Forrest Pulley took his turn to speak, rising and giving his affiliation as the Allegheny Sparta Trails Association. He announced that his county had no trails of its own, but “We want to change that. We need your help.”
It was a sentiment echoed numerous times by participants in the opening session of the first Great Trails State Conference last week in Winston-Salem: We need trails.
Note: In addition to leading hikes and backpack trips, and maintaining this blog, I work for the N.C. Department of Natural and Cultural Resources’ Hometown Strong initiative, which works to help communities in North Carolina’s 78 rural counties. Because North Carolina’s 14 State Trails spend most of their time in rural areas, I get to spend some of my time helping people learn more about them.
How do you follow an event like Year of the Trail?
You don’t. But you do build on it.
The just-passed Year of the Trail was intended to promote North Carolina’s vast trail system. Hiking trails, sure, but paddling, biking and equestrian as well. Year of the Trail events were held in 94 of the state’s 100 counties, those events ranging from hour-long guided walks on local greenways to three-day festivals celebrating trails across the state. The ultimate sign of Year of the Trail’s success? When the concept was conceived by the state’s General Assembly in 2021, it included $29.15 million for trail development; in the budget passed this past fall, legislators allotted nearly twice that much for trail development in the next two years.
I remember where I was on the very first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970: Standing mid-thigh in central Pennsylvania’s Buffalo Creek, ostensibly taking measurements of stream flow but instead watching the very expensive stream-flow measuring device break its cable and disappear quickly downstream. I remember this more than a half century later because our usually mild-mannered science teacher, Mr. Morris, became wildly animated as he told just how expensive the device, which he’d borrowed, was.
Here’s a post we like to run in the waning days of August, as a reminder that while fall is near, you still have time to knock a few more items off your summer to-do list.
Labor Day weekend, which is in two weeks, marks the end of wearing white shoes and seersucker suits. It also marks the end of several summertime frivolities.
