(New) AT Corridor Monitor

[+Harry Dolphin]

The Trail Walker for September/October 2007 has a very interesting article on a new AT corridor monitor.

It seems that a local geocacher checked off the box at the bottom of his NYNJTC membership renewal for expressing interest in participating in helping out. (Hey! I made the same mistake and became a trail maintainer!)

The Appalachian Trail owns a corridor through areas not in government owned parks/forests. The boundaries are marked by signs and monuments. These need to be maintained, kept up to date, and infringements monitored and reported. Bushwhacking with a GPS to find things? Skills learnt geocaching put to good use. It sounds like our intrepid friend astounded his instructor, and taught her a few tricks!

Geocaching is given frequent credit in the article.

Congrats, dude! (I'll stick with trail maintaining.) And watch out for a lake named Nuclear Lake. That one always had me worried.

[+geobernd]

The dude is me

 

Perfect combination for me - and I finally know how to read survey maps and translate them into projecting waypoints - lot's of fun... Just took on an additional 5-6 mile section that I'll visit for the first time this coming weekend... BTW: Besides Nuclear Lake I have a bunch of very old Posted signs in the terrain from the 'Nuclear Research Corporation' from somewhere between WW2 and the cold war... I don't even want to guess what they did in that lake back then (but it doesn't glow in the dark today - I already checked )....

 

BTW: If anyone is interested in becoming a Monitor please let me know - plenty of opportunities available - and I can teach you how to transfer survey maps into waypoints....

 

The only downside is that this is 'hurting' my cache statistics as I spend a good amount of time monitoring... You probably know how that goes from being a maintainer..... But at the end of a day of giving back it feels dadgum good

[+jonboy]

Congratulations on a great article Bernd. I was an AT corridor back in the 80's, in Putnam County, before we had accurate GPS units widely available. Our corridor had recently been surveyed for the land purchases, so we did not have to dig to find the AT Monuments.

 

It is interesting that you have been assigned the Nuclear Lake section. I was on the Putnam-Dutchess AT Management Committee back when this land was incorporated into the AT, it was quite a story, you can read about it here:

 

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.htm...or%20Department

 

but you would have to pay an archive fee. Nuclear Lake was the site of a plutonium processing plant, and there was a major spill of radioactive material in 1972 into the lake. There were also unconfirmed reports from former employees, of drums of radioactive waste being deliberately dumped into the lake. The company went belly up, and instead of having to clean up the mess, it was sold to the NPS for several million dollars, in one of those highly dubious sweetheart deals to which Washington is prone. When the public got word of all this, they were assured that the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had declared the site to be fully cleaned up. Anti-nuclear activists made independent tests and discovered remaining "hot spots"of radioactivity. The site was worked on and declared safe once again, only to have more "hot spots" found by the anti-nuke crowd. In the end, after spending far more than the purchase price in tax payer money, the site was more or less cleaned up, with only slightly elevated levels of background radiation detectable. At first the trail was routed far away from the lake, but eventually the public forgot, the activists found other causes, and the trail was routed next to the lake. I have gone swimming in this lake, and the best place to swim is at the clearing that was once the site of the nuclear plant. I would not eat fish caught in this lake, but plenty of others do.

Edited September 1, 2007 by jonboy