AT Shelter Building Schedule!

Hi all you eager shelter builders. Everything is warming up so we can look to starting the work again. The 9th could be a good day for a preliminary trip to carry in some of the tools, inventory the logs, and maybe mark and cut the front platform cross log. I cannot do the sawing because I am not presently certified for first aid. Someone else will have to do the sawing so, if there is no one in this bunch, sawing will have to wait until after the 14th when I recert. Let me know if this sounds like a plan. Howard

Mountain Trails by John Soldati

It’s late February and we are working under a weeping gray sky at Bull Gap. The crew is rebuilding a tier of steps that have long sense been dangerous to hikers. Light rainsqualls skip through the gap, making our work somewhat uncomfortable from time to time. We have been out since early morning digging the step trenches for the large four foot six by six inch heavy wooded bars. The Park Service maintenance crew has dropped them off for our use. Each bar is pre-drilled at each end so that an eighteen inch steel rebar can be driven in to hold the step in place. Because there is plenty of rock available, we are filling the risers with crushed rock by throwing large flat stones on the tread and smashing them with sledgehammers. This “crush” will hold the soil and add to hikers stability when crossing this tier of steps. Bull Gap is about three thousand feet and a location that absorbed the major brunt of the hurricanes last September. An adjacent hill just south of the gap looks as if giants were playing pick-up-sticks with large oak, popular, locust and black gum trees. Along the west face of the hill there is not more than eight feet of clear space between fallen and bowed trees. Soon we will be cutting a new section of the MST (Mountains to the Sea Trail) through this devastated forest, a distance of more that four hundred feet, to relocate the trail. So goes this winter’s work. Our crew has been weathered out more Wednesdays than ever before. Snow, rain and high winds have kept us off the trails except for a few days since early January. There is much work to do all around our areas of trail maintenance responsibility. We have had high winds and rain pass through western North Carolina and snows even into early April. When good weather returns it will be fun again to go out without having to abort for frozen ground, rain and snow storms. Soon, we will be pointing our group toward the Appalachian Trail and places like Big Stamp and Whispering Gap. We’ll go up to the high meadows above Street Gap to put large fog and snow blaze posts in to guide the hikers in the pea soup clouds that settle down usually in the early mornings. Our crew will unload at Catpen Gap and trek up to the summit of Bluff Mountain doing winter cleanup on the tread. We’ll be at Walnut Mountain Shelter repairing a latrine roof and floor. While up there we will make a new site for the spring that is almost filled with silt and rock. Lots of work to do in these hills and on the trails and as Robert Frost once wrote: “I’m going out to clean the pasture spring, You come too.” You guys take care out there. J

Pisgah Ranger District First Aid and CPR

First of all, I'm glad to see people responding to the First Aid/CPR classes. The intent was to have you call Red Cross and schedule your class, but I have been receiving e-mails and phone calls giving me the time you prefer. I would have been happy to schedule the class for you, but Red Cross will need personal information from you that I don't have. SO PLEASE CALL RED CROSS AT 828-884-4530 to Schedule your preferred time slots. Afterwards you will bring in your receipt for payment and we will reimburse you. Sorry for the confusion. Please let your crews know this b/c on a couple of calls, no phone number was left for me to return their call letting them know.

Secondly, there are some recent blow downs of 2 white pine trees on the Exercise Trail. The FS is going to try to sell these trees, so please do not cut them out of the trail.

Thanks everyone! Kriste

Gil and Mary Lynn Knight Memorial to be held June 9

Gil and Mary Lynn Knight were enthusiastic members of High Country Hikers and were very much loved by all who knew them. After their deaths in 2000 and 2002, money was collected for an appropriate memorial near the Pisgah Ranger Station. The time has finally come for the two benches with their names inscribed on the plaques to be dedicated in their honor at a memorial service, to be followed by a social hour and 2 short hikes. Many of their family members are coming from out of town to attend this event at the Pisgah Ranger Station on June 9, beginning at 8:30 a.m.

All current and former members of High Country Hikers are encouraged to attend. Members of the Friday Trail Maintenance Crew and other old friends are invited to join in this gathering to honor the Knights. If any of you know of others who knew the Knights, please invite them and encourage them to attend.

Please put June 9th on your calendar. Additional details and a reminder will be sent nearer the time of the memorial event.