Even though Susan Stemper considers herself more of a “distance walker” than a backpacker, she regularly drives 150 miles before hiking into a section of the Appalachian Trail near Gulf Hagas with tools on her back.
“Nothing is easy to get to on the AT,” she explains — but before she can finish, Tom Carr chimes in: “That’s the whole deal, right?”
Stemper and Carr are among at least eight Harpswell residents who volunteer as maintainers for the Maine Appalachian Trail Club, among 184 volunteers spread across Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Quebec. Although Harpswell’s maintainers range in age, hiking background, and tenure in the town, they all share two things: tenacity and a commitment to preserving 267 miles of rugged trail in Maine.
Most maintainers are responsible for the upkeep of a section of trail, while others monitor the surrounding corridors or perform tree work. The work varies from season to season. Each spring brings blowdowns, while the summer is busy with blazing and pruning of new growth. In the fall, maintainers clean rocks and leaves from water bars, which are drainage areas made from stones that help preserve the integrity of the trail.
The Appalachian Trail does not run through Harpswell — the closest section of trail, Grafton Notch, is nearly 90 miles away — so volunteers put in long days, sometimes stretching 18 hours while the summer sun lasts.
Besides the trail itself, the big draw is the community.
“It was very cool the first time I went to a club meeting and there were all these people I knew from Harpswell,” says Stemper.
David Brooks and Nancy Marstaller, both of whom have lived in Harpswell for more than 40 years, heard about maintaining from Tony Barrett, who served on the Harpswell Recreation Committee with Brooks.
“Sometimes we’ll camp nearby and incorporate a work trip with a camping trip,” says Brooks.
“I never went alone,” adds Donald Miskill, who joined the club as a volunteer in 1995 and has been maintaining ever since. “Either family or friends came as a safety while I sawed, and to help with clipping or other work.”
For Barrett, maintaining trails in Harpswell was the start, but the “sense of ownership and pride in maintaining a small piece of a large trail” got him hooked on his work for the Appalachian Trail. “If not for this responsibility, I wouldn’t get out as often into the Maine woods,” he says.
Carr performs hazard tree work, hiking in with a chainsaw to remove blowdowns from the trail. Carr started maintaining a section when he lived in New Jersey. When he moved to Maine, his volunteer assignment relocated with him.
“Sometimes it’s a drive to a paddle to a hike to the work site,” Carr explains ruefully, “and then you have to get back.”
“When my family had our section,” says Miskill, “it was a 2 1/2-hour drive up to a logging road just south of Rangeley Lake. Once parked, it was a 1-mile bushwhack into our section. … My longest workday was a 13-mile total hike to work on 2 miles of the trail.”
Despite its obvious difficulty, trail maintenance has its rewards. Perhaps chief among them, maintainers say, are the people you meet along the way.
David Brooks describes a meeting with a thru-hiker near Monson, which marks the start of the 100-Mile Wilderness and is as many miles from the end of the nearly 2,200-mile route. The hiker had carried a rugby ball all the way from Georgia. He was looking for people to play with, Brooks supposes, but it didn’t look like he had found many along the way.
Stemper remembers meeting another thru-hiker with the trail name Bob Cratchit, who was carrying a “little, blind, anemic Chihuahua” in a bag on his chest. The dog’s trail name was Tiny Tim.
“He could have talked the varnish off of a door with his stories,” Stemper says.
As for why so many Appalachian Trail volunteers have settled in Harpswell, nobody is sure — perhaps it’s just a place where many residents wish to volunteer in the outdoors.
“It’s quite an eclectic group,” says Carr of his fellow maintainers across the state. “They’re unique, but everyone works together and somehow it all works.” All eight Harpswell volunteers share an abiding love of the town. As Stemper puts it, “What’s not to like? The ocean, the trees, lots of great people, the Community Garden. It’s a community of people unlike any other place that my household has lived — people get involved and they care.”
