Carolina Mountain Club: Celebrating 100 years of hiking, trail maintenance
The noise of hiking sticks, warm welcomes and rustling dirt filled the air as Carolina Mountain Club members got ready for their hike.
Ages ranged from around 50 all the way to 93. The 4.2-mile climb up Tennent Mountain was considered a "relaxed" day for the crew. Judy and Jim Magura, who have been a part of the club for 12 years led the group of almost 20 hikers.
"All right everyone, gather around and introduce yourselves," Judy Magura called out.
But everyone knew each other already, a lot of the hikers are friends outside of the club.
Veteran hiker of 22 years Sharon Smith said meeting all kinds of people from everywhere is what makes this club special.
"Having the closeness with nature, having that bond with nature has kept this going because we all have something in common. We enjoy the beauty of it, and we try to keep it and maintain it. We have volunteers that maintain the trails, and we put a lot into it," Smith said.
The hike was an early celebration of sorts for the quintessential WNC hiking group — the Carolina Mountain Club, which turns 100 July 16. The club has over 1,000 members who not only gather to hike some of the most gorgeous trails in the country but do their part to share the bounty with others through volunteer trail building and maintenance for the past century.
Being the largest and oldest hiking and trail maintenance club in the Southeast, members celebrated by hiking up Tennent Mountain in Haywood County in Pisgah National Forest on July 12 ― a summit named for the club's first president, Gaillard Tennent.
The best part — the club is open to all ages and all levels of hikers.
Brenda Worley is the councilor for hiking; she's been with the club since 1994 and has been in her position on the council for eight years. She schedules hikes and has a hiking committee — they all get together and schedule hikes for Wednesdays and the weekends.
"I've met just about all of my friends through CMC," Worley said.
While hiking is a huge component of the club, so is building and maintaining the trails. The trail crews work each day of the week (except Sundays), 12 months a year. These crews are responsible for strenuous work such as building new trails, renovating, clearing trails after storms and restoring neglected trails. There is also a Saturday Crew that works two Saturdays a month, according to said Joseph Bange, councilor for trails maintenance. Members maintain over 400 miles of trails.
The club prides itself on four different components: hiking, trail maintenance, conservation and education, according to David Huff, councilor for communications.
"Conservation is a big thing here," he said. "We're here in the outdoors advocating, supporting and conserving the wild spaces in the public lands. We also are about education," Huff told the Citizen Times.
The club does educational programs on trail maintenance and trains others on how to help maintain the trails and the ways the general public can contribute to keeping the trails walkable and enjoyable.
CMC works with three national forests, Pisgah and Nantahala in Western North Carolina and Cherokee in Tennessee.
The club is funded by grants, and it works closely with the U.S. Forest Service, Appalachian Trail Conservancy and other area hiking clubs. CMC has a five-year agreement with Blue Ridge Parkway and the three national forests that allows members to work on the trails while the park services help them maintain safety standards. The club has to report back what members worked on and how many hours they worked — this allows it to get more grant money, according to Tom Weaver, the club's president.
"It's a partnership," Bange said. "They benefit a lot because they don't have to have the staff up there to work on the trails."
Bange's role is to coordinate all of the work on the different trails the club maintains and be aware of what kinds of projects the CMC is working on.
Les Love became the vice president of the club last January but has been a part of the CMC for over 20 years. He joined in 1997 and met his wife of 19 years, Catherine, through the club. Since he joined, Love said he has seen the membership increase by triple the amount it used to be, and he credits it largely to social media.
"I think one of the big things that we try to work on is getting people out on the trail, and to do that, we want our trails to be in tip top shape, because now with social media, people go out and hike a trail, and they do their own report on social media about the condition of that trail," Love said.
He said club members take great pride in the fact that the trails they work on are in great shape.
"It is such a good vehicle to give people the opportunity to learn trails in Western North Carolina. All you have to do is show up," Love said.
The Loves lead hikes every three months, and he said that before members lead a hike, they go and scout out the trail to make sure that it's in good shape.
"So anytime you go on a Carolina Mountain Club hike, that leader has done their due diligence to make sure they know where they're going to be leading their group," he said.
More: Lew Blodgett carves a path: At age 98 still going strong along Blue Ridge Parkway
The Carolina Mountain Club gives people the opportunity to enjoy the beautiful scenery in WNC, not just for the locals but for people who come to visit.
The oldest member of the club, Caroll Koepplinger, 93, joined CMC in 2000. He told the Citizen Times that he will have hiked 9,000 miles by the end of the year.
"Many people say I'm an inspiration to them, and if I can inspire someone to hike that extra mile, then I will happily use my age to do it," Koepplinger said.
The group stopped about halfway through the hike at the top of Tennent Mountain, over a 6,000-foot elevation, for a lunch break. Judy and Jim Magura passed out chocolate — a tradition for the hike leaders. They all caught their breath and ate their sandwiches while enjoying the beautiful views and good company.
"Everyone wants to hike," Love said. "It's the main thing folks want to do here. They want to get out on the trails. So that's what we do. Give them that opportunity to just show up and follow the leader, and you're going to learn a lot of a lot of trails and you're going to make a lot of friends. If you want to give back, we have crews that go out every day of the week except Sunday, just to work on those on those trails. So, we teach people how to how to work on trails, how to be pack leaders. It's a great teaching organization," Love said.
'We just do it for fun'
The way the club functions is through its council members and volunteers — no one on staff is paid.
Tom Weaver has been the president of the club for two years now, and he told the Citizen Times that he didn't realize he would be the president when the club celebrated such a huge milestone — calling it an honor.
One of the challenges the club faced was a surge of foot traffic during COVID and having to keep up with the maintenance on the trails.
More: Blue Ridge Parkway visits in 2022 dropped. Is it still most popular national park?
"It's also a mixed blessing, too, because more people are out there seeing what we do, and we've been able to enhance and build up some of our trail maintenance," Weaver said. "A lot of people come by and think we work for the government (but), we don't. We just do it for fun, I guess."
The Carolina Mountain Club offers three to five hikes every week. The club started in 1923 with only about 25-30 active members but has grown to over 1,000 members. It started to really boom after focusing on hiking, trail maintenance and bringing the community together, according to members.
They work with a variety of public and private partners to conserve the beauty of the trails, and the club has taken responsibility for sections of the Appalachian Trail and Mountains-to-Sea Trail.
The majority of the members are retired and have dedicated their free time to making these trails accessible and appealing to the public, according to members. Being able to have a growing membership of volunteers for 100 years was a major talking point with the council and something that the club is honored to be able to share with the public.
More: Max Patch camping ban, usage restrictions extended until 2026 by U.S. Forest Service
"Most people don't know that public lands — national forests, state parks and national parks — that consist of miles and miles of trails are most of the time not maintained by the government but by volunteers, and without volunteers, the trails aren't kept," Huff said.
Keeping it diverse
The Citizen Times asked several members of the council what they felt the biggest struggle has been for the club. The answer — diversity.
"Certainly, we're trying to be a more diverse club, and we're a little bit behind on getting our club membership to look like the general population out here in Western North Carolina," Weaver said.
A visitor-use study by the U.S. Forest Service in 2018 showed that of the nearly 6 million visitors to the national forests in North Carolina, 96% were white, 4.7% Hispanic, 1.5% Black, 1.4% Asian and 0.8% American Indian/Alaskan.
More: Black Folks Camp Too aims to get Black people hiking, camping, into the outdoor economy
The club has a diversity and inclusion committee that's been working for a couple of years on diversifying membership. It is looking to encourage people of color and younger hikers to join. CMC started a new youth partner challenge where they offer short hikes with an educational component to youths under the age of 18.
"It's always a slow process. We want to do these changes, and it's really hard but we've reached out to different schools, we've reached out to the YMCAs in the area, and we've done meet-up hikes too," Jan Onan, committee member for diversity and inclusion, told the Citizen Times.
More: Chain barrier to prevent dumping on Mountains-to-Sea Trail near Blue Ridge Parkway
Onan said the club has reached out to other diverse group around WNC in hopes of connecting, and some are going to the 100th birthday celebration on July 16 at the North Carolina Arboretum.
"We are really excited about it. We're hoping to be able to partner with each of them to see how we can help them or support them in their hiking or outdoor adventures and maybe partner in some way in the future," Onan said.
The club encourages volunteers who are wanting to learn more about trail maintenance to join on Saturdays — this is also a good option for people who work during the week and can't join during the weekdays.
By the numbers
440: Number of trail miles the club maintains in WNC.
150: Miles the CMC maintains on the Mountains-to-Sea Trail.
95: Miles maintained on the Appalachian Trail.
1923: Year CMC started.
Over 1,000: Members.
More than 200: Guided hikes each year.
100th anniversary celebration info
What: Carolina Mountain Club will celebrate its 100th anniversary with more than 20 booths including local nonprofit partners, live music, food trucks and activities for children.
When: 1-5 p.m. Sunday, July 16.
Where: North Carolina Arboretum, 100 Frederick Law Olmsted Way in South Asheville.
Who: Open to the public.
More info: Check out the club's website, Carolina Mountain Club
McKenna Leavens is the education reporter for the Asheville Citizen Times, part of the USA Today Network. Email her at mleavens@citizentimes.com or follow her on Twitter @LeavensMcKennna. Please support this type of journalism with a subscription to the Citizen Times.
This article originally appeared on Asheville Citizen Times: Carolina Mountain Club: 100 years of hiking, trail maintenance
