I remember thinking at some point that there was room for optimism. You can't beat it... you can't join it... and it's not going to run out on it's own energy. For reasons that I can't be too public about, where I come from, that brings us right back to fight, only this time our back is against the wall. But Adventurer's Project went from fighting because it had to, to actually having a shot at winning.
7 years ago, the Road Fork and Whipple Sections were a nightmare. But the remoteness of the Marietta Unit and the hearsay is that North Country Trail got everything they ever dreamed of out of The Wayne made it a popular destination. Personally, I think that the Little Muskingum River Flats on the Whipple Section is the masterpiece of it all. 12 something years ago, it attracted some attention. But by the time the hikers came, they arrived into a maintenance nightmare. It was bad. The story that I call "The Night from Hell" took place mostly on the Road Fork Section in The Wayne. The trail in the Marietta Unit got scathing reviews because of it's maintenance. That didn't change until the BTA assembled its first work week, which was for the Road Fork and Whipple Sections.
I remember when hiking the Road Fork Section on-road, I had some of the first GPS tracks for the BT. The on-road blazes were few and far between. And even the GPS couldn't cut it through 3 of it's intersections because the way that they appear on the maps isn't how they end up being in person. And at intersections on the Road Fork Section's on-road, sometimes there's a gravel driveway that looks like a road. It could be something that looks like a four, or 5 way intersection when it's only a 3 or 4? These are the kind of places that use to drive hikers straight up crazy because they'd get on the wrong road. Then RF's blazes were so few that it would take them miles to determine that the were heading the wrong way.
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