Re: [at-l] Trail Expansion

[Tim Hewitt <thewitt@fairchildsemi.com>]

It's great to have another trail that ends at Katahdin, but the IAT is just
that, a different trail.

At the 1997 ATC conference in Bethel, Maine, the founders of the IAT admitted,
and appologied to the group present, to taking the name International
Appalachian Trial to get a jump-start on the funding necessary to finish the
trail in Canada. They used the name purely because it had name recognition. The
fact that the IAT really does follow the logical Appalachian mountain range to
where it peters out in Quebec was a tangent to the real reason they called it
the IAT. They had already been denied a official ability to extent the AT into
Canada by the ATC.

It's an interesting trail in Canada. It winds its way through New Brunswick and
Quebec to Gaspe taking some very strange routes (not unlike it's southern
cousin), and many of these "zingers" were put in place to go through a specific
small town, or a park, or some other politically expedient route. These routes
were picked not because they were the best for hiking, but because the local
political entities funded the construction of the trail. In one place you
literally come to a bridge, turn right (if you are going north), hike 50 miles,
cross the river, hike another 50 miles, and end up on the other side of the
initial bridge. This was done to go through a specific Provincial park as I
understand it.

Note that the IAT is called the New Brunswick Trail System where it crosses
Frasier Paper land in NB. Frasier refused to grant permission to anything
labeled AT on their lands based on the land-grab history of the AT in the US.
Not everyone likes the name AT...

-Paddler
GA>ME Class of 99
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