Appalachian Trail takes hikers to new vistas
By Chris Dixon | New York Times News Service
October 16, 2007
If the Benton MacKaye Trail is a ribbon of dirt blazed through the wildest stretches of southern Appalachia, then the turn-off trail to Owen Vista is little more than a thread. George Owen, a retired Methodist minister and devout hiker, marked the spot some 15 years ago while working with a crew of volunteers to carve a new footpath they hoped would carry them from the starting point of the Appalachian Trail at Springer Mountain in northern Georgia and into the most feral corners of Tennessee and North Carolina.
After more than three decades of work, their 290-mile-long trail is a reality. But until a final decision is made on a proposed mountain highway, it's likely to be some time before some of the most scenic stretches of the Benton MacKaye are completely out of the woods.
"When we were building the Benton MacKaye, we had the option of going down in the valley or staying up here," Owen said of his vista. "When I saw this view, I said, 'We need to stay up here.'"
Made the right decision
With that, Owen, remarkably fit at 69, climbed the last few steps of a several-hundred-yard-long spur trail and reached the roughly 2,900-foot-high clearing that bears his name. And it was plain that he and his co-workers had made the right choice. Framed by oak, pine and poplar, a hazy vista stretched across a seeming infinity of rolling Blue Ridge Mountains. "I had four heart bypasses 10 years ago," he said. "I'm really fortunate to even be able to make this hike."
Owen flipped open a bag of carrots and talked a bit more about a two-year-old trail that has actually been 80 years in the making. The Benton MacKaye, he said, takes its name from the Harvard-educated forester, utopian socialist and outdoorsman who founded the original Appalachian Trail, because it follows the general route that MacKaye originally laid out in the early 1920s as the southern course for his now-storied 2,174-mile-long Maine-to-Georgia hiking path.
Owen credited Dave Sherman, a former director of the office of planning and research at the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, with uncovering MacKaye's early plans and resurrecting the idea of the trail. Around 1975, Sherman proposed the trail to several members of the Georgia Appalachian Trail Club. "I thought he was a little crazy," Owen said.
Six members of Sherman's study team created the Benton MacKaye Trail Association ( http://www.bmta.org ) and proposed a route through Georgia that tracked almost exclusively through publicly owned land, including bear- and boar-filled woods along the ancient mountains and valleys of the Chattahoochee National Forest and Cohutta Wilderness. At the time, the Appalachian Trail was surging in popularity, and state and federal forest officials were keen to open alternatives.
The Benton MacKaye's 81 miles that run from Springer Mountain to the Tennessee state line officially opened in 1989. The trail wends through fern-blanketed bottomlands, beneath stands of old-growth hickory, hemlock and yellow poplar. The high meadows are thick with blackberries, blueberries and huckleberries. The air on this summer day thrummed with the hum of fat bumblebees, their legs heavy with pollen from orange mountain azalea, spiderwort, fire pink and white mountain laurel so dense that they canopied the trail.
Keeping a brisk pace, Owen said that after the Benton MacKaye's first segment opened, hikers in Georgia and Tennessee had hoped the trail would continue through hollows and wilds with names such as Little Frog and Bald River Gorge before traversing the southern end of the half-million-acre Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and ending at an intersection with the Appalachian Trail at Davenport Gap.
Many parts of what would become the Benton MacKaye already existed on footpaths or on old road and rail beds. But the process was delayed for more than a decade by Tennessee and North Carolina officials who demanded habitat studies. In 2003, officials from the Cherokee National and Nantahala National Forests gave final approvals that allowed for all the segments to be officially linked. Work began in earnest on signs, erosion control and assigning a cadre of more than 200 volunteers to maintain the trail.
A path less trodden
Several volunteers showed up one cloudless morning for a series of hikes through Tennessee. Near the spot where the Benton MacKaye crosses the white water of the Ocoee River, Owen introduced Betty Petty, a retired engineer with the Tennessee Valley Authority and president of the trail association; Linda Davis, an insurance agent from Cleveland, Tenn.; and Ken Jones, a retired TVA nuclear engineer.
Tromping into the forest, Petty said that because the Benton MacKaye had only about one-tenth the traffic of the Appalachian Trail, you could go for a very long time and not see a soul.
After hiking a few miles in the hills and along the forested banks of the gleaming Ocoee, we caravaned another 20 miles for a hike along the Hiwassee River and through the farming, fishing and white-water rafting community of Reliance, Tenn. There, we wandered into Webb's Store, one of only three stores along the entire length of the Benton MacKaye.
Settled in the late 1880s
The Webb family settled into this fertile river valley in the late 1800s and never left. The store's owner, Harold Webb Jr., expressed interest in Jones' idea of rerouting a portion of the trail across the Webb family's private riverside land and past the historic abandoned church, from its current position adjacent to the land along Tennessee Highway 30.
From here, the Benton MacKaye heads into some of the most remote backcountry in the East, as it climbs toward the Great Smoky Mountains. During the next couple of hours of grueling hills and riverside solitude, the hikers said that despite increasing traffic, the remoteness of the trail also meant that it was difficult to recruit volunteers to maintain the trail.
But on a hopeful note, Owen said there had been some discussion between the Benton MacKaye Trail Association and the Appalachian Trail Conservancy on the feasibility of turning the 90 miles of the Benton MacKaye in the Great Smoky Mountains Park into a true alternate route to the Appalachian Trail's 69.5 miles there. Not only would that build traffic and boost recognition for the Benton MacKaye, it could ease congestion on the Smoky Mountain portions of the Appalachian Trail.
