[at-l] Happiness is ..........

[spiriteagle99@xxxxxxxxxxx (Jim and/or Ginny Owen)]

..... missing the idiocy on at-l this weekend.

And spending time in the woods.  We went to North-central PA this weekend
and spent two days clearing 7 or 8 miles of the Mid-State Trail south of
Blackwell.  Saturday started off rainy, but settled down to just grey and
gloomy.  We weren't carrying a chainsaw for this trip - only hand saws and
loppers.  That was all we needed.  The blowdowns were many, but surprisingly
small.  We cleared our section and kept going for another mile or two into
the next section. It's a 10 Km section with no direct access in the middle
and doesn't have a maintainer right now.

Saturday night we went to the Blackwell Hotel for dinner and ran into two
southbound hikers - made us glad we'd cleared the trail for them.  And gave
us added incentive to do what we could on Sunday.  One of the pleasures of
maintaining is knowing that hikers use the trail that you're putting so much
sweat and effort into.

Sunday was beautiful - warm and sunny.  We went to the other end of that 10
Km section and worked our way back toward where we'd stopped on Saturday.
Lots of damage on the ridge, but very little once we descended.  We didn't
make it all the way back to where we stopped on Saturday, but then we didn't
intend to go that far.  We left about a 4 Km "hole" in the middle.  We'll go
back to that section with a chainsaw later cause we know there are a mess of
blowdowns in there - we were there last year and nobody's touched it since.

We got home about 9:30 last night - tired, sore, a little bruised around the
edges - and happy.  Even reading the utter nonsense on at-l didn't bring me
down.  Although I do owe an apology to Ga Dawg for underestimating the
willingness of some people to defend the indefensible.

Y'all have a good week anyway,
Jim





_________________________________________________________________
Help STOP SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail