National Trail Efforts
This has been a golden era of trail building nationally. For the major national trails, much progress has been made toward completing them, protecting their routes or improving their marking and footway. Several new national trails have come off the drawing boards and are starting to take shape. Until recently, I wasn't aware of two big ones, the Great Eastern Trail and the Great Western Loop. The Great Eastern is a formal effort that will tie together existing trails plus some new ones to form a giant loop with the A.T. and provide an alternative along much of its route. I'd heard about similar ideas for a loop for many years and Earl Shaffer had long talked about it. But the organization and name are relatively recent. The Great Western forms a loop with the Pacific Crest Trail and the Continental Divide Trails with east west connectors. Versions of it have been hiked by Andy Skurka and Nimblewill Nomad although I'm not aware of any effort yet to formalize it. The International Appalachian Trail continues to extend its route through Canada and is now investigating geologically related routes in Europe and Africa. The Ozark Highlands trail is featured in the October issue of National Geographic which also has an article and map on the 40th anniversary of the National Trails System Act.
I'm including links for some of these trails as well as a new site on ultralight-hiking by Linguini.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2008/10/ozark-trail/white-text
http://www.andrewskurka.com/skurka.php
http://www.nimblewillnomad.com/gwl_2002-2008.htm
http://cduane.net/ultralight-hiking.html
http://www.internationalat.org/Pages/index
http://www.greateasterntrail.org/
