Drawing by Sharon Garvey
Please make note of revised shelter work schedule: Sunday, November 12 Saturday/Sunday, November 18 - 19 (Meet at the Weverton Parking lot at 9am each day.) With a good turnout we can complete the Edward B. Garvey Memorial shelter during the above 3 work dates. Everyone is welcome and the project particularly needs folks who have carpentry skills. John Coffey and Jane Thompson have offered to coordinate a dinner for late afternoon on November 18th (bring your flashlight - gets dark early, or plan to camp overnight). Please contact me or Jim Skinner (jskinner@erols.com) if you plan to work or would like to RSVP for the dinner. Thank You, Frank (301) 249-8243 Updated shelter photos (10/1/00) www.trailjournals.com\edgarveyshelter\ PATC Garvey Website http://patc.net/volunteer/garvey/
Previous announcements:
Good news! The Ed Garvey shelter is being built by PATC, and they need your help. The following dates are set aside by PATC for working on the shelter at PATC’s shelter-building workshop:
The work weekends will be every weekend in May, including Memorial Day Weekend. (There may also be work weekends in June, but call Frank Turk, below, for specifics.)
If you can help, contact Frank Turk, PATC’s shelter coordinator, at (301) 249-8243 or frankturk@aol.com. It would be great to have a big ALDHA contingent there.
The shelter is being assembled in Bowie, Md., a suburb of Washington, D.C. Call Frank for directions and the exact location. Once finished, it will be airlifted by helicopter to a trailside location, along the ridgeline north of Harpers Ferry in Maryland, about a mile and a half or so north of Weverton Cliffs. The water source is down the ridge a ways on property recently acquired by PATC for this project.
ALDHA’s board has voted to donate up to $800 toward the construction of a food pavilion, or covered eating area with picnic table, to help keep the shelter tidy and to provide a place for hikers to hang their food outside of the shelter. We will keep you posted on how that proposal is going.
DIRECTIONS to the building site:
Take the Beltway around D.C. to the Maryland side.
Take Route 50 East toward Bowie, Md.
Take 301 South for five miles.
Turn left onto Queen Ann Road
(You must pass Wawa Station and Route 214 before you turn left!)
Go another 1/4-mile and cross small bridge.
Just after the bridge on the Right is a gravel road.
If gate is locked, park and walk in to logs and shelter site on right.
Coordinating ALDHA’s involvement in this project is Wayne Greenlaw, a PATC member and an at-large member of ALDHA’s board who was a close friend of Ed Garvey in his latter years. To find out more about Ed, check out the memorial page we have posted here.
Related links
Here are a couple of related links about the construction of the Ed Garvey Shelter. Updates, photos and other information are available here:
Shelter Journal and current pictures from May 6, 2000. The manager of this Web site is rick@trailjournals.com. Check it out at http://www.trailjournals.com/edgarveyshelter/
Garvey Shelter Website. The manager of this Web site is Stan Turk. It is located at http://patc.net/garvey/index.html
Baltimore Sun article
The Appalachian Trail’s new notch
By Candus Thomson
The Baltimore Sun
May 10, 2000
Before his death last year, Ed Garvey spent nearly a half-century teaching Appalachian Trail hikers about the path under their boots. In his memory, admirers have been building a log shelter to give backpackers a roof over their heads at night.
Each weekend, volunteers gather in a field in Bowie to turn tree trunks into the walls of a two-story, 15-foot-by-9-foot shelter and a matching privy.
When the work is done, they will dismantle the buildings and haul them to a site above the Potomac River across from Harpers Ferry. There, the interlocking pieces will be reassembled, like a child’s toy.
“The only thing easy about this is thinking about it,” says project leader Frank Turk, laughing. “It looks neat, but it’s an awful lot of work. A lot of people get disillusioned.”
Daily progress is measured one log at a time. The timber is trucked in as 20-foot loblolly pine tree trunks. Workers peel away the bark and prepare the wood for the more-skilled volunteers with chain saws, who cut the notches in each end that will mesh with the log laid on top of it. Fine-tuning each notch is done by hand chisel.
It can take hours to get two logs to fit snugly together. Volunteers grunt and strain each time they have to lift the pieces for more chiseling.
“It’s a neat guy thing, but women like to do it, too,” says Turk, watching the action one recent Saturday. “It’s a mixture of precision and rustic skill.”
The shelter is being built in Bowie rather than near the Appalachian Trail, because it allows Turk to tap into a bigger volunteer pool and provides easier access to the construction site.
The project, which started in January, has attracted dozens of volunteers — students and faculty members from Johns Hopkins University, hikers who saw signs at outdoors shops and students from Model Secondary School for the Deaf in Washington, where Turk teaches.
Turk, 43, never met Garvey, never hiked the 2,100-mile Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. Frankly, he wasn’t ready to build a shelter, having just finished one for another part of trail in Maryland when Garvey died on Sept. 20, at the age of 84.
But Garvey’s friends, and those moved by his books about the Appalachian Trail, felt no tribute could be more fitting.
And after Turk read Garvey’s books and met the Garvey family, he agreed to take on the project.
“We couldn’t have been luckier,” says Sharon Garvey, Ed’s daughter. “He is so enthusiastic. He’s involved the family as much as the family has wanted to be involved.”
Sharon Garvey, an artist, has designed T-shirts for the volunteers. She and her husband have lent a hand on the construction crew. Her sister, Kathleen Menendez, has crafted a sign for the shelter and another one for the cabinet that will hold the shelter’s logbook for hikers to sign. A close family friend has built a small memorial marker.
“My father donated his body to science, so there isn’t any grave site. We were thinking the marker could be set into concrete at the site,” Sharon Garvey says.
Edward Bohan Garvey was a tireless advocate for the trail, which he thru-hiked in 1970 at the age of 55. He wrote his first book about the experience, “Appalachian Hiker,” that laid out in practical terms what someone needed to know and do to follow in his footsteps.
More than 50,000 copies were sold — an unheard-of number in the days before “Into Thin Air.” The book spurred thousands of hikers to try the trail in segments or as a half-year adventure. Garvey updated it in 1978 and again in 1997.
But even before the book, Garvey was fighting to protect the trail. In 1952, he joined the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club — the group that maintains a segment of the trail from Rockfish Gap, Va., to Pine Grove Furnace State Park in Pennsylvania. He served on the Appalachian Trail Conference Board of Managers for almost a dozen years, pushed for a professional staff to run it and recruited new members.
He lobbied Congress for passage of legislation to buy land to permanently protect the trail.
After his death, hundreds of hikers wrote to the Appalachian Trail Conference and the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association to ask for a memorial.
Among them was George Cathcart, a 1982 thru-hiker and now chief spokesman for the University of Maryland, who said his trek “turned my life around in 100 different ways” and called Garvey “a major inspiration to me.”
The desire to honor Garvey drives Turk to be the first there every weekend and to race out to Bowie after school “at the drop of a hat to measure this and that” and get in a few hours of work before nightfall.
Some days, it’s just Turk and Jim Skinner, a mathematician at the Naval Observatory in Washington who worked on the last shelter. Other days, he has more help than tools.
“You have to be ready to go with the flow,” says Turk.
He says it is no accident that the last shelter and this one are the work of deaf and hearing volunteers. Turk, whose parents are deaf, says the project is the “merging of my two worlds, two languages, two cultures.”
Turk has scrounged up thousands of dollars of free materials, and persuaded a number of people to donate logs, heavy equipment and sawmill time.
“He’s extremely resourceful. He’s faced some daunting obstacles, from cold and snow to limited equipment. It’s amazing what a problem solver he is,” Sharon Garvey says.
The PATC has received in donations about one-third of the project’s $10,000 cost.
Charlie Graf, an Arnold resident and chairman of the PATC Shelter Committee, says he hopes to use old roads to get the shelter pieces to the site, but if not, they’ll have to look for a helicopter to airlift them in.
But before that can happen, volunteers will be needed to prepare the shelter site, clearing access and digging the foundation and privy pit.
Turk says even those who can’t do manual labor are invited to lend a hand and earn a Garvey T-shirt.
“If they want to come out and play music or help cook a community meal, that would be terrific,” he says.
To learn more about the Ed Garvey Memorial Shelter, call Frank Turk, 301-249-8243, or log on to the PATC Web site.
