Mills Kelly Discusses "The Lost Appalachian Trail on May 6 & 7

We are so excited to host Mills Kelly of The Green Tunnel podcast for TWO programs in May! Mills will speak at Bosler Memorial Library on Saturday, May 6th at 3pm and on Sunday, May 7th at noon at the AT Museum. The program at the AT Museum will be held outside on the museum lawn, so please bring a camp chair or blanket to sit on! 

For more than two decades, hikers on the Appalachian Trail in Virginia walked through some of the most beautiful landscapes of the southern Appalachian Mountains. Then, in 1952, the Appalachian Trail Conference moved 300 miles of the trail more than 50 miles to the west. This change was the single largest re-routing of the AT in the trail’s long history. Lost in that move were opportunities for hikers to scramble over the Pinnacles of Dan, to sit on Fisher’s Peak and gaze out over the North Carolina Piedmont, or to cross the New River on a flat-bottomed boat called Redbud for a nickel.
 
In his latest book, historian and lifelong AT section hiker Mills Kelly tells the story of a part of the history of the Appalachian Trail that is all but forgotten by hikers, but not by the residents of the southwestern Virginia counties that the trail used to cross. Virginia’s Lost Appalachian Trail is thus a history of the AT and a story of the power of memory in rural communities traversed by the trail.