Yesterday and Today, 50 Years of the Rachel Carson Trail

The Rachel Carson Trail was completed and the first hike held 50 years ago this coming March. While I'm familiar with most of our core volunteers over the past 25-30 years, I didn't know much about those involved with the founding of the trail, so I thought I'd research those folks and salute them and their amazing accomplishment. Checking around I couldn't find any of our emeritus volunteers with knowledge of the founding, and our archive of newsletters and documentation were scant in acknowledging individual contributions, which left me with not much 'meat' to write this article.

Reading through our archive though, it struck me that we are the same sort of people, and we face many of the same challenges as those from 50 years ago. Yesterday and today, we are folks with an extreme passion for the outdoors, for getting out and getting some exercise while surrounding ourselves with the great outdoors. We're people proud of our community, the beauty in our back yards, and we want to share it with our neighbors.

But yesterday, as today, the things we would like to do, our goals, are limited by our volunteer pool. Very early in the history of the RCT there was the declared goal of connecting our trails and linking them to other local trails. We've had some successes - we've achieved the goal of extending the trail through North Park (and connecting to the since established Harmony Trail). And we still have our challenges, even though the Freeport bridge now includes a pedestrian lane, we're still working to make the connection to the Baker Trail. We've also gotten closer to the goal of connecting to the Fox Chapel trails, but we're still lacking the resources to finalize the Hartwood/Beechwood Farms connection.

The Rachel Carson Trail is currently in its best condition ever. Over the past 5 years we've rebuilt the trail eliminating about 5 miles of road walking and building about 8-9 miles of new trail. We have nearly 40 Trail Stewards maintaining the trail, and dozens more who show up for Work Crews rebuilding and improving the trail, so in many ways we are stronger today than at any time in the past 50 years. But we suffer the same limitations as our founders, we struggle to find hike leaders, and to organize and staff work projects. We aspire to do more, to complete our long term goals, to grow beyond individual trails into an integrated trail system for our region. The missing ingredient today is the same as it was 50 years ago — YOU! So if you have it in your heart, join our team and help us make the next 50 years of the RCT better than the first 50.