Fifty years ago, on December 11, 1975, Benton MacKaye died at age 96 in Shirley Center, Massachusetts, at the home of his friend, carekeeper, and long-time neighbor Lucy Johnson.
To commemorate the semi-centennial of this mortal event, I include further below two substantial passages from my previous writing about MacKaye’s life and legacy. The first of these consists of excerpts from the final chapter of my 2002 book, Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail. Titled “Linking Action with Prophecy, 1953-1975,” that chapter describes the last active and rewarding decades of MacKaye’s long, eventful life.
The second is an unpublished article I recently excavated from my semi-organized files, titled “What Does the Future Hold for a ‘Retreat from Profit’? Following the Appalachian Trail into the 21st Century.” I wrote this in 1995. For a number of reasons that may perhaps become obvious upon reading the article, I didn’t find any magazine editor willing to publish it, though at that time I was having some luck placing stories in various significant environmental publications. Nonetheless, when I recently re-read the piece for the first time in three decades, I was more than a little surprised at how on-the-nose and timely it may be–including the role of one particular fictionalized but recognizable character and my prophecy about a possible alternative future for the Appalachian Trail. The first section of the 1995 piece is satirical, as you’ll see. The second section offers a straightforward summary of MacKaye’s original 1921 proposal and conception of the Appalachian Trail, as it appeared in the October 1921 edition of the Journal of the American Institute of Architects. That article, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” and the compelling map that accompanied it, launched the remarkable project that created the 2,197.9-mile trail, inspired thousands of volunteers to help build it, and motivated millions of hikers to explore the mountains and forests the trail traverses. MacKaye’s idea for the Appalachian Trail, and his efforts in the early 1920s as a self-appointed region-wide community organizer to get the project started, represent–and will remain–his greatest legacy.
At the time of his death in 1975, MacKaye had been living in Lucy Johnson’s home for the better part of the previous decade. By all accounts, he retained his considerable mental acuity until his very last days. By the mid-1960s, though, during the ninth decade of his long life, MacKaye’s gradually declining physical condition and modest financial means interrupted the annual round he had enjoyed since retiring from federal government service in 1945.
For the first two decades after his retirement, MacKaye fashioned a circuit, organized around his limited financial resources and extensive personal network, that followed the seasons north and south between Maine and Washington, D.C., with stops along the way with a nephew in Maine, nieces in New Hampshire, and friends in New York City and other waystations along the route. During those postwar years, his usual base of operations, at least during the warmer months of the year, was the rustic Shirley Center “Cottage,” immediately adjacent to Lucy Johnson’s house, that his family had owned since 1888. The small house had long been an economical and usually enjoyable place of refuge and retreat for various MacKayes. Shirley Center was the original colonial village surrounding a classically picturesque and peaceful common in the larger town of Shirley. For Benton, as I have previously written, “the almost organic ‘starfish symmetry’ of Shirley Center’s tight-knit physical arrangement–town hall, church, schoolhouse, general store, homes–came to represent an idealized model of community life.”
Throughout their ownership of the property, the MacKayes had never “improved” the Cottage with such amenities as electricity and running water. These spartan circumstances suited MacKaye, who lived as a bachelor for all but the six years, 1915 to 1921, that he was married to Jessie Hardy Stubbs, familiarly called “Betty.” Eventually, he outlived all his other five siblings and had the use of the Cottage to himself.
For many of the winter months in those years, Benton took a small, rented room in Washington D.C.’s Cosmos Club, long a gathering place for the capital’s scientific, literary, and journalistic elite. With occasional financial assistance from friends and fellow club members (men only, at the time), MacKaye, from his favorite seats in the club dining room, library, and at the top of the club’s grant entry stairway, enjoyed stimulating daily contact with influential figures in the nation’s capital.
MacKaye was also the object of genuine respect and affection, and perhaps a measure of bemusement, from his fellow club members for his long experience, lively wit, and raconteurial verve. In particular, he acted as a personal bridge between several generations of conservation leaders. During these years, MacKaye served a five-year stint (1945-1950) as president of the Wilderness Society, of which he had been one of the eight founding members in the mid-1930s; he then held the position of honorary president for the remainder of his life. With some assistance from Wilderness Society staff members, he toiled away on his “opus”–which he titled, “Geotechnics of North America”–a treatise on what he called “habitability.” He finished a substantial manuscript of the project, which proved too unwieldly and unconventional to find a publisher. Throughout the rest of these years, as he shuttled up and down the eastern seaboard, he stayed with friends and relatives, conscious of his self-imposed time limit of “one sheet’s worth” of bed linen at each stop.
MacKaye made his last sojourn to Washington DC and the Cosmos Club in the spring of 1964. He held court at the Cosmos Club to meet with various officials and acquaintances to whom he’d sent research inquiries for his ongoing research on his “Geotechnics of North America.” He visited with many old acquaintances and friends, from the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Wilderness Society, and some of his late wife Betty’s suffrage colleagues from the National Woman’s Party, including the legendary Alice Paul. In a shocking, bittersweet moment, he learned during lunch at the Cosmos Club on May 5 that Howard Zahniser, the 58-year-old executive director of The Wilderness Society, had died during the night before–only a few hours after MacKaye had dined at the club with him and other leaders of the organization. A few days later, MacKaye attended the funeral of his friend and fellow wilderness advocate. Zahniser did not live to see the passage of the Wilderness Act only a few months later. He had been the principal author and advocate of the legislation during the tortuous, almost decade-long political effort to ensure protection of some federal lands from development and commercial use.
By the time MacKaye returned to Shirley Center on July 10, he found that someone had broken into the Cottage. He had entered a final but rewarding chapter in his long life, in the community and environment where he felt most at home.
* * *
I.
Excerpts from Chapter 18, “Linking Action with Prophecy: 1953-1975,” Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail (2002):
Like the Park Service officials who came to present the Interior Department’s [Conservation Service Award] in 1966, many others–scholars, journalists, biographers, Appalachian Trail hikers–made the pilgrimage to visit the oracle of Shirley Center, the living memory of the American conservation movement. His once black hair had gone white; his hawkish countenance was etched with age; his nearly sightless eyes were focused on his memories. Nonetheless, MacKaye still retained his intense curiosity, lively wit, and clarity of mind. “I’m making more speeches now, and getting more response, than I ever did before,” he observed to author and conservationist Freeman Tilden, “sitting right here on my Empire, without the fuss of facing a crowd. . . .”
[T]he Cottage served as his home base and its Sky Parlor as his summer “office.” Benton came to rely even more on his friends and next-door neighbors Harry and Lucy Johnson, who for years had looked after the properties of the MacKaye “Empire” during his absence. “[H]arry and Lucy are my adopted family, you might say,” Benton once reported [in 1956] to another old Shirley friend. “Lucy feeds me gorgeous suppers, and I live in their house about as much as in my own.”
By 1964, MacKaye’s eyesight had begun to deteriorate. But not until a year later did his various physical ills–stiff legs, failing vision, intestinal distress–finally provoke mild complaint. “I’m doomed to mild pale toast in lieu of my long cherished Carboniferous brand,” he told a Harvard classmate. Harry Johnson, whom MacKaye had known for seventy-five years since their Shirley boyhood days, died in early 1966. Thereafter, Benton’s friendship and companionship with Lucy Johnson deepened. Although a semi-invalid himself, MacKaye could accurately say . . . of Lucy Johnson that his widowed caretaker “needs me.” The Johnson home essentially became his own home. Lucy’s depiction of her eighty-eight-year-old boarder and companion portrays their mutual affection and concern. “Benton keeps very well,” she reported [in 1967] to the Broomes [Harvey and Anne, his close Knoxville, Tennessee friends]. His eyes have changed very little. He keeps his typewriter going every day. He writes letters and ‘articles’ all the time. He is asleep now in the Morris chair.”
As the literature about the trail burgeoned, MacKaye became a figure of living legend to the Appalachian Trail community. (It did his reputation no harm, of course, that he long outlived Myron Avery [long-time chair of the Appalachian Trail Conference], the other person most responsible for the AT’s existence and success.) He enjoyed the attention of the many visitors and correspondents who expressed their appreciation for his inspired idea; but he worried that certain trends–especially the single-minded quests for speed and distance–violated his vision of the trail’s purpose. He repeated several cautionary maxims whenever the opportunity arose. “I hope the A.T. will never become a race track,” he wrote one correspondent. “But if so, I for one would vote to give the prize to the slowest traveler.” When asked to describe the trail’s “ultimate purpose,” the almost blind wilderness sage offered a cryptic but suggestive response: “There are three things: 1) to walk; 2) to see; 3) to see what you see.”
♣
During the 1960s and 1970s, scholars and practitioners of urban and regional planning found inspiration in the ideas of the Regional Planning Association of America [RPAA], whose central figures, including MacKaye, [Lewis] Mumford, [Clarence] Stein, and [Stuart] Chase would all live into their nineties, providing recollections and materials for a variety of capable scholars then writing about the RPAA’s history and influence, such as Roy Lubove, Carl Sussman, and Walter Creese. Lewis Mumford’s 1961 The City in History was a crowning statement of the garden city and regional planning ideals promoted by the RPAA. But other urban scholars, notably Jane Jacobs in her own popular 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, fiercely criticized as antiurban these leading proponents of garden cities and regional planning. The RPAA “Decentrists,” charged Jacobs (borrowing [public housing advocate] Catherine Bauer’s term), “hammered away at the bad old city. They were incurious about success in great cities. The were interested only in failures. All was failure.”
According to Jacobs, America’s “deeply reactionary” garden city advocates–she singled out Mumford and Stein–promoted a romanticized “idea of simple environments that were works of art by harmonious consensus,” concealing “a more dominant theme of harmony and order imposed and frozen by authoritarian planning.” MacKaye, himself the most unauthoritarian of personalities, shared with his friends Mumford and Stein certain planning notions that were schematic and idealized. Of course, he had usually addressed the regionwide planning of wildland and rural landscapes, as well as their relationships to cities–not the detailed planning of cityscapes. Jacobs found hope in the disorderly vitality and diversity of cities, not in what she depicted as the RPAA’s inflexible, darkly utopian prescription for urban revival. The troubled physical and social urban environment of the United States in the 1960s nonetheless provided stark evidence of the many pessimistic trends and forces that the RPAA had accurately identified during the 1920s.
Mumford’s own writing career continued to flourish, as he produced both angry jeremiads and more reflective memoirs. But he remained faithful to his elder friend, with regular phone calls, written testimonials and greetings, and occasional visits. For instance, on MacKaye’s eighty-ninth birthday, in 1968, Mumford wrote to him, saying “How happy the thought of our long friendship and active partnership in ideas makes me. No matter how widely we have been separated in space we have stayed close together in thought. My only regret–far too late to mend!–is that we never spent even a couple of days camping out on the A.T. together! More than anyone else in our time you have given us back the wilderness we had almost lost, by showing us the kind of man it could produce.”
Their close but guarded half-century friendship never waned during the final gathering-in of Benton MacKaye’s years. In early February 1975, Aline Stein called him early one morning to report the death of her ninety-two-year-old husband, Clarence. When Mumford phoned from Cambridge that night, the two “talked about the RPAA days,” as MacKaye recorded in his diary, “of which he and I are now the only survivors.” Later that month, MacKaye himself was hospitalized for several weeks after a fainting spell. But he then returned to his Shirley routine.
Mumford paid a call in late April, bringing Carl Sussman, a scholar then working on a book about the RPAA. Among other things, the two long-time friends talked about MacKaye’s planned message for the 1975 Appalachian Trail Conference. In early June, two ATC staffers came to Shirley to film MacKaye in his native surroundings. Later that month, when the brief movie was shown to the conference in Boone, North Carolina, the thousand trail enthusiasts in attendance responded to the image of the “Father” of the Appalachian Trail as they might to “the shroud of Christ,” according to one bemused observer. MacKaye was spending his last summer at Cornish [New Hampshire] with his niece Christy, but Lucy Johnson traveled to the ATC meeting, where she delivered his message to an enthusiastic ovation.
In May, Benton had spent a “lovely day” talking with a writer for Backpacker magazine; the journalist was awed by MacKaye’s detailed knowledge of the nation’s geography and his intense curiosity about current environmental and trail issues. During the final months of his life, he received visits from both Stewart Brandborg, Howard Zahniser’s successor at The Wilderness Society, and Paul Pritchard, the new executive director of the Appalachian Trail Conference. Both conservation leaders were still eager to receive the opinions and blessing of the venerable progenitor of their respective organizations. Brandborg described some of the society’s organizational and staff problems, a harbinger of difficulties the group would experience for years to come, as it struggled to find a role after its great victory, the Wilderness Act. Pritchard talked with MacKaye about the proposal for an Appalachian Trail “Greenway,” a belt of protected land surrounding the trail.
Benton carried on his routine serenely until one Monday evening in early December. After dinner and the reading of the day’s mail, Benton retired to bed earlier than usual. When Lucy asked whether he was sick, he replied, “Oh no, I’m alright, it’s just a little gas. That’s all. I’m alright.” But over the next two days, he continued to experience discomfort, requiring a visit by a doctor.
“Thursday the picture changed,” Lucy related to Stuart Chase. “He was miserable. He could not get comfortable. He turned on one side and then the other, sat up, laid down, etc. In the afternoon he had difficulty with breathing, and as the day progressed it became much worse. From ten o’clock to eleven o’clock it was very heavy. At eleven he went to sleep and in a minute he stopped breathing. He passed at 11:20 on December 11, 1975.” He was ninety-six years old.
The immediate tributes to MacKaye’s life were modest but fitting. His Shirley neighbors honored him at a memorial service held in the First Parish Church on the common. The next March, more than a hundred friends and acquaintances gathered in the John Wesley Powell Auditorium at the Cosmos Club to celebrate his life. The Wilderness Society’s Living Wilderness published a 1976 memorial issue rich in biographical and personal detail, with eloquent contributions from Mumford, Chase, Robert Howes, Frederick Gutheim, Paul Oehser, Paul Bryant, and other friends and colleagues. Although Benton MacKaye’s domestic life had often been marked by tragedy and solitude, in his final decade with Lucy Johnson, his genuine gift for companionship had been amply rewarded. “He was a dear man, and it was a pleasure to have him here,” his carekeeper and friend reflected. “I miss him very much.”
* * *
II.
The Future(s) of the Appalachian Trail
During 2025, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy has celebrated the 100th anniversary of its founding as the Appalachian Trail Conference in March, 1925. (The non-profit organization changed its name in 2005 in an effort to clarify its purpose and public image.) MacKaye had played a key role in organizing the original meeting of the ATC, which fulfilled the suggestion in his 1921 article that “[t]he various sections [of the trail] should be under some sort of general federated control,” comprising local trail clubs along the AT’s route. That organizational framework has proven its durability and effectiveness, remaining in place a century later. Thirty local trail clubs, the ATC reports, “are responsible for much of the day-to-day work of keeping the A.T. open by mobilizing volunteers to care for their respective trail sections.”
During the century of the ATC’s existence, many other environmental and conservation organizations–some of them with much larger memberships and public reputations–have either fallen by the wayside altogether or struggled to sustain their influence and missions. It is a measure of the durability and effectiveness of the ATC that it has remained focused on the single purpose for which it was founded and which Benton MacKaye originally envisioned: protection and maintenance of the Appalachian Trail, its surrounding natural environment, the challenging recreational opportunities it offers, and the spirit of community the trail embodies.
In the years since its inception and creation, the Appalachian Trail has evolved to become a unique and iconic American cultural, environmental, and political institution. As early as 1927, MacKaye’s friend Lewis Mumford described it as “one of the fine imaginative works of our generation,” a bold claim and prophecy for a project that wasn’t first completed as a continuous hiking trail between Maine and Georgia for another decade. “Perhaps it is unrivaled by any other single development in the development of American outdoor recreation,” MacKaye himself wrote in a foreword to a 1972 book about the AT, at age 93 dispensing with his customary modesty.
Having spent many years researching and thinking about the AT’s history, I have concluded that its creation and flourishing existence represent something of a miracle, possible only in the narrow window of time in the early and middle years of the twentieth century between MacKaye’s first public proposal of the idea in 1921 and the passage of the 1968 National Trails System Act. The existence of the Appalachian Trail–officially the “Appalachian National Scenic Trail”–is the product of a confluence of contingencies, involving social, political, and economic conditions, serendipity, key personalities, and a genuinely grassroots movement. It is almost unimaginable that such an initiative, of comparable scale and impact, spanning 14 states, could succeed today.
In fact, the existence of the Appalachian Trail may sometimes be taken for granted, even by its most enthusiastic users. One hundred years is a long time–at least on the scale of each of our personal lifetimes or the 250 years since the nation’s origin and creation. As we are learning amidst current political tumult, however, many of our seemingly “permanent” institutions–and the legal framework and cultural norms that support them, including the Constitution itself–are proving to be quite tenuous and vulnerable.
Indeed, there is reason to be concerned whether the Appalachian Trail, despite its theoretical protection under federal law as a public resource open and available to all, can and will survive for long into a second century and beyond.
The turmoil currently roiling national politics is not entirely unprecedented, however. Rather, our current situation represents the culmination of ideas, forces, personalities, and institutions that were also prominent and influential during much of the 1980s and 1990s. Thirty years ago, the nation was engulfed in a series of government shutdowns between November 1995 and January 1996, totaling 26 days, in a budget showdown between Democratic President Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress. During the shutdown, 368 National Park Service sites were closed.
In the previous year’s mid-term elections, Republicans had taken over the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years. They had campaigned on what they called a “Contract for America,” a sweeping program of reforms and legislation, including a balanced federal budget, legislative term limits, welfare reform, Social Security reform, regulatory reform, and an array of other controversial measures. Two firebrand Republican Congressman, Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Dick Armey of Texas, were credited as the principal authors of the program, but much of its substance was attributed to the Heritage Foundation–the very same “conservative think tank” that developed the almost 1,000-page “Project 2025,” which has provided the agenda and foundation for much of current Trump administration’s policies and legislation.
The current Trump administration, following the Project 2025 playbook, includes many proposals to dilute environmental regulations and laws, open public lands and resources to commercial development, and otherwise upend long-standing federal conservation and public lands policies. An early initiative of Department of the Interior, as incorporated in a preliminary budget proposal for fiscal year 2026, called for a $900-million cut in the budget of the National Park Service, partly by turning an unspecified number of the 433 sites under the agency’s jurisdiction over to the states in which they’re located. The Appalachian Trail, of course, is under the jurisdiction of the National Park Service. The Trump administration has already acted to lay off an estimated 24 percent of Park Service permanent employees and a proposed 7,000 of 30,000 Forest Service employees. Those two agencies are responsible for substantial tracts of public land traversed by the AT.
The Appalachian Trail Conservancy, which operates under formal agreement with the National Park Service in a “cooperative management system” to maintain the trail, has recently described the toll taken on the AT’s environment and experiences as result of the vagaries of federal funding and policy:
The National Park Service (NPS), U.S. Forest Service (USFS), and state land managers work together with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC) and the 30 local A.T. Maintaining Clubs to steward the Trail. Volunteers carry out much of the on-the-ground work, help plan Trail projects, and identify most of the maintenance and improvement needs. But ultimately, the A.T., like other National Park System units, is a federal entity. Without consistent federal engagement and funding, the system that protects and manages the Trail breaks down.
When Congress fails to pass a budget and the government shuts down (or experiences a “lapse in appropriations”), or when it relies on short-term fixes called “Continuing Resolutions,” federal staff cannot plan or approve long-term projects. Trail maintenance, land protection, and critical infrastructure repairs are delayed. Decision-making slows, morale drops, and both volunteers and agencies are left in limbo.
How We Got Here
Under the U.S. Constitution, federal funds can only be spent after Congress passes a law authorizing it (an “appropriation”). Each year, the process begins when the President submits a budget proposal in February. Congress then has until September 30 to debate, amend, and pass appropriations that fund federal programs, including those that support the A.T.
Unfortunately, this process has broken down in recent years. Since the Ford Administration (1973-1976), there have been 11 shutdowns, six of them in the past 30 years. Of the more than 122 days the government has been shut down during that period, three-quarters—have occurred in just the past 12 years. What was once viewed as disastrous, now seems more commonplace, in part because the President is keeping more of the government open without staff. In the last five years, Congress hasn’t passed a single annual budget on time, relying instead on short-term funding extensions and large “omnibus” bills passed months late. We are now in the longest “shutdown” or lapse in appropriations the United States has ever experienced.
As of today, the federal government is still operating under a Fiscal Year 2024 budget that began in October 2023. It has been extended multiple times, with only limited updates, such as disaster recovery funding following Hurricane Helene. That means the Appalachian Trail, and the people and partners who protect it, are still operating under guidance written two years ago, in a very different environment.
During the “Contract for America”-propelled budget deliberations leading up to the 1995-96 budget shutdown, one Republican initiative called for the elimination of all funding for new public-lands acquisitions, including funds to acquire unprotected private land along the Appalachian Trail route. A subsequent bill, eventually vetoed by Bill Clinton, called for a 5o percent reduction in the previous year’s appropriation from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, a principal source of federal land acquisition funding.
It was during these debates and political battles that I wrote the article included below, which appears here just as I wrote it 1995. Some of the factual information it includes is out of date, but the article seems timely in several respects. For better or worse, it attempts to encapsulate key aspects of the important idea and institution–the Appalachian Trail–for which Benton MacKaye is and will remain best known. Perhaps that idea can still point the way toward a more hopeful future, as represented by the example and legacy of Benton MacKaye, who remained an optimist throughout his almost century-long life.
* * *
What Does the Future Hold for a “Retreat from Profit”? Following the Appalachian Trail into the 21st Century
WASHINGTON — “The mountains of the eastern United States will never be the same again,” President Hoot Dinmuch said today as he signed into law the Appalachian Tollpath Act of 2005. Speaking in the Rose Garden and Nursery Center, which was closed to paying customers for the brief ceremony, the president hailed the bill as “a landmark in the privatization of the American landscape.”
“No revenue source will go untapped in transforming the Appalachian Toll path (AT) into a profitable family entertainment experience,” Dinmuch said.
The AT legislation represented the latest in a series of recent bold initiatives to reform the administration of lands, parks, forests, and other natural resources formerly owned and managed by the federal government.
The Appalachian Tollpath, formerly known as the Appalachian “Trail,” will be administered by the Appalachian Tollpath Corporation (ATC), a wholly owned subsidiary of National Theme Park, Amusement, Recreation, and Casino Services, Inc. (NATPARCS). NATPARCS recently purchased all 368 units of the former National Park Service for $368.
“America’s taxpayers are lucky to have the burden of the National Parks taken off their back at last,” said NATPARCS chairman Donald Tramper, who addressed the ceremony holographically from his office in Atlantic City. “Now we can get on about the business of developing these resources to their highest potential,” continued Tramper, who rebuilt a hotel, casino, and real-estate empire from the wreckage of financial setbacks during the 1980s and 1990s.
NATPARCS’ subsidiary, ATC, will assume the trail maintenance responsibilities of the former non-profit Appalachian Trail Conference and its 32 affiliated trail clubs. Tramper indicated that members of the defunct Conference and trail clubs may be offered a one-time discount on tollpath fees.
Tramper also outlined some of the provisions of the Appalachian Tollpath Act, which was supported by a coalition of lumber, transportation, construction, water, telecommunications, mining, and entertainment businesses, many of whose representatives paid NATPARCS $25,000 each to attend the bill-signing ceremony.
The new law permits ATC to install tollbooths and tollgates at every trailhead and road crossing along the path’s route from Maine to George. The law expressly prohibits any federal regulation of the rates hikers will pay for use of the tollpath. “We will charge whatever the traffic can bear,” Tramper said. “No longer will deadbeat hikers be able to sneak onto the path just anywhere without paying.”
Tramper explained that AT customers will gain access to the trail only at the automated high-security tollgates. Using magnetically encoded cards similar to those used in automatic telling machines, AT users will be offered a variety of toll options, based on mileage hiked or time spent on the tollpath. Tollpath patrons will also be offered discounts for vacation and entertainment packages that include stays at other NATPARCS resorts.
In another security measure intended to prevent unauthorized free use of the trail, the federal government, as a condition of transferring title of the footpath to NATPARCS, agreed to erect parallel chain-link fences, topped with razor wire, on each side of the trail right-of-way for its full length. President Dinmouth defended the $100-million price tag for the tollpath fences as an anti-crime measure.
“The fences will prevent hikers from vandalizing property and harassing and assaulting citizens on adjacent private land,” the president said. “Besides, we were able to save the taxpayers another $200-million requested by NATPARC to install lights the length of the trail to encourage twenty-four-hour-a-day hiking.” NATPARCS has agreed to install the lighting solely from the revenue generated by royalties and licensing fees from a new line of Appalachian Tollpath outdoor clothing and equipment.
NATPARCS chairman Tramper also touted some of the company’s other revenue-producing plans for the tollpath. Among those features will be the theme parks and casinos that have become standard features of all the former National Park Service units acquired by NATPARCS. Many shelters and huts will be upgraded to full-service hotels or fast-food restaurants. Tollpath Shopping Malls will be restricted to highways crossings.
NATPARCS also plans to use its technology and entertainment expertise to take advantage of several features unique to the Appalachian Tollpath. Tramper introduced ATC employee Bill Cipher (“Wiredfoot”), who will be the first person to attempt a “virtual” end-to-end hike of the tollpath. Using “Backtrakker,” a home exercise and entertainment machine developed by NATPARCS in a joint venture with The Wilderness Channel, Cipher plans to enjoy the Appalachian Tollpath experience without leaving the comfort and convenience of his own home. “The BackTrakker technology lets me program a degree of hiking difficulty customized to my own ambitions and skills,” Cipher said. “The machine is connected via satellite uplink to on-the-ground sensors and television cameras. I can experience the topographic and climatic conditions along the tollpath in real time. But if it gets too miserable, I’ll simply switch to another section of the tollpath where conditions are better at the moment.”
“At ten dollars a mile, the adventure should cost me just over $21,000,” Cipher said. “But I don’t have to buy a backpack or sleeping bag.” For an additional $1,000 surcharge, the ATC will award certificates to virtual end-to-end tollpath hikers. . . .
— — —
You get the idea. There is a certain perverse pleasure in spinning out such a nightmare scenario for the Appalachian Trail several decades hence. But the point is that the prospects for the Appalachian Trail may be shaped in the current [1995-1996] Congress by radical changes proposed for national parks, national forests, and other federal lands and natural resources.
For users and supporters of the Appalachian Trail, it may be timely to recall some of the ideas and values behind the trail’s original conception. The current challenge to the AT’s future could inspire a renewed commitment to those still-valid ideas and values, which have established the Appalachian Trail as a uniquely successful natural resource.
Benton MacKaye proposed the Appalachian Trail in 1921, when the searing experience of the First World War was fresh in the minds of most Americans. At that time, the National Park Service was only five years old. MacKaye, trained as a forester, had recently left the federal government, after fifteen years working for young government agencies like the Forest Service and the Department of Labor. He was a progressive, a softspoken social, a vigorous proponent of federal ownership and management of public lands and resources. MacKaye’s politics may seem out of fashion in the 1990s. It’s worth remembering, though that it was just such ambitious federal “bureaucrats” as MacKaye–and colleagues like Gifford Pinchot, Robert Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and others of equal intellectual stature and ideological conviction–who fought back earlier assaults on America’s publicly owned lands and resources.
When MacKaye joined the Forest Service in 1905, the year of its founding, there wasn’t a single acre of national forest in the eastern United States. (One of his Forest Service duties was to conduct a study of watershed runoff that buttressed the agency’s case for the acquisition of New Hampshire’s White Mountain National Forest.) Nor were such eastern national park units as Greak Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah, or Delaware Water Gap yet set aside for the public. Co-founder with Marshall and Leopold of The Wilderness Society in 1935, MacKaye was still alive in the 1960s and 1970s to witness the passage of the Wilderness Act [1964] and the Eastern Wilderness Areas Act [1975]. These laws provided further protection of lands within some eastern national forests and parks. Today, in the 1990s, the Appalachian Trail that MacKaye conceived and that so many Americans have worked to protect, traverses those national forests, parks, and wilderness areas (not to speak of other public lands included in state parks and forests). The public environment threaded together along the Appalachian Trail did not just happen. It evolved from the ideas and efforts of citizens, public officials, and farseeing politicians who placed a high communal value on the protection of exceptional areas of the American landscape.
When MacKaye proposed the Appalachian Trail, however, he was speaking not just as a preservationist dedicated to saving unpeopled wild terrain. In fact, at that financially and politically tumultuous postwar moment, he was most concerned about nurturing a sense of community in an increasingly industrialized and urbanized America. His goal in proposing the Appalachian Trail, he said, was to increase “the facilities for the outdoor community life.” While he placed recreation as the first of the opportunities offered by the trail project, he also included public health and employment among the objectives of the plan. Far from being an elitist, MacKaye pitched his Appalachian Trail project to the interests of eastern urban workers who had lost a direct connection to America’s natural landscape. Again and again, he emphasized the importance of developing a sense of community. He sought to nurture the interests and resources that Americans shared in common.
“The project is one for a series of recreational communities through the Appalachian chain of mountains from New England to Georgia,” MacKaye wrote in his 1921 article. “Its purpose is to establish a base for a more extensive and systematic development of outdoor community life. It is a project in housing and community architecture.”
If it seems odd to think of the Appalachian Trail as “a project in housing and community architecture,” keep in mind that MacKaye’s article, “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning,” appeared not in an outdoor magazine but in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects, edited by one of his reform-minded comrades, Charles Harris Whitaker. MacKaye went on to fashion a career as a pioneering regional planner. His provocative 1928 book on the subject, The New Exploration, was described by his long-time friend and colleague Lewis Mumford as worthy of “a place on the same shelf that holds Henry Thoreau’s Walden [1854] and George Perkins Marsh’s Man and Nature [1864].”
MacKaye visualized the “primeval” environment along the Appalachian ridgeline as merely the backbone connecting the broader working landscape of the “Appalachian Domain,” as he sometimes called the region. “The rugged lands of this skyline would form a camping base strategic in the country’s work and play,” MacKaye wrote.
MacKaye’s original 1921 proposal comprised four elements, which reflected his seamless vision of how the “country’s work and play” could co-exist on the same terrain. The first and fundamental element was, of course, the trail itself, “over the full length of the Appalachian skyline.” At this early stage–before the creation of the Appalachian Trail Conference in 1925, before the acquisition of some of the public lands through which the trail would eventually pass, before the passage of the 1968 National Trails System Act and the federal government’s central role in securing a trail right-of-way–MacKaye had anticipated some of the challenges the trail’s creators would confront.
“Difficulties might arise over the use of private property–especially that amid agricultural lands on the crossovers between ranges,” he predicted. “It might sometimes by necessary to obtain a State franchise for the use of rights of way. These matters could readily be adjusted, provided there is sufficient local public interest in the project as a whole.” He also suggested that the trail be developed and managed in sections “under some form of general federated control.”
The other three elements of his proposal included “shelter camps,” “community camps,” and “food and farm camps.” The shelter camps were modeled after some of the huts already built and operated by hiking clubs in New England’s White and Green Mountains. These, he insisted, should not be commercial ventures. “The spirit of cooperation, as usual in such enterprises, should be stimulated throughout. The enterprise should, of course, be conducted without profit.”
He imagined the community camps as settings “for various kinds of non-industrial activity,” including not just recreation but study and “recuperation” as well. Located on or adjacent to the trail, providing separate dwellings for individuals and families, each such camp “should be a self-owning community and not a real estate venture.” Finally, the farm and food camps, located in adjacent valleys and forests, would provide opportunities for employment in agriculture and sustainable forestry on public lands. “Their development would provide tangible opportunity for working out by actual experiment a fundamental matter in the problem of living.”
As pragmatic as he was visionary, MacKaye had presented the four project components in the order of their likely completion. Over the years, taking the measure of the project’s popular and political support, he and other leaders of the trail effort downplayed such features as the community camps and farm and food camps. But the trail itself, the federated structure by which the trail was created and has since been managed, and, in some measure, the shelter camps evolved much as MacKaye imagined. Most significantly, the Appalachian Trail remained substantially true to his subtly but intentionally subversive purpose.
“The camp community is a sanctuary and a refuge from the scramble of every-day worldly commercial life,” MacKaye concluded his trail proposal. “It is in essence a retreat from profit. Cooperation replaces antagonism, trust replaces suspicion, emulation replaces competition.”
Now both the trail and those values are under attack. In an era when the rhetoric of free markets, free enterprise, deregulation, and privatization reign virtually unchecked, justifying a public project as “a retreat from profit” would be considered downright heretical and unpatriotic. Nonetheless, it was exactly that spirit which inspired the creation, protection, and continuing popularity of the Appalachian Trail.
Of the 2,158 miles of the Appalachian Trail route designated by the Park Service [as of 1995], all but 44 miles have been protected in public ownership, according to the Appalachian Trail Conference. Now, on the verge of forging the last crucial links in this tenuous chain of legal protection for a contiguous trailway, Congressional proposals would place a five-year moratorium on the purchase of new federal lands using the dedicated revenues of the Land and Water Conservation Fund. The Park Service and Forest Service estimate that appropriations of eight million dollars a year for three years would complete a job on which the government has already spent $145-million. Under the banner of deficit reduction and belt-tightening, that previous investment could go to waste.
From the outset, Benton MacKaye emphasized the necessity of securing the trail’s continuity. “A trail is as serviceable as its poorest link,” he said in his 1921 article. But for the acquisition of the remaining 44 miles of unprotected right-of-way, the link between the Appalachian Trail’s rich history and its promising future may be irrevocably broken.
It has been almost three quarters of a century since the Appalachian Trail’s inception–not even the lifetime of many a spry hiker. Surely the future of this quintessentially American resource deserves more deliberate consideration than the slapdash, historically ill-informed approaches bandied about in Washington today.
Indeed, the sour irony of failing to secure a protected right-of-way is that the Appalachian Trail embodies those very American values which so many pundits and politicians irascibly assert are in short supply today. The trail was created and is now perpetuated by a network of amateurs, in the literal and best sense of the word, who are united not by self-interest or the search for profit, but by a love for the outdoors, a yearning for adventure, and a sense of community and cooperation. The history of the trail is the history of an authentic grass-roots movement. An opportunity enjoyed by Americans of many ages and backgrounds, it has long been setting and wellspring for genuine “family values” and truly free enterprise.
Moreover, the Appalachian Trail, from its inception in the early 1920, has been a model for the administration of a major public recreational and environmental resource. Over the course of its 2,158 miles, the Trail crosses numerous political jurisdictions (including 14 states), tracts of private property, and ecological zones. Originating as a private project, the trail has always received substantial support from local, state, and federal governments. Since its designation as a National Scenic Trail in 1968, primary responsibility for the trail has rested with the National Park Service; but much of the trail’s management and maintenance remains in the hands of the Appalachian Trail Conference and other trail clubs. Politicians and policymakers looking for examples of successful public-private partnerships need look no further than the Appalachian Trail experience.
In that most essential and democratic of American texts, the annual Rand McNally Road Atlas, the only two footpaths usually depicted in the United States are the Pacific Crest Trail and, of course, the Appalachian Trail. Symbolically, at least, these two thin, red broken lines are the only places in all of America set aside exclusively for people traveling on foot. Our country holds sacred the rights of private property; and it lacks the tradition and legal right of pedestrian passage across private land available in, say, England and some European countries. In this light, the importance of securing opportunities for walkers on America’s public lands becomes all the more crucial.
Benton MacKaye, predictably, had something to say about protecting the rights and opportunities of those who choose to walk. “Ultimately the hiker is as much entitled to his appropriate highway as the automobilist is to his,” wrote MacKaye when the motorcar’s onslaught on the American landscape was just beginning. “But a public comprehension of this principle will take public education.” The burgeoning interest in trails and greenways throughout the country bespeaks the progress of just such a comprehension and education, which was stimulated in no small part by that grandaddy of trails and greenways, the Appalachian Trail.
Benton MacKaye’s idealistic vision has motivated multitudes of little-known Americans whose ambitions were no more selfish than to enjoy and help protect their shared mountain environment. Another lifetime hence, as the cycles of history and ideology turn, future citizen guardians of the nation’s public resources will no doubt continue to take pride in the traditional American values of independence, self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and individual rights. But, while walking and working on the Appalachian Trail, they will also exemplify the equally important national legacy of community, interdependence, volunteerism, and common interest in the wild landscape. Then the Appalachian Trail may continue to serve as both “a sanctuary and a refuge from the scramble of every-day worldly commercial life” and the setting for a genuine “outdoor community life.”
No matter the trend of current political fashion, these too represent authentic and enduring American values.
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