How ALDHA’s home page was hatched . . .
By Bill O’Brien
Benton MacKaye, when he was just a young fellow, was supposedly sitting in a tree on Stratton Mountain in Vermont when the idea came to him for a long-distance trail following the ridge lines and linking the highest peaks on the east coast. That turn-of-the-century idea later evolved into the Appalachian Trail.
The genesis for this home page has a much less romantic story. As with almost any home page, the idea sprung while sitting on my keister, safely ensconced in an easy chair in front of a warm, glowing tube, following the path of others who had already blazed this Internet Trail. So much for romance. But the idea has become reality, and today you’re looking at the home page of the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association.
As with any creative borrowing, appropriate acknowledgment is due to the folks who provided the inspiration... Kathy Bilton is first and foremost. She created a home page for the Appalachian Trail in late 1994. It started as a fun project but has evolved into something much more serious than that -- the principal source of information on the Internet about the Appalachian Trail. It was her page that sparked the notion for ALDHA’s humble effort. (Sample picture from her page, photographed by Judy Birmingham, is shown here. Follow it to her Web site.)
Acknowledgment is also due to all the creative geniuses in the various A.T. maintaining clubs who have launched their own home pages. Links to these pages can be found in Side Trails.
Back home, I want to thank a co-worker and colleague for providing technical support and other motivation, from learning a new language to finding a Web server. Charles Andrew Sauer, take a bow.
Typing in the coding raw, which is how this page was created, can be a drag, but I found it provided the most freedom and flexibility than working with text editors and converters designed to make Web publishing “easy.” Just when it was becoming a real drag, I went to Trail Days in Damascus, Va., and met Waldo, the kid from Charlottesville who declared himself graduated from high school and hit the trail, hiking north from Georgia to Maine with 6 extra pounds in an already too-heavy pack. The extra weight is for his laptop computer, cellular phone and digital camera. He’s posting a running journal of his thru-hike on the A.T., complete with photos from the trail. (A linkup to his page is in the Side Trails section.) The enthusiasm this kid has for the A.T. is infectious, and I was back at work pecking away at my keyboard as soon as I got home from that trip. Thanks kid. (Note: click on his drawing to jump into his journal entries.)
I’d also like to thank the 1995-97 ALDHA board of directors and, especially, past Coordinator Noel DeCavalcante, for their blessing and support for this project. I hope this page will demonstrate that the Internet can bring real people face to face for the betterment of the trail, whether it’s through work trips that are advertised here, at the Gathering which is fully explained here, or during thru-hikes which may be hatched here thanks to advice and support from otherwise faceless names in a register.
I also hope it proves that there are few better forums than a home hage for an intermingling of viewpoints from far and wide, hither and yon. A quick scroll down this path should make it unmistakably clear that it contains not just the opinions of one person, but scores and scores.
Which is your cue to start inputting. So it’s all up to you now ... Happy hiking!
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Side Trails