Monday, July 27, 2009

Cultivating hikers' path

Outwardly, the Scott Farm in Middlesex Twp. looks a lot like any other farm, with its whitewashed barn, clapboard farmhouse and assortment of outbuildings. But the farm, nestled along the bank of the Conodoguinet Creek at the north end of Bernheisel Bridge, is unlike any other.

No livestock is raised there. No crops grow in its fields. It really doesn't have fields these days. The land across the road from the farm that was once cultivated is now a new-growth forest providing a buffer to benefit the creek.

A brightly painted sign designates the farm as an Appalachian Trail maintenance facility. But even most hikers, many of whom stop to enjoy lunch at picnic table shaded by the barn's overhang, have little clue how important the farm is to the behind-the-scenes work that makes a 2,100-mile walk from Georgia to Maine possible.

"That is our work center for volunteers," said Karen Lutz, the mid-Atlantic regional director for the Appalachian Trail Conservancy. "It's a very important facility. We do a lot of things there."

The barn is used to store equipment and materials used by the conservancy and its affiliate local trail clubs to maintain the trail. It's also serving as a temporary storage facility for the Earl Shaffer Shelter, which once served as an overnight stop for hikers as they passed through northern Dauphin County.

That small, three-sided, log structure, built in the early 1960s by Shaffer, a York-area native who in 1948 became the first man to complete the trail, was dismantled last year and hauled to the barn to await reassembly in the planned Appalachian Trail Museum, expected to open next year in Pine Grove Furnace State Park.

Acquired in the 1980s, when the National Park Service sought the land to help protect the trail's path through the area, the farm also serves as a training center for the volunteer maintainers who Lutz calls "the soul of the trail." Volunteers go there to learn how to operate equipment and techniques used to build structures such as bridges and erosion-control measures that make the trail more walkable.

The house provides lodging for the farm's caretaker and houses ridge runners -- hikers hired to patrol sections of the trail -- on their days off. A bunkhouse built behind the farmhouse provides lodging for trainees and the all-volunteer trail crews that complete major projects along the trail's mid-Atlantic region, which stretches from Virginia to New York.

While local trail clubs handle routine maintenance, such as mowing fields and clearing downed trees, the conservancy crews "do the really heavy-duty big projects," said Craig Dunn of the Cumberland Valley Appalachian Trail Club.

To find evidence of their work, hikers need look no farther than across the Conodoguinet Creek, where a 500-foot-long boardwalk raises the trail above wetlands and out of the floodplain along the creek. That project was built in 2005 by the conservancy's crew, with volunteers' help.

The farm also serves as a trailhead, providing a gathering place for groups looking to go for day hikes.