Trailbuilding on the CT

I've been wanting to volunteer to help build the Cumberland Trail ever since I started hiking the trail. I had even published a CITO event last fall to try to et other geocachers involved in building the trail. The CITO event had minimal interest, but the CT Rangers ended up canceling trail building for that day anyways due to a snowstorm moving through the area. Still, I wanted to volunteer and help build what promises to be a great trail through the state, so when I saw they were looking for volunteers again this spring I signed up for a day and put it on the calendar. I didn't bother making it a CITO event this time, but I did post about it on the geocaching facebook page in the hopes that some cachers might want to join me. Again, little interest. Oh well...

I showed up at the Ranger Station and filled out some waivers then stood around while a bunch of people showed up. I was pretty impressed by the number of volunteers who were there, and all of them looked like kids. I was just starting to think to myself how great it was that so many kids around here are into hiking and volunteering, when I learned that all of the volunteers were indeed university students, and that they were volunteering as a requirement for their degree programs or courses they were taking.  This diminished my view of them slightly, they were here because they had to be, not because it was something they really wanted to do. Still, I bet they had choices about where they could volunteer and the fact that they chose back-breaking manual labor speaks well of them. I was the only non-student volunteer. This made me both feel old and young. Old because I was over a decade older than all the other volunteers, and had a lot less in common with them. Young, because, hey, I was hanging out with a bunch of young college students! Made me feel like a student again.

The Rangers took us up to a section of trail being built from Woodson Gap, near the coordinates N36 27.512 W84 00.747. We worked on side-hill digging on a 200 ft section of trail, and spent a good 3 hours doing so between breaks and instruction from the Rangers. For the number of manhours we put in, the amount of trail we built was pretty disparaging. At this rate, the CT might never get finished. But I think also that the Rangers did not want to push us "students" too hard, or give us too much responsibility. By keeping us all fairly close, they could keep us under close supervision. The section of trail we built could almost have been a carriage road, it was getting fairly wide from all our digging. I hope it gives future CT hikers the best 30 seconds of hiking they could hope for!