If you enjoy hiking, backpacking, or any use of trails for outdoor recreation, we invite you to join the PATC. In the mid-Atlantic region, chances are that the trails you use are maintained by volunteers from PATC. Our volunteers strive to keep your path clear so that you can more fully enjoy your outdoor experiences. The next time you are striding along on a trail, look in any random direction through the forest. That is what a trail would look like in a very short time without diligent trail maintenance. How about the trailside shelter you had lunch or overnighted in, or used to escape a storm? PATC volunteers built and maintain it. Does litter get picked up by woodland creatures? Only if they have a PATC patch on their backpacks.

We take the maintenance of public hiking trails seriously. Each year, hundreds of PATC members volunteer thousands of hours of their time to maintain sections of hiking trails varying in length from 0.2 to 2.0 miles. Each year, the Club offers training to trail maintainers (whom we call “overseers”).

The responsibility for over 1,000 miles of public hiking trails forces the creation and maintenance of an organization to accomplish the mission of maintaining those trails. One elected officer—the Supervisor of Trails—is responsible to the Club membership (nearly 6,500 souls) and to over 40 federal, state, and local government agencies for the successful maintenance of all of those miles of trails. That means a lot of meetings and phone calls and meetings and phone calls and, on occasion, e-mail. All of this, and done by a volunteer! Well, successive Supervisors have organized the trails volunteers into districts.

Myron Avery was, by all accounts, not made for a desk. He was a mover, a motivator, and a shaker—and not in the 19^_th century religious sense, either. People either loved or hated him; there were few who knew him who did not have a strong opinion about him. While it’s probably true that without Benton Mackaye the concept of the Appalachian Trail might not have been born, it’s a fact that, without Myron Avery, there wouldn’t be an Appalachian Trail for feet to trod.