Imagine hiking for an hour or two through the woods, up twisting switchbacks of a dusty footpath, straining body and mind against mountain slopes, then as the vegetation clears toward the top and a vista approaches, unexpectedly into view appear a trio of retirees, nicknamed the Mountain Goats, whittling away with hand tools at a big chunk of rock, and whistling as they work.
The Roanoke Appalachian Trail Club maintains 120 miles of the famed nearby trail, including 16 camping shelters and 52 wooden bridges. While it has many volunteer maintainers, three of those club members â president Bill Neilan, membership coordinator Mark Farrell and volunteer Jim Webb â have taken to trail work more frequently than just during the clubâs weekly Monday meetups.
Next, they go forth into society, realizing varied and exciting futures.
Bryce Miller graduated Tuesday from Northside High School. He said he is ready to start a career as an electrician, using his hands to earn a living.
âI was born with bilateral club feet. Iâve had a bunch of surgeries over the years,â Miller said. âI donât remember much until sixth grade, where I was just at home for the entire year in a wheelchair.â
But by his freshman year of high school, Miller â now an honor-roll graduate â was running the mile race in track, as well as 3.1-mile cross country races.
Many Roanoke-area residents can immediately identify the illustration on the cover of âAll About the Appalachian Trailâ as McAfee Knob, the heavily trafficked terminus of Catawba Mountain in western Roanoke County that also happens to be the most-photographed location on the 2,200-mile-long trail.
Author Leonard Adkins once simply called it home.
âWe lived just a few hundred feet below McAfee Knob on Appalachian National Scenic Trail lands caretaking a house for the National Park Service from 1993-1998,â said Adkins, via email. âThe view from our front window was basically the same as that from the Knob, with deer and black bears as our closest neighbors. Almost every day started with a 1.5 mile (roundtrip) walk to the knob.â
Rotary Hosts Kim Selvage Talk On Hiking Appalachian Trail
ROTARY News:
“Hike your own hike,” advised guest speaker Kim Selvage as she spoke April 20 by Zoom from Florida to the members of the Rotary Club of Los Alamos.
Selvage, a former Los Alamos resident, business woman and Rotarian, traversed the Appalachian Trail (AT) in 2020. She entitled her presentation “Remain Fluid Because Flexible Is Too Rigid.”
The AT Trail is described as the oldest hiking trail in the United States and, at 2,190 miles, the longest hiking-only trail in the world. “Hiking its full length,” Selvage said, “is equivalent to summiting Mount Everest 16 times.” It extends through 14 states: Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
Sarah Hodder, Katie Thompson, and Mercedes Walters (ages 31, 32, and 32, respectively) are all ultrarunners who live near the area. They decided running the pipeline route was a considerate way to protest its existence and impact on local communities.
“In doing so, our team hopes to raise awareness of the deleterious impacts of the pipeline and tell the stories of those people whose lives are so negatively impacted by its construction,” Walters said.
The Mountain Valley Pipeline runs 303 miles through Southwest Virginia up through West Virginia, across 17 counties; over 1,000 waterways; and dozens of wilderness areas, parks, and forests. Portions of it also lie on ancestral