by Ed Lawrence, KTA Trail Care Chair
This fall, I spent a week in Virginia participating in an American Hiking Society (AHS) Volunteer Vacation doing trail work in the Mount Rogers National Recreation Area. Working alongside other volunteers from New Hampshire, North Carolina, Texas, Maryland, and Virginia, as well as U.S. Forest Service personnel, the AHS crew dug sidehill and repaired treadway along the Rowlands Creek Falls Circuit Trail in the Jefferson National Forest.
The trail features a series of tumbling cascades over rock strata beneath an exposed section of dramatic syncline. The crew was based out of the Forest Service Volunteer Trail Camp in Sugar Grove, which is also the home of the Appalachian Trail’s Konnarock Trail Crew. On my day-off, I hiked to the summit of Mount Rogers, the highest natural point in Virginia, where I ate a trail lunch overlooking the grazing ground of the Recreation Area’s herd of wild ponies.
Along with my wife, Catherine, I have been active with the AHS Volunteer Vacation program for the last decade and we have taken our trail care skills, honed in Pennsylvania, to work crews at a variety of hiking destinations, including the Bob Marshall Wilderness, Montana; Mount Whitney, in the Sierra Nevada of California; the El Yunque National Forest, Puerto Rico; Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, Washington; and the Lost Coast Trail of the King Range National Conservation Area, California.