In order for us to explain what Hiker Trash Trail Maintenance is we first have to tell you how it came about. During our southbound thru hike of the Appalachian Trail this past year (2015) we were moving trees from day 1 on the trail since we had started May 19th in Maine and trail maintainers hadn't yet been in most of the 100 mile wilderness, we moved 100's that we were able to both pick up, even carried a saw a few days and cut some off the trail. We also dealt with 100's of lbs. of trash left by weekenders and winter folks, cleaned out the shelters, and Ebrake began digging out and cleaning every fire pit at every camp we stayed at. It became her mission to clean out and rebuild them, even stopping to do them in the middle of the day.
Once we started running into other thru hikers and they saw what we were doing it spread, we noticed others doing things and it began to snowball. We started off telling others we should all spend 5 minutes a day doing something to improve the trail, cleaning up trash, sweeping a shelter, moving a branch..any time you look at something and think "someone should..." just "be the someone!". This lead to "Leaving Beautiful Traces" our version of "Leave No Trace" minus the NO. We feel like when you tell someone NO they may sometimes take it to literally...we believe hikers can make a huge positive impact by leaving things better than they find them.
After we got home from our hike we quickly started planning for our books and still wanted to give back to the trail. This is when we came up with Hiker Trash Trail Maintenance, we decided we had to take matters into our own hands. Many of the trail clubs are very overwhelmed and many of the members are frankly getting older and honestly have a hard time keeping up with the maintenance. Memberships aren't growing as fast as the numbers of hikers on the trail, funding is always less then whats needed and usually focused on bigger projects. The trail crews and clubs need more members and we strongly urge anyone who has the time and is able to, to join a local trail club near them - we are doing a blog on the trail club contacts so (Click Here) to find a club near you.
As for those who don't have the time and can't commit to a club, we invite you to join us in our mission to improve the trail Hiker Trash style.There will be a few Ambassadors for us on the trail this year doing "as you hike" projects ( currently looking for Ambassadors if you are a "repeat offender" and planning to thru hike again this year and would be interested please check out our blog "Ambassadors" and send us an email). We will also be around the trail ourselves this year promoting our books and doing projects, so we hope to see some of you out there! We will be posting blogs on projects we have coming up and projects we're getting involved in so subscribe to our blog, follow us on Facebook, subscribe to our Youtube and all that other social media stuff below ;)
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