A.T.rail Of History
A.T.rail of History tells the stories of the Appalachian Trail. It will carry out the mission of the A.T. Museum to tell the story of the A.T., by telling the stories of the founding, construction, preservation, maintenance, protection, and enjoyment of the Trail since its creation.
A.T.rail Of History
Mills Kelly, An A.T. Story Teller
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Mills Kelly describes himself as an historian, podcaster, backpacker, photographer, and author. He's had a long and distinguished career. He is a (now retired) professor of history at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.
He's also had a long history with the Appalachian Trail. While at GMU, he hosted an excellent podcast on the A.T., The Green Tunnel. A link to this podcast can be found below. He is the Historian of the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club.
Mills is one of the A.T.'s best story tellers. He's written two books about the Trail, Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail and A Hiker’s History of the Appalachian Trail. We talk about the Green Tunnel podcast and the two books. Mills recounts some little known stories about some of the A.T.'s best known figures.
Follow THIS LINK to learn more about The Green Tunnel podcast. HERE is information on Mills' books.
This is the Trail of History, a podcast of the Appalachian Trail. The 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 18th midpoint, tells the stories of the founding, construction, preservation, maintenance, protection, and enjoyment of the trail since its creation. Today I'm speaking with Mills Kelly. Mills is a historian, podcaster, backpacker, photographer, and author. Mills is a retired professor of history. He uh taught at uh George Mason University, and he taught there for 24 years. We're going to focus on Mills' association with the Appalachian Trail. Mills, welcome to our podcast.
SPEAKER_00Tim, thanks so much for having me.
SPEAKER_01When did you uh start to get interested in the Appalachian Trail?
SPEAKER_00Well, of course, it dates me to say this, but it would be 1971. So what is that, 55 years ago now? And uh it's because I was uh an 11-year-old Boy Scout, and we went backpacking on the trail in Shenandoah National Park because it was the closest backpacking trail to where I lived.
SPEAKER_01And how much of the trail have you done?
SPEAKER_00You know, I'm a lifetime section hiker, and I think the last time I counted my mileage, it was getting close to 700 miles. So, you know, what's that? A little somewhere between a quarter and a third. And uh, but I have a long, long way to go. I'm not sure I'll ever finish it, but I do I do really enjoy section hiking.
SPEAKER_01That's great. I'm uh doing this interview with a bit of trepidation because I'm speaking to a uh a veteran podcaster on the Appalachian Trail. Uh, you did a podcast called the uh the Green Tunnel, which which I loved, by the way, and in part gave me the idea of doing this podcast. So tell me about the Green Tunnel. How how did that come about?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, thanks, thanks for asking. I'm glad you I'm glad you enjoyed it. It's um, you know, it's a great story because at the time that COVID hit in 2020, I was the director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason. And the the Center for History and New Media is the premier digital history center in North America. And, you know, every we all scattered uh when the lockdown happened. And I was responsible for a lot of people who were, many of them graduate students, who were locked up in their apartments and and you know, shared living spaces and things like that. And everybody was kind of going crazy. If we can remember back that far, we were all kind of going crazy being cooped up. And one of my colleagues, uh Abigail Mullen, who's now a professor at the Naval Academy, she said to me that she wanted to do a podcast because that was a thing she could do from home during the lockdown. And I said, sure, that sounds great. And so she did a podcast on uh actually on uh diplomatic history, which is what she's interested in. And um, and I realized it was a great way of engaging our graduate students who were stuck at home uh with uh with digital project projects and and with history. And so we started planning out a second show, which would be in my area of expertise, the history of the Appalachian Trail. And uh we didn't actually begin the work full-time until after we came back to campus. But by then we had gotten a very generous grant from the Mellon Foundation um to hire a full-time producer for the show and other shows. And uh so it became one of several podcasts that we were launching at the Center for History and New Media. The the best thing from my perspective about the Green Tunnel podcast is that every single one of our 50 episodes, except I think two, was produced by a student, uh, mostly graduate students, and one really outstanding undergraduate. And so for those students, they they learned everything about podcasts. You know, none of them knew anything about the history of the Appalachian Trail, but they did, you know, they knew history and they were all history students. And and so they learned how to do interviews, they learned how to do the research, they learned scripting, they learned audio production, you know, they learned uh promotion, how we promoted the show. So it was a really wonderful learning opportunity for them. And it was honestly, it was a great way to try to bring the AT community together around the history of the trail as the centennial was approaching.
SPEAKER_01Can you talk about some of your favorite episodes from the Green Tunnel?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's you know, it's a little hard to pick out of 50, but um a couple that really uh stand out as uh memorable to me is um, you know, honestly, the second episode we did, which was about the communities that were along the trail before the trail, I think is still looking back, I still think that was one of the very best episodes we did, both from a production standpoint and um and you know, and from a research standpoint and telling a really important series of stories. And um, we also learned about the generosity of people in a variety of other industries. So for instance, um, you know, we have a song uh on the show um by Irene Kelly uh called uh Pennsylvania Coal. And it's when we were talking about the, you know, one of these abandoned coal communities along the trail and Roush Gap. And that song was just kind of perfect for what we were trying to communicate. And so we wrote to her and really through her agent, and she said, I would be thrilled if you would use some of my music in your show. And uh, you know, later we did the same thing with the Rolling Stones, and you would think that the Rolling Stones would charge you an arm and a leg to use some of their music. And we wanted a piece from Jimmy Shelter, and you know, arguably one of the 10 greatest rock and roll songs of all time. And they're their booking or their agent, licensing agent said, Well, what's your budget? And I said, Zero. And and she said, Okay, well, like, how about 200 bucks? And I said, sure. I thought she was gonna say $2,000 or something like that. So, you know, we really learned a lot about the generosity of people in the industry. Um, so that that episode about the you know the communities that were there before the trail, that really stands out. Um, yeah, I think one of the most fun episodes was the one on the history of the privies, and because everything has a history, including the crappers along the trail. And um I will I will really encourage your listeners to listen to that episode all the way to the end, because honestly, the entire episode is a setup for the final line. And so you'll miss out if you don't listen to the final line. Um, and but it was, you know, I mean, it was an episode about science, it was an episode about environmental sustainability, it was an episode about accessibility of the trail, you know, uh, and then the final one that really stands out for me is um the episode we did called The Weight of History, which is about the history of race on the trail, which is, you know, it's a topic a lot of people don't want to talk about. And and but the fact is the trail is no different from the rest of American society in that respect. And um, you know, there are are and you know, there have been and continue to be racial issues along the trail. And so I think we were able to handle that in a in a really careful and important way. So those are um you know, those are all episodes that really stand out for me.
SPEAKER_01That's great. Uh as I said, I I listened to the whole Green Tunnel series, I loved it. And in the episode notes, I will provide folks with a link to the Green Tunnel podcast. Um you are the historian of one of the AT's leading maintaining clubs, the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club. Of course, it's one of two maintaining clubs that was founded by Myron Avery. Uh, please talk a bit about the history of the PATC and what you've learned about that club.
SPEAKER_00Sure. And I think Avery would claim three. He's he loved to claim credit for as much as he could. Um, so in addition to PATC, I think he would claim credit for the Rono Club and the Natural Bridge Club. And I'm not sure that he gets full credit for either one, especially the Rona Club. But well, the main club too. Oh, well, and and some would say that Gene Stevenson was the really the founder of the main club, not Avery. So, but if you ask Myron, of course, he would tell you, oh yeah, that was me. But um, so uh yeah, the PATC, which we're uh in the first weekend of October, we're actually having our Centennial Fest um because the it's like a kickoff of a centennial year. The club was founded in 1927 by Avery and half a dozen other people who were members of the Washington, D.C. Wildflower Appreciation Society, and which was kind of a hiking club and or strolling club more than anything. And um, and so they heard about the Appalachian Trail Project getting started, and they are they're like, Yeah, we're in, we want to do this. And um, and so right away in 1927, they started uh building the first sections of the trail south of the Potomac River. And you know, north of the Potomac, uh, there were already some fairly extensive trail networks, especially in New England, but uh south of the Potomac, there was really almost nothing. I mean, the Carolina Mountain Club had done a little bit of trail building earlier uh when they were a branch of the Appalachian Mountain Club, but it was nothing really AT related. And so, you know, PAT started hacking out the trail south of the Potomac, and the the section um north and south of Route 66 that people hike on today was where they started because they could ride the train from DC out to the little village of Linden, Virginia, and get off the train there with their shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and and start making trail. And um so so yeah, and and PATC is uh along with the main club, um maintains the the largest sections of the trail over to both clubs maintain over 250 miles of trail. And um and PATC also maintains about 750 miles of other trails in the capital region. So it's a it's a big club.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the uh you mentioned Myron Avery. I do a presentation on 100 years of the Appalachian Trail. I'm actually gonna do it at the gathering that we're the Alda gathering that we're both gonna attend soon. Uh and I have sort of two reflections about Myron Avery. One is he was an indispensable person in terms of building the trail. Without Myron Avery, there would have been no Appalachian Trail. And the other thing is, I'm not sure that I would have wanted to be a friend of Myron Avery's because he just strikes me as kind of a son of a gun.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know, when when he died, and he died, you know, tragically at 52, um, the the Avery family had a real history of heart trouble. And in the early 1950s, when he started having heart trouble, the treatment for heart attack in those days was bed rest, and uh which doesn't actually help other than preventing you from dying that day. And um so uh, but when he died, the president of the Blue Mountain Eagle Climbing Club um said that Avery left behind two trails, the the Appalachian Trail and a trail of bruised egos. And um, and so people up and down the trail, people really respected Avery, but not many of them liked him because he went out of his way to pick fights with people. I mean, he really did. And um, you know, he could he could find an insult where none existed. And so he was just kind of that guy. And uh two interesting little side notes about Avery. One of them is that um he uh he never learned how to drive a car. He didn't have a driver's license. And um his I know this because in the PATC archives, we have a recording of an oral history done with his son Hal, who was the person who happened to be with him the day he died, and up in Nova Scotia. And um Hal said that he and his brothers resented the Appalachian Trail because their father didn't have a driver's license. And so on the weekends when he wanted to do trail work or trail inspections, they had to drive him. And as Hal said, we didn't want to drive to some stupid trail, we wanted like go out with girls and um, you know, or go hang out with our friends. We didn't, you know, we didn't want to drive to this trail. So they were not fans. Um, and the other thing, and and this is just you know, Avery was really a compartmentalized guy because um I only learned after I became the archivist of the PATC that his his wife uh was blind and uh she had contracted a really bad case of malaria at some point and lost her vision. And he never once mentions this. He barely mentions his family in any of his correspondence. You know, people would write to him and say, and be sure and say hello to Mrs. Avery for me, or how are your children doing? And he he wouldn't even acknowledge these things. And um, so he had he had two really separate lives. You know, he had this sort of engaged life of uh Navy Department lawyer and Appalachian Trail leader, and they had a private life with uh a disabled wife and children, and um and somehow he kept those two really separate, which to me is kind of fascinating. Um I'll tell you one other um kind of interesting thing you learn when you start delving deeper into the history of the clubs. Uh the PATC was one of the clubs, along with the Georgia Club and a couple of others that in this in their earliest incarnations had 50-50 membership rules, um, meaning that uh they had to have 50% men and 50% women. And the reason they had those rules was because there were, quote, as one person put it, too many women. Um and and so in the 20s and 30s, joining a trail club was really popular as a social activity, and um and that included trail maintenance because the early clubs required their members to do trail maintenance work, and that was an expectation. And um, and so and if like if you look at the first or the picture of the first meeting of the Georgia Club in the early 1930s, it's two-thirds women in the photo. And and so, you know, those little tidbits run against the kind of conventional wisdom that hiking and trail maintaining, et cetera, that's kind of a guy thing. Um it wasn't 7500 years ago, and it isn't today. It's just that it's like a popular myth that won't go away.
SPEAKER_01On our website, uh the Appalachian Trail Museum's website, we have a video uh of early trail work on the AT. Have you seen that video?
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Uh and it's it's narrated by uh my old friend Tom Johnson, who was uh uh, in my view, uh perhaps the uh the AT's uh leading historian until he died and was uh very active in the PATC and president. But uh for anybody who wants uh uh a kind of a an idea of what it was like to do trail maintenance on uh back in in the 30s, uh that is a fascinating video because uh the men have suits and ties on and the women have uh dresses, and and it's just fascinating. And they're out there wailing away with uh with trail equipment. It's it's it's it's a it's a fascinating uh uh video. I really enjoyed your earlier book about the uh Appalachian Trail, Virginia's Lost Appalachian Trail. Can you tell us about that book and the relocation that it discusses?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, Virginia's Lost Appalachian Trail is a um, you know, it was a book I didn't intend to write. It was a book I didn't plan to write. It was um when I give presentations about it, I I like to say that if you're a historian, an archive is a really dangerous place because it's full of rabbit holes and um they open up in front of you all the time. And um, and so you have to decide, like, Alice, am I gonna jump into that rabbit hole or and you know see what's down there or am I gonna back away? And usually you back away. And um for me, I I was actually working on my most recent book, which we'll talk about in a minute, but uh so I was just researching the that that other book, and I read a memo about the route of the Appalachian Trail along the boundary between um Franklin County and Floyd County in Virginia. And that wouldn't mean much to most people. Um however, I um I'm actually from Franklin County originally. Uh my father was a professor at Farham College there uh when I was a kid. And and so I thought the the Appalachian Trail doesn't run anywhere near Floyd County or Franklin County. And because I had this Franklin County connection, I thought, well, I'll just hop down into that rabbit hole for a minute and see what's down there. And uh that led me deeper and deeper into this story of the the single biggest relocation of the trail in its history. This is over 300 miles of the trail, um, which at the time was about 15% of the entire route. And um, you know, for those who know the trail, you can visualize the route from um from Damascus on the Tennessee-Virginia line up to McAfee Knob in outside of Roanoke. You know, it runs kind of up through the Grayson Highlands and then cuts over to Parrisburg and then um runs up past Dragonstooth and then to McAfee Knob. Um in its original incarnation from um Damascus, it turned onto Iron Mountain, which is where the trail goes at the moment because of Hurricane Helene relocations. Um and I they may have finished those relocations, but certainly the spring that's where it was going. And um and it stayed on Iron Mountain. Instead of going through the Grayson Highlands, it actually cut north and uh crossed the current route and continued over to the New River at a little town called Freeze, spelled fries, like French fries, and uh crossed the river there on a little flat bottom ferry boat that you paid a nickel to get somebody to pull you across on. And uh and then uh from there cut up um back into North Carolina, actually, very, very briefly, um like five miles, and then uh essentially followed the route that the Blue Ridge Parkway takes today from around Floyd, Virginia, Tuggles Gap, um up to um Roanoke and and eventually got to to McAfee Nob. And um the, you know, when I started researching this, I was like, wow, that's just such a crazy story. Why would they have rooted it that way? And then why would they have abandoned it? And they rooted it that way for the simple reason that uh local people in Floyd County um argued in f the county agent, a guy named Shirley Cole, argued in favor of uh rooting the trail that way. And um Avery was kind of freaking out because he didn't want anybody but Myron Avery deciding where the trail should go. So he sent a trail scout named Roy Osmer uh to scout out a route, and Osmer ended up just collaborating with Cole and proposing the same route. And um, and so that's how uh and then of course Avery took credit for that. Like, oh yeah, we figured it out. So um so that's why they went that way, and it was kind of a path of least resistance because there was an old uh wagon road that they could use for the original version on the south side of the new river or the east side, and the um so they used that for a good bit of the trail, and that's the route that the Blue Ridge Parkway takes now. Um and uh on the other side of the New River that had just become the Jefferson National Forest, and and so they had Forest Service workers to help them a little bit with the trail there. Um so it was kind of a path of least resistance set of decisions. Um it moved away because that's an incredibly rural part of the state. And uh the biggest town is Galax, which today only has about 2,000 people. And when the trail came through originally, it went like right through downtown, uh Galax probably had a population of seven or eight hundred. And the um that's the biggest, but you know, two thousand people is the largest town in a like seven county area. And so the trail depends on volunteer clubs, and there just weren't enough people to staff volunteer clubs, and so uh they couldn't keep the trail up and And um, you know, a lot of it was on private, you know, like gravel roads and stuff like that. So when uh the Jefferson National Forest expanded to where it is today, up toward Parrisburg, then they had a lot more federal land that they could move the trail onto, and so they did. Um and they would have done it before the Second World War, but the war intervened and and prevented that from happening until the early 50s. But what was especially interesting to me about the book was I went out, you know, I set out to write a book about the single biggest relocation in the trail's history. And as you do sometimes as an author, you realize the book I thought I was writing is not the book I'm actually writing. And because the story begins to tell you what it actually is, not what you thought it was. And and the story in the book is really about the persistence of historical memory in Appalachian communities, because people who live along the route of what they call the old trail uh still, um they talk about it as though it moved away, you know, like ten years ago, something like that. And it moved away in 1952. That was, you know, 75 years ago. But in their way of thinking, it just happened recently, and and so it's still part of their story. And um and so it was really interesting to me to um kind of come to know and come to understand how the Appalachian Trail imprinted itself on the memories of these folks in in ways that you know, as hikers, we just don't get that. We just kind of hike up and down the trail without understanding how important it becomes to people who live nearby. And so that's kind of what the book ended up being about.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it is a fascinating book, and it's called uh Virginia's uh lost Appalachian Trail. And uh and I encourage folks, if you're interested, to uh pick it up. Your most recent book is A Hiker's History of the Appalachian Trail. Uh, first, uh why'd you decide to write that book?
SPEAKER_00So that's the book I thought I was gonna write first, and then I ran into this other story. But um what I well I decided to write this book because there, you know, there are a lot of histories, not a lot, but some histories of the AT, Tom Johnson's, um, Sarah Middlefeld's, um, you know, there's Jeff Ryan's book about Avery and and Mackay. Um, there are a number of historical accounts of the trail, but in those accounts, the hikers are almost invisible. They're accounts of whose idea was the trail? How did the trail clubs form? How did the trail clubs build the trail? How did the trail clubs advocate for the trail to become a national park? What's what's happened to the trail because of you know administrative changes? How is the trail maintained? And in all that story, hikers are almost invisible. The only hikers who tend to come up in those stories are the famous through hikers, you know, Earl Shaper, Grandma Gatewood, um, Dorothy Laker, you know, people like that. And um they or you know, who has the fastest known time these days? And you know, those which are all great stories, but but if the National Park Service is to be believed with their new estimates, um about 15 million people visited the Appalachian Trail last year in 2025. Through hikers constitute one one hundredth of a percent of that number. So so telling the story of through hikers is important because they're you know, it's an amazing achievement. But it's not the story of the Appalachian Trail. It's just one part of the story of the Appalachian Trail. And so and the story, and telling the story of how the trail got built and maintained, that's also important, but that's just one part of the story. So I was trying to understand how do we tell the story of those millions and millions of people who have hiked on the trail, most of them just for a couple hours, a couple days, maybe a couple of weeks, um, and and really enjoyed it, really, you know, did what Benton Mackay intended in 1921 when he proposed it, which is just go into the mountains and decompress a little um for a few hours. Um, how do we tell their story? How do we reclaim their story as part of the story of the Appalachian Trail? And you know, that's a challenge because you know, if you and Tracy go for a hike on the AT for, you know, three hours and you come home and you had a great time. Well, that's what Makai intended. And and if you wrote a book about that three-hour hike, who would buy it? You know, nobody. So because it's not it's not a great story, um and it's just interesting to the two of you. And so um the average person doesn't leave behind much of a record of their experience, except those people who have hiked on the trail for a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, they stop at trail shelters and they write in the shelter logs. And the AT Museum has lots of those shelter logs, and our wonderful volunteers there have digitized most of them now. And uh they very kindly, just before I left for six months in Europe a couple of years ago, they gave me a thumb drive with, I don't know, seven or eight hundred of those digitized shelter logs, so I could read them while I was living abroad. And um, and and there are other ways, of course. You know, hikers wrote to the ATC or to their trail club and about their recent hike and you know what it was like. And there were newspaper stories about people hiking on the trail. But um, but the shelter logs were the most important source for me because I could read about the family that stopped at, you know, Manasseh Scap shelter that I maintain and um you know and had a picnic and then went home. And their two little daughters, first hike on the Appalachian Trail, we loved it, you know, that kind of thing. And you start uh you just I I read these shelter logs um seemingly endlessly and uh and just let the story emerge of the hiking experience. And then, you know, I did a lot of research about you know the changes over time in things like gear and food and you know what hikers ate and you know where they um you know what was the history of the shelters and things like that. But the the focus throughout the book is really on the hiker experience.
SPEAKER_01Are there a few hikers uh that that really stood out to you that that you wrote about?
SPEAKER_00So I can't remember their names now, but there were two young men from Baltimore in the 1930s who set out to hike from Harper's Ferry south into the what was becoming Shenandoah National Park. It was just being, you know, Skyline Drive was being built, and um, and so um, and it they wrote an account of 10 days on the Appalachian Trail, and it's hilarious. You know, they were in there probably early to mid-20s, and one of them was a very good writer, and you know, they talked about sleeping in um old abandoned houses that they shared with cows. Um they uh at one point they where they where the trail crosses Route 50, which um in northern Virginia, which I think might be the most dangerous trail crossing, it's a really good place to get run over by a car and needs a bridge in the worst kind of way. Um they uh they got caught in a torrential downpour, and there used to be a gas station at the top of the mountain there, and they ran into the gas station, and the owner of the gas station took one look at them and said, You boys, you know, you need a bath and a hot meal. My house is at the bottom of the hill. Just go down there and you know, take a bath, take whatever you want out of the fridge and spend the night. And they were shocked that this guy would let them do that, you know, because they were city boys and they didn't have a lot of contact with rural people and their kindness and generosity. And so, um, but there, and you know, and then later they got free meals at a CCC camp in Shenandoah. And it's just it's a really entertaining narrative of what it was like to hike on the trail as the trail was um being constructed, and and because it wasn't even complete at the time that they were um that they were hiking. Another person who really stands out for me from the um from the 1950s is the um the the woman who grandma gatewood hated above all people, I think. Uh her name was Dorothy Laker, and she was from Florida, and she decided that she wanted to hike. This was in the in the early late 50s or early 1960s. She decided she wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail. She recruited a friend to go with her. Her friend, as often happens, her friend bailed out after a few days, and Laker went on and hiked the trail, and um hiking it alone, becoming the second woman to hike it alone after Emma Gatewood. And and I say Emma Gatewood really hated her, and I know this because I've heard um in the PATC archives, we have an oral history with um, actually, it's in the ATC archives. There's an oral history with um with Emma Gatewood just before she died. And basically what happened was she hiked the trail, she got all this publicity for being the first woman to hike the trail alone. Um, the third woman, I like to point out, to have hiked the whole trail, but the first to do it alone. And um she uh and then Dorothy Laker did it, and so that kind of pissed Emma Gatewood off. So she had to go do it again. And uh and then Dorothy Laker did it again, and so Emma Gatewood had to do it a third time just to prove that she was the best, you know. And and in this final oral history, I think the guy interviewing Gatewood didn't know that she didn't like Dorothy Laker because she he says, So, grandma, I understand there's a woman named Dorothy Laker who's also hiked the trail a couple of times. Have you ever met her? And you can almost hear the spit coming out of her mouth, she's so mad. And and and she says, she says, Well, that woman, Dorothy Laker was that woman, that woman, she took up with men during her hike. Implying slut. You know, I mean, she was just really nasty about it. And uh, and the interviewer quickly changed subjects. And uh, but Laker, unlike Emma Gatewood, who never met a microphone she didn't like, uh Laker really didn't seek publicity in uh Larry Luxemburg's two-volume uh book about hiking the Appalachian Trail. She wrote a way too long essay. Larry should have forced her to edit it down, about her hikes. But um that was it. That was the only interview she ever did. And um and she just was kind of invisible. And in the same way, uh Robert Taylor, who was the first African-American man to hike the trail, uh, through hike the trail, he did one very, very short interview with Outside Magazine in 1996 after he did it. And that's it. You know, he went off and hiked the PCT and did no interviews after that. And so uh, you know, there are a lot of I I'm I guess I'm a fan of the people who aren't publicity seekers.
SPEAKER_01Um that book sounds fascinating. I have not read that one. Where can folks get your books?
SPEAKER_00So um you can get, you know, you can come to my website, millskelly.net. I have a few um uh independent bookstores that I would encourage you to purchase through and they'll send them to you. Um but uh you know I'm a huge fan of independent bookstores, and so um I the best way to do this is to go to a website called bookshop.org. Bookshop.org is a nonprofit that supports independent bookstores. And so um it's just like shopping on Amazon, except that you when you sign into the website, you you choose your favorite independent bookstore. Mine at the moment is Blacksburg Books in Blacksburg, Virginia, because they've been really supportive of my work. And and so if you purchase a book, and when you purchase the book, if you've designated, say, Blacksburg Books, they get the credit for the sale, not Jeff Bezos, who has more money than he'll ever spend. And so, um, and so you know, I really would encourage people to use bookshop.org. It's a really wonderful nonprofit, and um, you know, it supports these independent bookstores. And of course, if you visit the Appalachian Trail Museum that you and I are also associated with, then those books are in the bookstore.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was gonna mention that, that uh they're they're available at uh the museum store, and the museum has an online store as well. If you go to our uh website, which is either atmuseum.org or appalacian trail.museum, and then uh look at the uh at the menu and and look for store and and you can buy Mills books as well as a number of other great books on the uh on the AT. Mills, is there anything else you'd like to talk about?
SPEAKER_00Um you know, I think that it's gonna be really interesting to see what happens to the trail uh over the next decade. Because, you know, I've been very past focused. I'm a historian, I'm an archivist, I you know, I'm very interested in the past of the trail, but I think we're um entering into a period of pretty rapid change. And you know, obviously climate change is having a huge effect on the ecosystem that the trail passes through. Um, you know, we're enter entering into a period of uncertainty about funding and about land protection and um you know what that's gonna look like. Um and so um the other thing I'm very aware of is that the trail clubs depend heavily on a much older demographic for volunteers to help maintain the trail. And that's you know, part of that's because older folks have more time and and more resources, and um, you know, they're not building their careers, starting families, all those things. And um, so they do have a lot more time, but I think it's really incumbent on the future of the for for the future of the trail, it's incumbent on the on the trail clubs to figure out ways to start recruiting much younger people into their activities. Because if you look back into the 1930s and the 1940s, trail club members, um, there were an awful lot of people under age 30 in those clubs. You know, it was it was a really popular thing to do. And so um how that happens, you know, I have my own ideas about that, but um I think this is going to be one of the big agendas for the clubs going forward.
SPEAKER_01I think that's an excellent point. Uh, and ATC has a uh a program, a campaign to try to get uh younger people. Uh there tend to be a lot of younger people who who hike the trail, but not as many younger people are giving back to the trail by by things like trail maintenance. So that's an excellent point. I'll just let me just quickly point out a couple of other things uh in terms of challenges. Overuse uh of the of the trail is a real problem, and people who are fairly naive about uh the effects of what they're doing, that's an issue. An increasing issue is invasives on the Appalachian Trail. I don't know if you've noticed it, but invasives are are really taking over parts of the trail, particularly my my personal experiences in the Middle Atlantic states, uh invasives such as uh stiltgrass and mile-a-minute wheat and and uh uh multiflora. Yeah, right. It's it's it's a real challenge and still still grass is the bane of my existence. Yeah, it really is. And it has it has taken over the middle atlantic states. My I I mentioned to you before we went on air that my wife and I are in the process of of hiking sections and we're in the middle atlantic states and through Pennsylvania in particular, it's still grass is is just taking over the trail. That is uh a topic that I that I hope to have an episode about fairly soon. Mills, it's been a delight to uh to speak with you. I've I've been speaking to Mills Kelly, and we mentioned his two books. I'd encourage you to uh pick up those two books if you're interested in more information about his work. Thank you very much, Mills.
SPEAKER_00Jim, thanks so much for having me. It was a real pleasure.
SPEAKER_01Thanks 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. Our annual banquet is coming up soon on November 8th. We'll honor the 2026 class of the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame, Daniel Chazen, Elmer Hall, Reese LaCay Jr., and Sandra Merrow. Our banquet will return to the Bavarian Inn in Shepherdstown, West Virginia. For complete information, again, go to our website, Appalachian Trail.museum. 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 atmpodcast at gmail.com. The music for this podcast is courtesy of Randy Wintalker Motes. For the Appalachian Trail Museum, I'm Jim Foster.