118 * * * * * "Oh, Ranger!" 



few. After that the Appalachians, and the trail clubs that were to fol 

 low, concluded that the way to build trails was to have the state or the 

 national government do it. The trail clubs concentrated their activities 

 upon the erection of camps and shelters and upon focusing public atten 

 tion on the recreational possibilities of publicly built trails. 



Today the Appalachian Club numbers its members by more than 

 four thousand. It has a notable clubhouse in Boston and chapters in 

 New York and several other eastern cities. Its leaders conduct weekly 

 walking trips in the country about these population centers and head 

 annual expeditions into the more remote wilderness. The club operates 

 a chain of lodges and camps along the main trails of New England, 

 capable of accommodating several hundred members each night. It was 

 sponsor of a trail conference at which representatives of state govern 

 ments and of trail clubs met and planned a great interstate continuous 

 trail system extending from Georgia up the backbone of the eastern 

 mountain range all the way to the northernmost tip of Maine. When 

 this system of trails is connected, the eastern hiker can hit the trail 

 anywhere along the "Long, Long Trail" and keep going for weeks on 

 end without leaving the wilderness, yet all the time be within a hundred 

 miles of a metropolis. 



After the Appalachians had demonstrated what trails could do for 

 the White Mountains, a group of trail lovers in Rutland, Vermont, as 

 sembled, organized, and adopted the Green Mountains as their particular 

 orphan. The goal of the Green Mountain Club was the building of two 

 hundred miles of trails in their mountains. This was achieved and met 

 with such general approval that the club grew into a widespread organi 

 zation with chapters in half a dozen cities, including New York, which 

 strangely enough, is more or less a hot-bed of trail clubs. It is the 

 headquarters of the Tramp and Trail Club, the Inkowa Club, the 

 Fresh Air Club, the Wild Life Council, the Camp Fire Club, the Boone 

 and Crockett Club, and various other similar societies. 



When it comes to doing something big, the Boy Scout badge goes 

 to the Sierra Club of California. Casting about for some bit of wilder 

 ness to which to be big brother and big sister, this trail society, founded 

 in 1892 under the leadership of John Muir, the noted naturalist and 

 sage of the mountains, adopted the biggest mountain in the world, the 

 Sierra Nevada. According to scientists, there are only two kinds of moun 

 tains on this earth, those that are piled up by volcanoes and those that 

 are pushed up by Nature through eons of internal earthly convulsion. 

 The Sierra Nevada is one of the latter, being a great block of granite 

 four hundred miles long and almost a hundred miles wide, pushed out 

 of the earth until its crest averages an altitude of more than two miles 

 above sea level. As if size were not enough, this giant mountain is head- 



