atn mayâjune 2000 appalachian trailway news

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What is past, and passing, and to come Bit by bit, historians, anthropologists, and archaeologists are looking beneath the Trail’s duff and dirt to assemble a “cultural inventory” of the recent and ancient history that the Appalachian trailway encompasses. By Glenn Scherer VISUALIZE FOR A moment a day in 1944, foggy February along New Jersey’s Kittatinny Ridge. Two farmers butchering hogs in the valley below hear something. A plane—the groan of a fourengine bomber circling low, lost in sleet and fog. Its anxious crew has no warning of the looming mountain. The farmers hear an earsplitting explosion. They break off their bloody work and run 22 22 MAY–JUNE 2000
through freezing rain up the ridge, only to come upon a hellish scene. A twentyfive-ton B-17 “Flying Fortress” has slammed into the mountain. Its fuel tanks have exploded. Fire rages in the wreckage and the surrounding trees. The B-17’s hundred-foot wingspan has sheared off treetops along a quarter-mile swath. Bodies, thrown clear of the crash, lie amid debris. Only the fuselage is intact. The words painted on the nose cone declare the crew’s patriotic intentions: Up Der Fuehrer! This bomber will never see Europe or the mission for which it was built. A month later, in the farm country below the ridge, the boys of Camp No-Be-Bo-Sco (short for “North Bergen Boy Scout” Council) turn out to memorialize the airmen of Up Der Fuehrer. They gather around the tail-gunner’s section of the aircraft and light a council fire. “You could hear a pin drop, it was so quiet and solemn,” recalled scout John Hover. “It was a very moving service, as most of us had family members in World War II.” Half a century later, the forest has healed, hiding signs of fire and destruction. I’m hiking the A.T. along the ridge in October with historian Ron Dupont. Although birches have gone golden, we aren’t leaf-peeping. Dupont is hunting for something. We leave the Trail and enter a patch of blueberry bushes, their leaves scarlet. A gum wrapper and a tin can litter the ground. “People think of the Appalachian Trail as untrammeled wilderness,” Dupont muses, “but it’s been trammeled—trammeled big time.” Then, he bends over. “What the hell is this?” he asks. He holds up a foot-long chunk of metal. The jagged scrap is old. It’s Left: Farm water tower at Hurd’s Corner, New York. The 1920s landmark fell into disrepair in the 1960s. Volunteers from the New York–New Jersey Trail Conference and local civic groups restored it in 1989. Photo: John Nelson. Above: Stone wall near Hosner Mountain, New York. Photo: Mike Warren. scorched black, twisted and fused, peppered with rivets and melted glass. It’s what Dupont has been looking for, and he turns solemn. “This is the place,” he says. The mountains (and maintainers) remember… For Dupont, and others like him, the Appalachian Trail pierces the sediment of history like a drill bit cutting through strata. Since the days of “It’s not until you actually go out there and pay close attention to the stone walls that you realize the startling extent to which these mountains were cultivated.” Myron Avery, Trail maintainers have cared passionately about the history they’ve found underfoot. Volunteers from Maine to Georgia have spent countless days scouring local newspapers (where the story of the B-17 crash turned up), visiting historical societies, tracing deeds, interviewing old-timers, walking the woods, and joining professional archaeological digs. In recent years, the process has become more formal. The Trail, as part of the national park system, is undergoing an official “inventory” that looks at its “cultural resources” (government jargon for what the rest of us might call “cool historical sites”). The idea is to perform a state-by-state systematic cataloguing of the historical landscape within the bor- ders of the Trail corridor. Even as the National Park Service’s Appalachian Trail Park Office begins the methodical inventory process, local volunteers continue to figuratively peel back the forest duff to uncover the history that lies along and beneath the A.T. While Dupont’s period of expertise begins after 1492, archaeologist Joe Baker’s is more remote. His special interest is in searching out prehistoric hearths and trash pits, and deciphering the Stone Age record. “We have the oldest radiocarbon dates in the East,” Baker observes, pleased by what he and fellow Pennsylvania archaeologists have found. Carbon dating is a technique for measuring the age of organic material, based on the decay rate of radioactive carbon. “People were living in Pennsylvania at least 14,000 years ago, maybe 20,000. At every little spring, tucked back into the folds of these mountains, you’ll find chert flakes.” The flakes are a byproduct of Indian tool-making. “In fact, we’ve probably damaged some encampments by unknowingly plopping Trail shelters on top of them.” Baker first volunteered his scientific skills as part of a 1988 historical study of the A.T. corridor where it crosses the Great Valley of the Appalachians in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania. Later, he took part in the 1999 Pennsylvania A.T. cultural resource survey, the first statewide inventory ever conducted by the National Park Service along the Trail. “There are a lot of things we found, but a lot we didn’t,” Baker says. “We only looked at the existing written record and never turned a shovel. We didn’t look on the ridges. The Catoctin greenstone up there was mined by Stone Age peoples for thousands of years. It was carried and traded as far away as Maine and the Mississippi River.” Baker immediately qualifies his statement, happily debunking the most persistent of A.T. historical myths. “But, APPALACHIAN TRAILWAY NEWS 23
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Page 5 and 6: and, for the most part, engaged in
Page 7 and 8: Camping in the 1940s did I state th
Page 9 and 10: Paper Trail Trails, as well as recr
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Page 13 and 14: SIDEHILL News from clubs and govern
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Page 17 and 18: “2,000-Milers” for 2000 The App
Page 19 and 20: Clinton E. Fuhr (Pale Rider), Pitts
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Page 31 and 32: MINISTRY OF FUNNY WALKS Felix J. Mc

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atn mayâjune 2000 appalachian trailway news