A couple of months ago my newish friend Matthew Podolsky invited me to submit a guest post on the blog of the Wild Lens Collective. That post is now up and you can read the entire thing here.
The timing of this post was spot on for several reasons. First, it came out just before my new book, A Hiker’s History of the Appalachian Trail became available for order and/or purchase. [If you want a copy, the links you need are on my homepage.] Just as important, at least to me, is the fact that this post about my research process for the book highlights a critical problem facing the Appalachian Trail community.
The AT has been around for more than 100 years and one of its signature characteristics is the fact that it has always been a volunteer-led, volunteer-managed recreational resource. At present, something like 33 clubs (plus the ATC) are responsible for various bits and pieces of the trail. The makeup of that constellation of clubs has changed over the decades as some clubs have stopped working on the trail and others have signed on to the project. A few of these clubs are well-funded and have the capacity to maintain an archive of their documents, photos, video, audio, and ephemera, but many simply don’t have that capacity.
If only one organization were responsible for all 2,190+ miles of the trail, it would be relatively easy (as such things go) to craft a strategy for archiving the history of America’s most iconic long distance hiking trail. Instead, there is no strategy whatsoever. Things get saved, or they don’t. Things are saved appropriately, e.g. photos stored in acid-free media, or they aren’t. Things get saved in perpetuity, or they get thrown out after a year or two.
As I did my research for the book, I visited more than a dozen of the trail club archives plus the archive at the Appalachian Trail Museum. Some were in wonderful shape, like the archives of the Appalachian Mountain Club or the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club. Others were in pretty good shape, and some were, frankly, a total wreck–chief among the ones that were in bad shape was the ATC’s archive, the largest of them all.
There is never going to be funding to support a comprehensive collecting and archiving strategy for the Appalachian Trail, especially now that the current administration has taken a meat axe to funding for our public lands. But I do think we might consider a meeting in a year or two, where representatives of as many of the clubs as possible could come up with a more coordinated collection and preservation strategy. There are some very experienced archivists in the trail community who could help guide such a process which would be especially helpful to the clubs that are just doing they best they can with the limited knowledge and experience they have.
Perhaps this is just a dream, but from dreams come realities–like a trail that Benton MacKaye dreamed up back in 1921.
