The Many Faces of Trail Protection:
The North Country Trail Association develops, maintains, protects and promotes the North Country National Scenic Trail
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n the years that I have served the NCTA, the concept of Trail Protection has evolved significantly. In the beginning, it was simply a matter of preserving the trail on the ground. It was mowing and pruning, fighting back the pucker brush and the autumn olive bushes to keep the trail open and hikeable. At that time, that was a big job for me. After a couple years, I became more active in our local chapter and was drawn into interacting with our local DNR Land Managers and then the DNR management from the Capitol. I began to make the acquaintance of some of the good people who were granting us the right of way across their land. I remember well my first workshop with Irene Szabo at my first National Conference in Pennsylvania. She spoke of developing relationships with landowners and seeking easements for the trail. My gut response was “I don’t want to do that.” and “I can’t do that.” Sound familiar? Shortly after that, in our local chapter, we lost a beautiful section of trail on which we had worked hard to achieve “Gold Star” status. We lost it because we had not taken care to maintain relationships with a landowner and keep up our written “contract” with him. That was a very hard lesson. Not long after, we experienced the death of two very good friends who had supported the Trail’s passage through their land. We had failed to make the effort to get a permanent easement and discovered that the children were far less interested in supporting the trail than their parents. A new meaning of Trail Protection impacted me. With the passage of the Willing Seller legislation and the possibility that the NPS could purchase land more easily, work with Land Conservancies, and more aggressively seek permanent access to the land through which our Trail passes, you can bet I was at the Trail Protection Workshops that were held at the Dayton Conference. The one thing that struck me in those workshops www.northcountrytrail.org
TRAIL
HEAD LARRY HAWKINS President
was how few of us were there and how little we have done as an organization to protect the corridor through which our trail passes. During the past year, we formed a Board Committee, which has been truly struggling with the direction in which we must go in coming years. What are our priorities? Is it simply getting trail on the ground or are we to be patient to get the best and most scenic passage for the Trail? How wide should the easements be? Are we looking for ten feet, twenty-five, a hundred feet, more? What kinds of easements should we be seeking—twenty-five years, permanent? How are we to use the funds that become available? These are thorny questions. More recently, on a national level, a new and challenging side of Trail Protection has become apparent. With a Congress that is less and less committed to the environment, we have been
struggling to get congressional approval for the Arrowhead reroute in Minnesota. Natural gas “fracking” is putting the trail at great risk in Pennsylvania. In the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan, renewed interest in mining threatens the “viewscape” through which the NCNST passes. The most recent and serious incursion has recently occurred in New York's Madison County, where many of us hiked an abandoned railbed during recent NCTA conferences in Cazenovia. A ten year old section of the trail maintained by the Central New York Chapter was destroyed when the New York Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation (OPRHP) arbitrarily changed the designation of the trail from a hiking trail to a multiuse trail and allowed a local snowmobile club to come in with heavy equipment and bulldoze away years of work by the Central New York Chapter. Your Board of Directors met in emergency session to commit significant funds to a legal battle to reverse this decision and alter the perception of the OPRHP as to how they interact with National Scenic Trails. We hope you support us in this effort to protect the Trail to which you have dedicated so much sweat equity. —Larry Hawkins
On NCT Hikers trail east of Craig Lake State Park, Upper Peninsula, Michigan: somebody else's handiwork on a shelf fungus, so her hike group just laughed and kept going. …and lived! Pictures by Lorana Jinkerson. April-June 2012
The North Star 3