Agile Trekker: Hot Springs/AT River Clean Up, Carolina Mountain Club

Date	Distance	Time	Elevation Gain	Average Moving Time	Year to Date Miles
11/30/2024	1 mile	5 hours	n/a	n/a	760.2 miles

Parking:

Hot Springs Resort

Map:

Directions:

The CMC organized a volunteer day in Hot Springs. Hot Springs is an Appalachian Trail community. The tourist industry is important to the town, and a big part of that is the Appalachian Trail. Glen and I drove up there, and then he realized he left his hiking shoes at home :( He dropped me off and went back home. He was pretty upset.

It was a large event, with 130 volunteers. Wow! We had some folks from the USFS and the ATC helping us as well. They divided us up into 4 work groups. One group worked on the grounds of the Hot Springs Resort. The other three groups worked on trails. Our group of 40 or so people worked on the AT where it follows the river in Hot Springs. We even had a family volunteering who came up from DC. We passed by NOLS, which was destroyed. Their office was marked up with X's. The little shacks they had next to the river were destroyed. The campground across the river was gone. So much work! Our job was to remove trash washed up from the river and to work on reducing the piles of debris. I hiked in with loppers and a trash bag. So much trash - lots of construction trash, plastic, tires, pipes, and pieces of houses. A group of 10 of us stopped and worked on a pile of debris. The piles were around 15 feet tall. OMG. Our goal was to reduce the pile and improve the view from the trail - so that AT hikers can see the river as opposed to a pile of logs, brush, and trash. It was hard work as the piles of trees and debris were caked in mud. And the footing below was unstable due to branches being everywhere. We lopped away and used pick mattocks to try to break up the dirt so you could actually find something to lop. We had some sawyers, and they worked to clear what they could. We kept the smaller debris piles that we made alongside the river. There probably aren't trail maintenance guidelines for how to deal with this (enormous piles of debris after a historic flood)! We made progress, but it felt small compared to how much work there is to do. A lot of trash did get removed though - that looks noticeably better. On our hike out, someone from the USGS was showing us at a stream gauge how high the water had gotten. I read that the river was 21' higher. You could see debris way up in the trees!

Phyllis and Paul worked at the resort grounds. They said they found precious stones, jewelry, tires, cards, a teddy bear, etc. So sad. They brought the jewelry and stones to the resort, and the resort owner recognized them from a shop in Marshall that sells them. i.e. they floated several miles down the river to Hot Springs.

We finished up at 2:30, then walked into town to get some free food. A group from TN was in town volunteering to feed people. There are stories about people who have come from far away (e.g. Utah) and are staying in town to volunteer for a year or two to help with the cleanup and rebuilding!