[at-l] Trail Maintenance: Blazing

[rafeb@adelphia.net (Raphael Bustin)]

At 11:14 PM 3/7/02 -0500, you wrote:

>I think y'all are spoiled, and have no faith.  If you get lost, it's your 
>own fault and no one elses.  Treadway, map, compass, and commom sense 
>usually prevails.  How far off the AT have you ever walk before you 
>realized you were going in the wrong direction? Not far, I imagine, in the 
>scheme of things.  Barring white out conditions, the worst you could do on 
>the AT is stumble into a Pizza Hut.


The "Warning, trail turns!" blaze that I missed (alluded to in the
former post) was in the Smokies.  I think it might have been
a while before running into a Pizza hut  <g>.

Matter of fact, what clued me in to my error in that case was
that the terrain was getting impossibly difficult.  The presence
of other boot prints and compacted ground indicated that I
wasn't the only one who had made that same mistake.

I will say that *for the most part* the AT is very easy to follow
and well blazed.  I found that roadwalks and road crossings
sometimes create havoc -- eg., where the trail jogs by a few
hundred yards on either side of a road crossing.


rafe b.
aka terrapin