have sandwiches, water, and apple in the day pack. That was your lunch. Then you'd work all day, you'd stay with me at Kincora or down at Bramer Castle that night. Then you'd work all day on Monday and would have a pasta dinner for you Monday night. Sunday night it was normally a pork barbecue and salad and stuff. And then the the catch to it when you signed up, where are you on the trail and do you need a ride back to it? Yeah. So then when the returning hikers came in, where are you and uh where are you driving back to? And how many seats do you have in your vehicle? So somebody needs to come up to Pine Furnace. Rush is coming up 81. Put Rush together with the hiker, he gives them a ride up to 81 in Pine Furnace. And in 15 years, we never missed. So the final thing we did on Monday, about 2.30 in the afternoon, he yelled, anybody wants to paint a blaze, follow one of the maintainers. So they all painted a blaze. And they painted the blaze where they worked. And now, are we over blazed in some areas? Yeah, who cares? But the bottom line is they took possession of what they had done.

SPEAKER_06 30:11

Yeah. I have to say, I've I've been involved with uh the the Appalachian Trail for a while, and every official uh with every hike hiking club uh that maintains the AT that I've talked to has said the biggest problem that we have is recruiting young people to join the trail. And I I would imagine everybody in this room would would say the same thing.

SPEAKER_07 30:35

And one of the mistakes, Jim, that people go, they go to the universities and try and get the outing club. And the outing club's already overburdened.

SPEAKER_08 30:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_07 30:46

What you need is the community service person. Every college has got 30 hours or more community service. Go to them and recruit with them, do service learning, the 10-hour requirement. Um it's it's a perfect place to get recruits. It's that's good advice.

SPEAKER_06 31:08

Larry, any any questions for you?

SPEAKER_02 31:12

Yeah, so so on that same theme. Um so so ordinarily people have trouble recruiting. You limit it to 100 slots. So I want to know more about your secrets of recruiting. I I have a professional interest in this.

SPEAKER_07 31:32

Well, as I say, that's the way I go after the college groups and stuff is going after community services.

SPEAKER_02 31:37

For hardcore, you you filled out uh I I was filled up by Friday afternoon.

SPEAKER_07 31:43

Yeah, there was a line at nine o'clock in the morning to sign up. Um because it was a chance for them to pay back. That's what it was all about. Um they could learn, but they had two days of free food, um, they had transportation, they were back to the site, we didn't cause them any problem trying to return to the site. It was a total package. Now were the mistakes, yeah, there were. And one mistake there was this guy, and he got in the truck at eight o'clock in the morning at Damascus, and arised upon mountain. We took a shot cut and it was straight up. And he was sitting on a rock, and uh Tom went by and said, Are you okay? Do you have any water? And said, There's two bottles in your day pack. I already drank them. He was still drunk. He had no idea what he got in and went into the truck where he was going. He had a really bad two days. Do you give up journey? Well, again, we turned them to Damascus. Well, but that's the thing with recruiting is get the young people. We've we've got to get them. And the key to it is get the person that lives in the neighborhood. The hike of ATC recruit the two hica. That's great, except they're going back to Oregon. You know, you've got to get the day hike up. That's what you really need.

SPEAKER_06 33:31

Yeah, that's that's a so we uh inducted you into the to the hall of fame in in 2018, and uh, as I said, this is our first opportunity to interview you. You are actually here to represent another uh person who we're inducting uh uh this year, uh who's from the Tennessee Eastman uh hiking club, uh Ray Hunt. Um I'll ask you a general question first, just tell us about Ray Hunt.

SPEAKER_07 34:02

Ray Hunt was really an interesting person and uh quiet person. Um very dedicated and a real doer. Yeah he maintained Ron High Knob Shelter, stewardship fire, which we're now working on to re to replace the little logs that are uh decaying. But Ray was the head of ATC in the in the 80s, 83 to 89. And um and when I knew him, he was land acquisition, uh, Tennessee and North Carolina. And uh just uh really dedicated person, a d uh a a doer. Um one of his key interests when he was the head of ATC was publications. Get the word out, and how do you do that? And he did something as a he was a maintainer, I'm a maintainer, John's a maintainer, Joe's a maintainer, uh Brandon's the Forest Service maintainer for our section uh trails. Um he did something that I wish ATC would do again, and and Rush, I think, will back me up in this. We tried to do it and it didn't happen. He had a conference each year that all the clubs got together and told each other what they did best. It was a workshop for maintenance people that said, Hey, what do you got that I could use? And an example of stuff that we have, um we put wire on the bridges so you don't slide off, and we have graffiti boards so you don't write all over the shelter, you write on the graffiti board. When we came up here, one of the guys found Sherman Williams had a uh anti-graffiti paint, a matte paint that the Potomac Club used, so we put that on the shelters. You know, and everybody has specialties, but we don't know what they are. And and Ray had put all that together. Good. And it was somewhere in the meantime, it's gone away.

SPEAKER_06 36:27

Tell us some of the other important things that Ray did uh down in Tennessee.

SPEAKER_07 36:32

Well, land acquisition was a was a big one because that was when ATC was gaining all the land, but Ray was key on the 65-mile remote to put the round mountains on the trail, and they built that 65 miles in three years.

SPEAKER_06 36:50

I'm not sure if I should thank them for that because Rome Mountain is a tough climb.

SPEAKER_07 36:54

You can thank Hardcore for putting all those switchbacks on Rowan Mountain and the ones that did that. It used to be the Rhone Groan, straight up and straight down.

SPEAKER_06 37:09

Anything else you can think of in Tennessee? I know he did a lot uh for ATC Trail Wide as well. I'm gonna talk about some of that during the induction today.

SPEAKER_07 37:19

It uh no, I think from Myron Avery to Ray, well Stan Murray in the middle of that, they were the ones that really pushed maintenance and and land acquisition, which basically put the trail where it is now, and uh got away from the roadblocks. And that was that was key.

SPEAKER_06 37:47

Um in addition to his work in in Tennessee, he he served three terms uh as ATC chair and had a lot to do with getting uh legislation passed to uh t to uh fund uh land acquisition, as you said, for the corridor. That was a very important thing that he did trail wide.

SPEAKER_07 38:08

And he had another uh, yes it was, and he had another uh in later years a side interest, and it was called the Exchange Place. It was a stagecoat station in Kingsport, and he had that all um renovated and everything else, and it that's now a historic structure.

SPEAKER_06 38:28

It's uh very dedicated very questions about Ray.

SPEAKER_02 38:36

Um and he he was also the um data book editor um 1977, yeah.

SPEAKER_07 38:44

Yeah, yeah. On his typewriter. That's how he did the data book. And he did that for like five, six years, he updated it. And Joe uh has a copy for you that he uh that we'll present this afternoon uh of the second edition uh 1981 edition uh of the data book.

SPEAKER_06 39:08

Well, Bob, it is a pleasure to have you here again, and uh pleasure to be here. And it's a pleasure to finally get a chance to interview you here. Uh so you're welcome. Uh, and um uh we look forward to uh the induction this afternoon.

SPEAKER_03 39:22

I'm just following Larry's orders to throw out some stuff here. Uh-huh. Um I do I do have one addendum to uh Bob here uh about Bob. Um everyone in hiking circles has heard about the Triple Crown, you know, the AT, PCT, and the kind of the divide. But I like to think of another triple crown that is even more exclusive. So exclusive there are only two members in this club. They have received the uh ATC's honorary membership award, the highest award, the ATC gives women up here. They've uh received the uh they've been inducted into the AT Hall of Fame, and they've been made an honorary member of ALDE. And those uh it's so exclusive there are only two members, and they're both sitting here today.

SPEAKER_06 40:18

What what a good idea for a picture. Uh we'll have to we'll have to get a picture of uh these two esteemed gentlemen. Well, thank you guys. Um and I'm gonna ask you to to find other chairs and we're gonna invite somebody else uh to to come up. Good job. Is this your first time here at the museum? It is. It is okay it is, absolutely. Tell us where you're from.

SPEAKER_04 40:40

I'm from Asheville, North Carolina. I originally grew up in the DC suburbs and uh live in Asheville now.

SPEAKER_06 40:46

Okay. And you and you are Ed Ballard's son.

SPEAKER_04 40:48

I am okay and his grandson, my son, is here, also Tim.

SPEAKER_06 40:53

Well heck, come on up, come on up here. Yeah, welcome, welcome. Thank you. And your name is your Tim. Tim, okay. Well, great. It's great to have both of you. Um we talked uh a little before. Um did you have any idea how important your uh father was to the uh Appalachian Trail? I did not. That that's fascinating.

SPEAKER_04 41:16

So my dad met my mom and got married in his 40s, and then you know, I was sh born shortly after that, and he didn't really talk about his life before that much. Um it wasn't until after he died, and I was searching on the internet for stories about my dad and found the minutes of the conference where he proposed the buffer strip of land on each side of the trail and where it was uh accepted, adopted. Uh, and I found those minutes online on the internet, so I have a copy on my computer at home. But I I didn't know anything about that. Um didn't know anything about it.

SPEAKER_06 41:58

Yeah, uh we're gonna talk about uh this uh later, and you know, uh Ed Ballard is uh not that well known uh even among trail junkies like myself, uh I would say. But uh there are two important concepts that uh that those of us who are involved with the AT uh know about that Bob that uh Ed Ballard is really responsible for. One of them is the corridor. He's basically the first person who came up with the idea of having a corridor, not just the AT itself, but a corridor to kind of protect the AT from development on either side. And the other important concept is the uh the cooperative management system, because as most of you here know, uh the AT is is on some land managers uh land, but it's not the same land manager. It's it could be the Park Service here in Pennsylvania, it could be the game commission, it could be DCNR, in other uh places it could be uh the Forest Service or or some other state agency or something like that. He's the idea who came up, he's the guy who came up with the idea of the cooperative management system. Uh so these are two very important critical things to uh to the way the AT is structured. Um did your dad uh take you out on the trail or take you for outings or anything like that?

SPEAKER_04 43:28

Um sort of.

SPEAKER_06 43:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 43:32

So uh I was a Boy Scout in the in the DC suburbs, and uh my dad was the troop committee chairman. Okay um and it went on hikes with us. He was a little bit older than some of the other dads, so he didn't always go, but uh we did go on the AT as one of the places we went camping. So he just was another dad out on a camping trip. He never told me he helped help create it in the first place. Um I also wanted to tell you a little bit about his background, that I do know that maybe would help people understand his interest and his way of thinking about the trail back there in the beginning. He had a master's in landscape architecture from Harvard and uh during uh in the 30s he worked for the CCC blazing uh bridle trails across New England. He was uh avid uh cross-country skier. Um he loved the outdoors. He loved the outdoors, he loved uh plants, he loved um after he retired he became uh very active in the Virginia native wildflower uh society, protecting wildflowers, uh preserving wildflowers. So he was very much an outdoors guy, very much uh a uh someone who thought about the interaction of plants and humans, and uh so the idea that he would propose a buffer strip of land makes perfect sense to me. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:07

Makes perfect sense. Which uh DC suburb?

SPEAKER_04 45:11

Uh Annandale, Virginia. Okay. Yeah. Oh also, side note, completely irrelevant, but I was born in Harrisburg. Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_06 45:20

So you have ties to Harrisburg, and Modacious has tied to Harrisburg the whole I live in the Harrisburg suburbs, uh, and so the whole world seems to revolve around Harrisburg, it seems. Tim, were you old enough to know your grandfather at all?

SPEAKER_01 45:33

Uh a little bit. He died when I was probably 10?

SPEAKER_06 45:37

12. Twelve. Okay, all right. Do you have any memories of particularly uh being in the outdoors or with your grandfather?

SPEAKER_01 45:44

Or we we only saw them uh once or twice a year when we'd come up for holidays. Um so I didn't uh get to spend too much time outdoors with him. I feel like um uh we didn't coordinate this, so I don't know, uh it didn't know it'd be saying anything, but uh so I don't know if I'm getting ahead of anything you might say, but I think the main uh connection I have to him and to things related to the that was in the trail. Um of course, growing up in in Asheville, unrelated to him, we we were always out hiking and and in parts of the trail. Um but my uh actually my college girlfriend who is from Carlisle, so just all getting back to the area. Um her family introduced me. They they always went up to Maine every summer, and they introduced me to Maine and to Mount Catahdin. And then after he died, I don't think I really I think it was a little bit older when I um probably in high school or college, uh uh Ed Ballard wrote a memoir that he never published, but he wrote a memoir that we have copies of in the family and read, and he wrote a lot about Maine because he had a very strong connection to Maine, uh, including when he was with the Park Service um survey teams going out and surveying uh uh the area around Catain and wrote a lot about that, and so uh they introduced me to Catain, which made me uh always made me go back and reread his sections that he'd written a lot about, how important Maine and uh the trail area around Catain was to him. And so I've had that opportunity to go hide Catatin several times since then, including this summer. And whenever I do that, I always uh think back to how important that part of the trail was to him.

SPEAKER_06 47:11

Yeah, great. What else should we know about your father or grandfather that that we haven't talked about yet?

SPEAKER_04 47:17

Well, I think an interesting story is how we happened to be here, which uh you know some of, but uh about a year ago uh I happened to go on LinkedIn. I hardly ever go on LinkedIn, happened to go on LinkedIn, and I guess it was a suggested connection or something. Uh there was an Ed Ballard who posted that he was going to hike the Appalachian Trail. I said, well, this is interesting. So I put a comment, I never met, I still have never met this guy, but I put a comment on there, my dad was named Ed Ballard, and he helped plan the Appalachian Trail in the beginning. That was it. Nothing and months later, Brian King contacted me through LinkedIn. And you maybe you could explain who Brian King is exactly because I'm not I might get it wrong, but he's the retired historian of the trailer.

SPEAKER_06 48:20

Yeah, he was uh he's played a few different roles uh with uh ATC, Appalachian Trail Conservancy. Uh he was the publisher of uh uh his last position. And I think that he probably is uh the Appalachian Trail's uh leading historian, although one of the leading historians is is to my right. Uh and and uh you know he's he's basically his role is he's the historian of the Appalachian Trail. He he's written uh uh a couple of books uh uh that are just must-reads uh if you want to know about the history of the Appalachian Trail.

SPEAKER_02 48:58

And he was also the spokesman for the Appalachian Trail for for decades. You know, the uh public affairs person for ATC.

SPEAKER_04 49:06

Yeah, right. All right, well, so Brian again, completely coincidentally, somehow, I don't even know, sees my comment on LinkedIn. I'm not sure how often he goes on LinkedIn, but I can't imagine it's often. And he saw my comment and he contacted me and he said, This year your dad is getting inducted into the profession trail hall of fame, and we had no idea how to contact a family member until we saw your post.

SPEAKER_06 49:37

I mean, that is fortuitous, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 49:39

And I think he was an expert at finding where the thought was buried.

SPEAKER_04 49:45

Well, he found where I was buried. He he contacted me on LinkedIn, and uh we had a little bit of an email correspondence, and then we had a phone call.

SPEAKER_06 49:56

Right.

SPEAKER_04 49:57

And in the phone call, he told me that he actually talked to my dad, that in writing an article about the trail in the 70s, I think, or anyway, when my dad was still alive. No, it was the 90s, it was the 90s, yeah. Um, he called my dad and had a conversation with him about his experiences uh uh involved in the founding of the trail and shared some of that with me that I had never heard before, and um and then connected me with you, and uh here we are. But I just thought that was a pretty uh interesting set of coincidences that had to happen for us to be here today.

SPEAKER_02 50:34

Still never had any contact with the other Ed Ballard?

SPEAKER_04 50:37

No, no, no, just that was he was just a conduit to Brian.

SPEAKER_06 50:42

Yeah, well, in addition to his work with uh ATC, I believe he retired maybe two years ago. Uh Brian has served on our uh Hall of Fame selection committee since the beginning, and and he's an invaluable resource uh in terms of finding where the bodies are buried, and uh as as uh Bill said, and and he's he he uh is the guy who knows uh stuff about uh about trail pioneers and and and uh we have uh meetings uh at least one meeting a year where we go over potential candidates, and Brian is just an invaluable resource in uh in doing that, and in working through that residing.

SPEAKER_04 51:24

Really, really pleased that he found me and contacted me and we could be here. And um one more story for you. Sure. Uh when in 2000, when my dad was uh finally knocked off his feet, he was active. Uh he died when he was 94. He was an active guy, physically, mentally active right up until the end. He's in the hospital, he's he never gets out of the hospital, but of course that point we didn't know that. And I and I'm there and I ask him if he wanted me to read to him, bring a book and maybe from his apartment and read to him. And I thought he would pick some novel, some adventure, you know, Michael Connolly or something. And uh he said, No, uh, could you get the Appalachian Trail reader, which had just been published a few years before that with essays about the trail? And uh I said, sure, yeah. And that's all he wanted to hear was he had me reading essays from the Appalachian Trail to him as as he lay in bed in the hospital. So clearly that was a very, very important part of his life that he didn't really talk about much, but still at 94 that was the thing that he wanted to think about in his last days. Okay, I thought that was pretty powerful.

SPEAKER_06 52:38

Well, I'm I'm really so glad that we had the opportunity to connect, and then the both of you were here to accept uh glad you're here to connect with.

SPEAKER_02 52:47

You know, and it's not an unusual story where where the family didn't appreciate you know what what some of these pioneers did for the AT. Myron Avery, you know, who we credit for putting the AT on the ground. His family, and Myron died relatively young, and his his family was separated from the AT afterwards for for the most part, and and didn't fully appreciate how he was revered in the hiking community. So this story rings true, you know, over and over again.

SPEAKER_06 53:22

So thank you for coming. Uh yes, sir.

SPEAKER_03 53:26

Which trail club did did Ed belong to?

SPEAKER_04 53:30

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_03 53:30

I think you'll find if you haven't already met it, uh Ed Garvey's first book, he he talks about Ed. They were very close. Ed Garvey, uh one of the uh charter members of the Hall of Fame, and your dad were very tight. And uh almost positive. I remember hearing at least hearing about Ed Ballard all the time from Ed Garvey.

SPEAKER_04 53:53

Oh I'll have to look for that.

SPEAKER_03 53:55

And Bob, how many times have people asked you about the Titanic? Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 54:02

When I look at a ball, once or twice. But the best one, the best one was in the early days of the internet, early days of email years ago, I got an email from a school teacher in Columbia, South Carolina, asking me if her, I think it was third grade class, could have an email correspondence with me about the Titanic. And I said, yes, that would be great. I would enjoy having a conversation with them about the Titanic, except I thought she probably had the wrong Bob Ballard.

SPEAKER_06 54:38

For those of you who don't know, maybe those of you who are watching this online, Bob Ballard is the name of the guy who discovered the Titanic about 40 years ago, I believe. And uh yeah, when I one of the things we do when we're trying to find family members and and uh other people to accept for deceased people is we do an online search, and when I check for Ballard, of course, the Ballard that comes up is hard to find me. The other the other Bob Ballard, not you. But thanks to both of you for coming uh and uh we look forward to to visiting with you more uh this afternoon during the induction. Thank you very much. So we uh we we like to uh honor uh important trail people from the past, but we like even better honoring living trail people. And it it tends to work out differently. Some years three or four and sometimes even four or four uh are available to to accept in person. This year it's uh it's it's only one, and I I would like to uh uh ask uh our our fourth and only living inductee to come forward. Uh hello Ron. Hi and I'm I'm I'm pleased to say that uh that Ron's a a friend of mine. And uh so Ron, tell us tell us where you live, first of all.

SPEAKER_00 56:03

Well, I live in Poughkeepsie, New York. So it's about half an hour from the trail.

SPEAKER_06 56:10

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 56:11

Did you grow up there? No, I grew up in Florida. I was born in Tampa and brought up in St. Pete.

SPEAKER_06 56:17

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 56:17

And went to college in Massachusetts and then up to New England and then back to New York.

SPEAKER_06 56:23

Cool. Um what was your career away from the trail?

SPEAKER_00 56:28

Uh what uh actually at first five years out of college I was teaching. I was uh technical teaching up in Vermont at a boys' boarding school, which also had a I was also the advisor to the outing club, and this was a school that was based on uh on the outing concept where they did a winter trip of the entire school. But I took the ones who wanted to do even more, and we went up to like did some winter aquis climbs up Mount Washington and Mount Mansfield, and then came down to New York, taught there for three years, and then went into educational computing from there. And for a few years, uh my wife and I were at the uh Marist College in the Computer Center. We sort of created it and worked there, and we've had our own computer consulting business ever since.

SPEAKER_06 57:22

Good, good. Um you got involved with the AT in the 70s, is that right? Correct. Can you tell us how that came about?

SPEAKER_00 57:31

It's a there's actually a funny story attached to that. Uh when I moved from Vermont down to New York, and Vermont I had been actively involved with Green Mountain Club, uh, and our school club actually took care of one of the shelters up in Vermont. And so I tried to join the uh Green Mountain Club chapter in New York area, and they would not let somebody who was already in the Green Mountain Club in without a sponsor and a whole process. So I switched to AMC, Appalachian Mountain Club, and uh was doing some hikes with them and then moved up to Poughkeepsie in 74. And I got a call out of the blue, I think best I can tell is about 76 from somebody who was saying, uh, how would you like to join me on going out and taking care of my stretch of the Appalachian Trail? Which at the time was the polling area. Uh and he invited me and my wife, and we went with him hiking and doing minimal trail maintenance because it was almost all roadwalking back then. This is before the land acquisition process got serious. So at the end of the day, he says, Well, the company that hired, you know, I belong to is sending me back to Europe. How would you like to replace me? So I became an AT maintainer that way originally, uh, and was an AMC maintainer for a couple of years. And that polling area at that time, well, Dutchess County, which encapsulates polling, has 30 miles of the AT, and at that point, 26 miles was roadwalking. So most of our trail maintenance there was uh basically walking along the roads painting blazes on telephone poles.

SPEAKER_06 59:29

And and Pennsylvania was very similar to that in many sections of the AT, particularly in the Cumberland Valley where I maintained a section, it was a roadwalk for for most of that. Um I I believe you founded the Duchess AT Management Committee, is that right?

SPEAKER_00 59:45

Well, I was uh a little bit of arm twisting, but basically I was the original chair of the Duchess Putnam, was in the Duchess Appalachian Trail Committee.

SPEAKER_06 59:55

And then it became Duchess Putnam.

SPEAKER_00 59:56

And then they we merged it in about 10 years later with Putnam County, so it was everything between the Hudson River and the Connecticut line after that. But uh actually Bob Leone, who was a the he was before they got the regions as well organized as they do now at ATC, he was the regional rep for at least that part of the mid-Atlantic area, and he started a process that I got involved in right at the beginning since I was already a maintainer in the area there, of having a series of meetings in each of the four towns in Duchess County that the trail went through to try to create the original management plan for the Appalachian Trail in the area. So we'd meet uh in each of the towns, maybe with, you know, one of the specialties of one of them would be uh fire suppression, and another one, you know, be all sorts of different topics. So I uh my wife and I both got involved in that stage, and then at the end of that, they decided the region the reason the reasonable thing to do is to create a permanent Appalachian Trail Management Committee, and uh it was immediately suggested by one of the other people who was involved on that, Liz Leavers, who is already inducted into the thing. Uh she sort of nominated me to be the original chair, and by acclamation, I became the chair of the Dutch State.

SPEAKER_06 1:01:20

That's the way it tends to work. Yeah. Um I I know there have been several notable projects in in that area. One that I know uh something about is the Nuclear Lake project. Can you talk about that?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:33

Nuclear Lake was an unusual acquisition because normally the AT acquisition program is uh basically 120 acres per mile of trail, and the Park Service had the opportunity to get a larger parcel, so Nuclear Lake Parcel was 1,100 acres for only about three and a half miles of trail, so it was an unusual one. So they and and the history of it, why it's called Nuclear Lake, is it had been the site uh in the 70s of a uh nuclear processing fuels facility that actually made nuclear fuels for the nuclear submarines and things like that. And then they shut down operations, so there was a lot of concern whether the lake might be actually contaminated, things like that by by their processing. They actually had a plutonium facility that was right along the shore of the lake, and it had a waste storage building where uh everything was dumped into it, and then from there there was a drain that went out into the lake. So there were a lot of concerns about whether or not it was a safe place for the trail. And originally, our AT management committee recommended that the trail not go down to the lake, and we set up an upper route that stayed at least a half mile from the lake going through the property. Uh and then the Park Service, uh, unlike many of the other Superfund sites, this was not technically a Superfund site, but they actually got it cleaned up. And that involved uh putting a contained facility over this building, scrabbling the floors because there had been some radioactive materials spilled on the floors and so on, and drained the lake not entirely but down about six feet, and then did a complete grid search of the lake and found nothing in the lake, even where the uh drain facility drain was that would be anything higher than normal radioactive background. So after all that was done and everything was cleaned up, we moved the trail to come down to the lake. So, and the towns of Pauling and Beekman are the two towns that that goes through, uh never did do we offered them the opportunity to put even more use of it, but uh they didn't do it. But the Park Service still has a uh an on-site uh person that lives there. It was originally a family, it's now down to the to the mother who's the only one left. She actually uh mows the there's a dam on the lake, she mows the dam, she takes care, she's technically the dam master and things like that, and still is the primary protector of the lake and the property. Larry.

SPEAKER_02 1:04:28

Was there any thought given to changing the name? Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:32

Actually, there was, and the record and I was also on what we call the Nuclear Lake Management Committee, which is sort of a subcommittee of large or semi-independent, and one of the final decisions was don't change the name of the lake. So the history of it would be well better known. Uh and there was an article of actually when we had during all this processing, there was an opposition to putting the Park Service. Park Service already bought the land, but they they say we shouldn't buy used nuclear facilities and use it for parks. And so that was the one time I got mentioned in the New York Times article. I got interviewed on that because they were fighting, but by the end of this whole process, they disappeared, and at the final meeting of the Nuclear Management Committee, we made the recommendations like don't change the name, but we also recommended that the trail could come down to the lake.

SPEAKER_06 1:05:27

Uh beyond your work in New York State, you've been you've done a lot of uh uh work uh trail wide. Uh I know you've served for a long time on the Mid Atlantic Regional Partnership Committee, who we refer to as the MARPC. Uh talk a little about that and some of the other trail wide groups that you've been on.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:49

Okay. Uh actually uh for six years I was the chair of the Mid Atlantic Regional Partnership Committee. And actually, from I forget what year it started. Well, when we created this management structure and ATC in 2005, created the current definition of all the regions. I was on the group that got involved then, and I've been the New York, New Jersey representative to the Mid-Atlantic RPC ever since. Still am. I also now chair the uh organization of New York, New Jersey Trail Conference, has three AT committees, which is now Duchess Putnam, which is New York East of the River, whereas Orange Rockland, New York West of the River, in New Jersey. And I have a coordinating committee where I coordinate the three committees that uh so we act sort of in unison when we go to ATC meetings and things like that as well. Uh I've also been one of the few volunteers on the uh the part the committee of ATC, it's actually larger than ATC, it's ATC and the Park Service actually have the whole group that does the talking about extending the uh AT concept beyond the corridor and all the lands near it there. So uh I've been, I guess they've had five or six annual meetings now, and I'm one of the few volunteers. Most of it have been uh members of uh some of the different uh organizations that actually are conservation organizations.

SPEAKER_02 1:07:33

So uh after a half a century of involvement as an AT volunteer, what are some of your you know strongest memories and impressions, you know, of all those years of service?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:50

One of the one of the biggest was after, you know, uh we and Liz Levers was a good starter on this of getting the actual process going in 79 through 82, say, of getting the AT corridor uh put together. Uh one of the biggest memories was being pretty much in charge, and we had a strong management committee, so I didn't do by any sense all this myself. We had a lot of people who stayed around many years and put together all the trips to actually build the new AT. You know, I said we had 26 miles on the road, now it's about uh 100 yards on the roads in that space. So the process of building the AT, we did it in sections and we'd have an opening for that, and it might be from one major road crossing to another. And that was one of the most interesting things because we would have uh ceremonies to open a section of a trail and maybe have 150 people show up for it, things like that. A lot of work. A lot of people did a lot of good work. Uh the other thing we did is uh in Pauling, uh the trail is now on a permanently protected route with uh with uh approximately 1,600 feet of continuous boardwalk, uh working with the crew that put the boardwalk together at and vault, um, ATC Mid-Atlantic crews, as well as all our local volunteers. And over the course of a few weeks, we actually moved all that from the cross where the railroad trail train crosses the AT. For people may not realize it, that the New York Metro North Railroad actually has an AT train station, right where you can go from Grand Central to the AT in one continuous uh train strip, and then uh get off and hike the AT from there, north or south. And a lot of people would get off there and then hike it back down towards the Bear Mountain area and then take another one of the Metro North trains back to New York City.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:07

How how did the how did the trail go from uh a surface crossing of the Taconic to under the Taconic?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:20

That was something uh we we were got directly involved with the New York Department of Transportation on that. Uh that used to be one of the most dangerous crossings of the AT. Uh the Taconic Parkway was built really as a parkway, which meant it was really designed for 40 mile an hour speed limits, and now everybody uses it at 65 to 85 miles an hour. And then it was two lanes, a median, just a narrow median, no strip or anything, just a separator, and then two more lanes. And people, as we jokingly said, if you had if you were tried to cross the trail there, you know, cross there, your body would be southbound and your pack would be northbound. So they we we did some land trades where we're involved with ATC and the Park Service, where there were some land trades between the Department of Transportation and ATC and the Park Service, so that they could actually build up the property and actually raised uh some of the land there about 40 feet to put the overpass over the uh they so that the Taconic Parkway would go over the trail and it actually takes the underpass now and is no longer has that much danger of crossing the Taconic Parkway.

SPEAKER_06 1:11:45

Well, um the oldest tenured uh AT volunteer that I know of, at least, is Dave Field, who I think has been volunteering on the AT since he was 17 years old, and I believe he's quite 1754. Yeah. So so you don't quite you haven't yet reached him, but uh but being involved with the AT for over 50 years is quite a feat. And we are thrilled to have you today, and we look forward to honoring you further at the uh induction. Thanks for listening to this episode of A Trail of History. Please visit our physical museum located in South Central Pennsylvania within Pine Grove Furnace State Park between Carlisle and Gettysburg. We're open each year from April through October. We schedule many special events throughout the year. For complete information, visit our website at Appalachian Trail.museum. You can also follow us on several social media sites. We want this to be an interactive podcast. If you have ideas for topics we ought to cover or people we ought to interview, please let us know. Contact us at atm podcast at gmail.com. The music for this podcast is courtesy of Randy Windalker Motes. For the AT Museum, I'm Jim Foster.