Appalachian Trail Museum

A Trail of History tells the stories of the Appalachian Trail.

It is a production of the Appalachian Trail Museum.

The museum, located in South Central Pennsylvania, near the A.T.'s midpoint, tells the stories of the founding, construction, preservation, maintenance, protection, and enjoyment of the trail since its creation.

Today I'm speaking with Mills Kelly.

It wasn't 75, 100 years ago and it isn't today.

It's just it's like a popular myth that won't go away.

On our website, the Appalachian Trail Museum's website, we have a video of early trail work on the AT.

Have you seen that video? Yeah.

So can you tell us a little bit about exactly what is the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame?

Well, the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame was founded the year after the A.T. Museum opened in 2010, and we founded the Hall of Fame and had the first class in 2011.

It is designed to work similar to the baseball, football, basketball halls of fame, and the pretty much anybody who has made an exceptional and positive contribution to the Appalachian Trail or the Appalachian Trail community.

And we deliberately have kept this really wide in terms of people who are eligible to be honored.

A Trail of History tells the stories of the Appalachian Trail.

It is a production of the Appalachian Trail Museum.

The museum, located in South Central Pennsylvania, near the A.T.'s midpoint, tells the stories of the founding, construction, preservation, maintenance, protection, and enjoyment of the trail since its creation.

I am joined by Cynda Waldbruser.

Contact us at atmpodcast at gmail.com.

The music for this podcast is courtesy of Randy Windhocker Motes.

For the Appalachian Trail Museum, I'm Jim Foster.

That was just sort of standard hiker attire.

And you can see a lot of that in the photo database that the Appalachian Trail Museum maintains of photos that were taken at the ATC headquarters in Harpers Ferry sometime in the 1970s.

And it's just really, it's fun to look at those because you can see the evolution of hiker fashion over time.

Now, like if you're out wearing cut-off jeans and a cotton t-shirt, people would think, what's wrong with that person?

I was just going to ask you, like, how many of those logs have you read through? I can't imagine.

Hundreds, hundreds and hundreds.

And I was really fortunate because at the Appalachian Trail Museum up in Pennsylvania, they've been gathering as many of those as they can get their hands on.

And there are three dedicated volunteers there who digitize them.