Dan Kegley/Eva Kling, 15, of Abingdon (standing), watches partners in her Virginia State Parks Youth Conservation Corps team work out the fine points of measuring lumber using a ruler’s long and short marks Monday, the start of the group’s second week in Hungry Mother State Park.
By DAN KEGLEY/Staff
To be just five days out from the Fourth of July, Monday morning broke chilly and would progress only through cool by noon. The unseasonability of it, more befitting of fall than the 10th day after the summer solstice, was especially notable on the shaded northern slopes of Molly’s Knob foothills in the heart of Hungry Mother State Park.
There, up a fresh-cut trail that winds above the lake and its swimming beach eventually to reach the summit of this peak that dominates the park’s ridgelines, a two-seat, all-terrain vehicle lurched and crawled across the shaley trail bed.
“This things has two speeds,” said its driver, park ranger Geoff Hall, “don’t go and all-out,” but Hall generally found an intermediate gear one might call “easy does it.”
Still, this ascent might have unnerved an acrophobe (a person afraid of heights). Below some sections of the trail, the slope drops sharply to the lake. And the trail itself is a bubble or two off level, tilted decidedly lakeward. It was made that way.
“This is magic soil,” said Hall, quoting a consultant with Trail Dynamics, based in Cedar Mountain, N.C., who engineered the trail that replaces the old hike to the Knob. The consultant had never seen mountain ground that naturally drains so well as that below Molly’s Knob.
To that innate quality, the trail’s design added further draining capability. Its “outslope” makes rainwater roll off instead of puddling, and intermittent “grade dips” slows any flowing water so none of the trail goes with it, Hall explained.
Indeed, following a torrential rain Sunday, the trail’s surface glistened Monday morning but nowhere could any water stand waiting to seep or splash into hikers’ shoes.
Long-time park visitors and Molly’s Knob trail veterans in particular remember the trailhead at the old visitor’s center, where the mounted bear stood and a glass-paned hive let honeybees’ workings show through. The new trailhead is down the road a few steps, and the old way through the forest steadily vanishes where reclamation work by nature, with park officials’ assistance, is erasing the trace’s trace.
For years, Hall said, general obligation bonds for park improvements focused on facilities like the lodge that took the place of the bear, the bees and the visitor’s center, cabins, restrooms, paving and other park projects.
More recent visitor surveys, though, revealed the most-used facility in the park is its trails, and a bond passed for the purpose of their improvement, resulting in the new trail.
Most folks like the new way up Molly’s Knob, said Brandon Olinger who heads the park’s trail crew that formed along with the new trail in response to the park’s new emphasis on trails. “The other 10 percent remember the old trail and are not adjusted to it yet,” Olinger said.
Now, the state park system is taking note of Hungry Mother’s full advantage use of bond moneys on its trails. Olinger and company get invitations to other parks to make happen at Douthat, for example, what happened at Hungry Mother, Hall said.
“A lot of parks have gotten a lot of general obligation bond money, but can’t get people to do the work,” he said. If projects so funded are not undertaken, the money expires.
By its efforts and successes, Hungry Mother is known as a premier trail system park, Hall said.
The trail pauses in its southwestward climb at the crest of the ridge, beyond which, to the northeast, rises Molly’s Knob, yet a trail mile away, but seeming almost close enough to touch through the trees. The trail turns northward, following the ridgeline.
Just above the switchback a platform takes shape, standing on sturdy sawn timbers sunk deep into concrete beneath the shale. A skeleton of joists remains visible but a group of nine girls is steadily covering the vertical beams with composite deck boards.
The hard manufactured planks resist the screws that, once successfully inserted, hold the planks fast against the joists.
“It’s stripping the head!” voices shout over the jackhammer-like sound of a power screwdriver disengaging from a cross-slotted Phillips screwhead. “Back it out.”
Reversing the screw’s spin is easier, and soon a replacement is twirling into the hole. “Put your weight on it.”
The screw sinks in to its top.
The girls, ages 14 to 17 with an 18-year-old in the mix for good measure, are members of the Virginia State Parks Youth Conservation Corps. The program is a nod to Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps that provided jobs on public works, like the creation of Hungry Mother State Park itself, that generated precious incomes for workers during the Great Depression.
While YCC participants earn stipends for their three-week tours of duty in a park (they volunteer for work, but are assigned to particular parks), their main income is of the intangible sort – character and confidence built of hard, cooperative work, social skills enhanced in an intensely social setting, a break from school and a respite from whatever travails are theirs as teenagers.
“They have a sense of accomplishment that you can see on their faces,” said Amy Atwood, one of the park’s officials who works closely with volunteers.
Eva Kling challenges common notions about modern teens that suggest they all are bonded to cell phones, computers, and iPods. “The work’s the best part,” the 15-year-old from Abingdon said. “I love it. It’s tons of fun. Then the work is over and we’re like, ‘Oh, darn.’”
Free of any tone of sarcasm, her words sounded sincere. She didn’t mention the YCC program’s all-for-fun aspects at day’s end and weekends that 22-year-old YCC supervisor Sara Hamilton, also of Abingdon, counted off.
“We have fun hiking, reading a book, canoeing, fishing,” she said. A caving trip is scheduled for next week, and softball is on for the weekend.
And where do the teens get the energy to play after days of hard, physical labor?
“Motivation,” Hamilton said. “We make them smile, we make them work. They get a lot out of it. Be positive and you can keep going.”
Back at the observation deck, another plank is screwed down, the girls keeping up a steady work pace, keeping up banter and laughter, getting the job done. This is their project, from digging through the rocky ground to pouring concrete for the uprights to nailing the flooring supports in place and now fitting and securing the decking.
Above them, Molly’s Knob stands for some a difficult goal, and the deck built here in view of it will motivate hikers and bikers to push on, according to Hall, who said there’s some psychology in the platform’s location. But the best view of a mountain is not from its own top, and many will be satisfied to climb this far to stand at the knee of the park’s pinnacle and go no closer.
“The observation deck is where people can have a sense of accomplishment,” Hall said. “From there they can decide whether to go on up.”
To whatever extent people use the trail, its new configuration will limit if not end their contribution to erosion that may have had an effect far below the trail, in the lake that joins the knob as the twin centerpieces of the park.
The old trail had many tight switchbacks, and people coming down could see the trail snaking back farther below and would take the straight downhill shortcut to it. “Once people got to the top, they’d be in a hurry to get back and do something else,” Hall said. “They’d take shortcuts.”
People who know the land avoid traveling directly up and down slopes. Farmers counting cattle in hilly pastures cross their hills at an angle to avoid creating a path of least resistance for rainwater that would prefer flowing straight downhill, gaining speed, carrying soil and stones with it, eventually cutting ever deepening gullies if not diverted.
So it went on the slopes below Molly’s Knob in the shortcuts where cheating feet made water’s path easy, leading to erosion and perhaps to another general obligation bond project set in the park for this fall.
Hungry Mother’s Web site is already alerting park users that the park lake’s water level will be dropped for dredging work. “Hungry Mother Lake will be lowered up to 12 feet beginning September 2008. This will impact lake activities such as boating, boat rentals and fishing as well as the lake’s appearance. If your plans include lake activities, please make your reservation for after March 1, 2009. The park will not give refunds because of the dredging. We appreciate your patience as we improve the park.”
While the creek feeding the lake carries its own sediments that are deposited in the lake, Hall believes much of the lake sediments are from the slopes above it, generated at least in part by trail short-cut erosion.
“I don’t doubt that a lot of that is from the Molly’s Knob trail,” he said.
The new trail is more lake-friendly than the old, and the observation platform will be foot-friendly, providing benches for resting and taking in the view. Even a carving board will be provided as a place for trail users to scratch in evidence of their passage on the trail or their love for someone special. Hall hopes the board will spare nearby trees and other parts of the deck the inscription of initials and hearts.
Hall also hopes to start a trail adoption program, but noted the trails, used by people who appreciate nature, do not have a big litter problem. But anything to benefit trails and their users is fine by Olinger, who whenever he can professes his love for trails and Hungry Mother.
“It’s a privilege to work for DCR,” he said, referring to Virginia’s Department of Conservation and Recreation under which the state parks operate. “I don’t think there’s another state park that’s done this much on trails.”
An understudy of Olinger’s, Jared Vandergriff, likes what he does, too.
“It’s hard, but getting out here and learning from Brandon, I love it,” he said.
“We get paid to play in the woods, if you can call it play. It’s hard work,” said Hall.
Hall joined Vandergriff and Olinger in praising the park. “I’ve always believed it’s the best thing the county has to offer. There is no reason for young people to say there’s nothing to do here.” In addition to the park’s recreational offerings, there are opportunities to volunteer.
Olinger likes working with young people “who learn something about stewardship” out there in the woods, he said.
Eva Kling said she might participate in YCC again next year, although she won’t know until assigned whether her work would be in Hungry Mother. It’s been a rewarding experience, joining with other girls in a close setting one might suspect could create enough interpersonal drama for a so-called reality television show.
Instead, the group rapidly bonded. “We get along real well together,” Kling said. “By the second day it was like we knew each other forever. It’s three weeks. We have to get along.”
Jim Kelly, supervisor of state parks in this part of Virginia who is based at Hungry Mother, said the YCC girls could represent the future workforce for the parks. He called them the leaders of tomorrow, and said their experience may lead them later to jobs in the park system.
Like the YCC group, many young people come to the park from near and far to work and play in it. AmeriCorps is a frequent presence in the park, as are students looking for a meaningful alternative to the traditional beach-flocking spring break, like those this year from Philadelphia’s Drexel University and Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
So far this year, along with a local construction contractor, and park staff, these visiting young people have brought to about 75 the number of workers on the new Molly’s Knob trail.
“There are a lot of fingerprints on this trail,” Hall said, and a growing number of footprints as well, not one of them muddy on the mountain’s magic soil.
I’ve climbed the ‘old trail’ many times and there’s nothing to beat the sense of accomplishment you get when you finally summit. But I disagree that the top’s an anti-climax. It’s a spectacular view and worth every panting wheezing step!
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