Maine AT Club to honor volunteers

By Maine Appalachian Trail Club

The Maine Appalachian Trail Club will hold its annual meeting April 14 at the University of Maine at Orono to honor a UMO student volunteer group that has aided MATC for over a half century.
 
MATC will honor the Maine Outing Club at an 11: 40 a.m. ceremony during the 8 a.m.-4 p.m. meeting in Nutting Hall. MOC works on the AT somewhere in Maine two or three times each year. Ten to 20 people, but sometimes up to 30, spend long weekends getting tired, muddy, and sore doing a variety of projects. .
 
I remember the  cut and peel  weekend around Memorial Day in 1994 and being so tired at the end of the day I wanted to go to sleep. But there s a rule. It must be at 7 p.m.,  says MOC member and volunteer leader Chris Dorion.
 
About six weeks later, the MOC worked with MATC to haul the logs to the site. The 18-inch-diameter deacon seat logs took everybody,  Dorion says about this outing to continue building a new lean-to at Bald Mountain Brook.
 
From its first maintaining 17 miles of AT in 1949, MOC has helped mark the trail by painting trees and rocks, clear blowdowns, construct lean-tos and privies, build waterbars to control erosion, roll boulders into a beaver flowage so hikers could cross, relocate the trail periodically in areas with sensitive plant growth, and more.
 
MATC,  a volunteer group of some 600 members, maintains the AT in Maine from Grafton Notch some 271 miles to the edge of Baxter State Park in which MATC volunteers also help maintain the final 15 miles of the AT to the summit of Katahdin. 
 
Information about MATC can be found at www.matc.org.