For the past year, the National Forest Service has been taking inventory, collecting public input and meeting with outdoor interest groups to wrangle its expansive web of nearly 1,600 miles of trail in the Nantahala and Pisgah national forests into a better, more sustainable network.

This month, the forest service will share its preliminary assessment from the “Trail Strategy Initiative” with mountain residents.

The mountains rising above the valleys have long been the main attraction for tourists planning a trip to Western North Carolina, but a regional initiative between local government and private entities is looking to capitalize on the recreational potential riding on the rivers beneath.

Next time you hike a trail, pause a minute and give silent thanks to the legion of trail volunteers who have taken up arms and engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the forest, hacking back the undergrowth and clearing obstructive logs.

Volunteer trail crews devoted 28,000 hours of labor in North Carolina’s national forests last year. It often seems like an uphill battle, with the earth constantly trying to reclaim the zigzag of footpaths cut through mountains, but so far crews are holding their own.

“The trails, I think, are really in good shape,” said Mary Gollwitzer, a hiker in Haywood County.

Before Gollwitzer leads a hike for her club — known as the Leisure Hikers — she makes a practice of scouting the trail ahead of time.

“I don’t like to all of a sudden lead a hike and never have gone on it myself. I stay away from that because I don’t know what to expect,” Gollwitzer said.

She might revise the hike plan if the trail is too steep or has large boulders to scramble over, but she’s never ruled out a hike for the club because of maintenance issues.

Volunteer trail crews make sure the cumulative mass of fallen limbs and downed trees don’t eventually overwhelm trails. They build back washed out bridges, repair eroding trail beds, fix soggy sections by diverting water from the trail, and cart out lots and lots of trash.

There are more than two dozen volunteer groups in the mountains that lend their sweat and muscle to take care of trails. The biggest is Carolina Mountain Club, which runs six volunteer trail crews that comb the mountains several times a week fixing problem spots on the trail.

“Our primary mission is to promote hiking in Western North Carolina, and of course, that means we need trails to hike on,” said Marcia Bromberg, president of Carolina Mountain Club.

Carolina Mountain Club logged 17,344 volunteer hours for trail maintenance in 2011, covering about 400 miles of trail.

Carolina Mountain Club is a stickler for detail when it comes to their trail work, approaching their maintenance reports with a level of notation and specificity you would expect from a NASA shuttle launch.

Some trail volunteers pack their handheld GPS unit, able to catalog the exact trouble spot.

“I observed a dead fall at E 36404, N 3946090 whose removal will require a later trip,” crew leader Wayne Steinmetz reported on a trail scouting trip.

Or, “I observed that ice covered the trail at E 365491, N 3946623 (WGS 83 horizontal datum).”

Their trail maintenance log from 2011 goes on like this — for 190 pages — detailing the who, what, when and how of more than 1,200 volunteer work outings held last year by their various trail crews.

“Hiked in from Sunburst on FS 97 and 97H. Cleared several simple downs, repaired tread at two wash locations and lopped rodies and beech sprouts along uphill side of trail,” Paul Dickens wrote in his report of a workday in the Middle Prong Wilderness in Haywood County last January.

Most trail reports are highly clinical in nature, but you can always tell when Becky Smucker’s come through. She can’t resist throwing in a line about the weather and her botanical findings of the day.

“We did a spring scout of Shining Creek Trail …We removed downs, lopped some, fixed some drainage, reworked one major tread problem, removed some fire rings and carried out a little trash. It was a gorgeous spring days, and giant Vasey’s trillium was in bloom,” Smucker wrote in one report from a workday near Cold Mountain in Haywood County last May.

Strength in numbers

Several volunteer trail groups have sprung up to take care of trails in a very specific area, such as Friends of Whiteside Mountain in Highlands, or of a particular trail, like the Bartram Trail Society or Benton MacKaye Trail Association.

One of these hyper-local groups is the Friends of Panthertown in the Cashiers area of Jackson County — a group united by their love for the place known as “Yosemite of the East.”

The idea of small-scale, local groups taking care of their own little slice of trails is a model the forest service would like to emulate in its quest to build a larger volunteer base, said Jason Kimenker, the director of Friends of Panthertown. The group, which numbers 350 members dedicated to the protection and preservation of Panthertown, has about three dozen trail volunteers who turn out for regular workdays.

In reality, a relatively minute percentage of hikers actually volunteer to work on trails. But adding more volunteers to the mix isn’t a simple solution, Bromberg said. Orchestrating trail crews is complicated and time consuming.

“There are various skill levels, everything from trained sawyers and people like me who go out with my loppers and that’s about the best that I’m going to be able to do,” Bromberg said.

While hikers constitute the vast majority of volunteers working on trails, mountain bikers have upped their presence considerably in recent years. Several mountain bike chapters hold regular trail workdays. They concentrate their efforts in popular mountain bike destinations, like Tsali, Bent Creek and DuPont State Forest.

Horseback groups have historically been the least represented in trail maintenance circles but have been pitching in more in recent years.

Where the forest service can’t keep up, “friends of various stripes have come in and taken a piece of the burden off them,” Bromberg said.

The Wilderness Society last year launched a trail crew to focus on maintenance specifically in national forest areas designated as “wilderness.” Wilderness areas are a challenge when it comes to trail maintenance because power tools aren’t allowed, which means no chainsaws.

The Southern Appalachian Wilderness Stewards uses a combination of volunteer and paid trail crews, with the help of a grant from the National Forest Foundation.

“It was birthed to take some of the pressure off the trail clubs, which found they couldn’t support more wilderness designations if they couldn’t take care of their trails,” said Brent Martin with The Wilderness Society’s Southern Appalachian field office in Sylva.

Scotty Bowman always knew he wanted to work outdoors, but he couldn’t figure out how to live his dream and also make a livable salary — so he instead paved a career in restaurants, including stints as a chef. At least, this is what Bowman did until hitting his 40s, that momentous time when folks often realize that it’s either now or never to indulge their passions.

Bowman, in taking the risk to build a new career focused on the outdoors, has become part of a unique movement that might just help the Southeast get more Wilderness Areas to enjoy. Bowman has been busy this summer building and fixing trails in remote backcountry settings with Southern Appalachian Wilderness Stewards, a new program of The Wilderness Society that works directly with the forest service to provide support for Wilderness Areas and Wilderness Study Areas.

In Wilderness Areas, you can’t use chainsaws or power tools for trail work, which makes building trails in the backcountry miles from the closest road tough work. The SAWS group is deploying volunteers into Wilderness Areas who are willing to do the heavylifting of trail work using only hand tools, such as crosscut saws, in those remote territories where firing up power tools would violate wilderness regulations.

The labor from SAWS crews not only blazes new trails and keeps existing ones maintained, they could also be key in the effort to get more areas in the national forests designated as wilderness.

Designating new wilderness areas can be controversial given the stricter rules that apply, limiting everything from motorized recreation to hunting to logging to road building.

But even hiking clubs can be against new wilderness designation if it means their volunteer efforts to maintain trails in those areas will become more difficult, explained Brent Martin, Southern Appalachian program director for the Wilderness Society’s, based out of the regional field office in Sylva.

Hiking clubs are the front line when it comes to trail maintenance. But, Martin pointed out, they are generally made up of older, retired folks, with small core groups who also work on trail maintenance. And with limited time and energy, these good Samaritans often understandably balk at the wilderness rule of not being allowed mechanized tools such as chainsaws.

Enter younger, eager men and women such as Bowman, who are simply enchanted with being able to use crosscut saws and other primitive tools. A volunteer stint with SAWS has led to a summer job for Bowman as head of a SAWS volunteer trail crew. He hopes to repeat the experience next summer.

The trail crews are trained in using the necessary primitive tools, and learn trail building and trail maintenance techniques.

Bowman is in college, and anticipates perhaps mingling the contacts made through SAWS into a more permanent outside-oriented job, such as with the U.S. Forest Service.

“I always wanted to be outside, to be a part of doing something for the trails and for the public,” the 42-year-old said. “And I’ve picked up some really cool skills doing this.”

And the wilderness areas are picking up a lot of extra maintenance help these days, said Bill Hodge, director of SAWS.

“The idea is not to replace the hiking clubs, it’s to supplement their work,” Hodge said.

In the Southern Appalachian region encompassing North Carolina, Georgia and South Carolina, there are 22 federally designated Wilderness Areas and another 14 Wilderness Study Areas, which fall under the same set of no-mechanized-tools restrictions. Wilderness Study Areas requires congressional approval to move into actual permanently protected Wilderness Areas.

Crews, such as the one led by Bowman, go into the backcountry for five-day stretches at a time to work on the trails. There have also been shorter, weekend-long programs. SAWS is also active through its Wilderness Rangers program, which has placed SAWS “rangers” on the Cherokee National Forest in east Tennessee and on the Chattahoochee National Forest in north Georgia through November.

The initiative is part of a wilderness challenge funding grant, a 10-year effort to bring all of the U.S. Forest Service’s wilderness units up to a certain standard by 2014. North Carolina’s Wilderness Areas were at a higher level this year, but since the areas are reassessed each year, it could be that a SAWS ranger will be used in this state next year, Hodge said.

The SAWS rangers are, along with other duties, helping map where camping sites are being set up in the wilderness areas, Hodge said. Plus, they often serve as the only “official” many visitors will see in these remote regions, helping to guide hikers and provide help as necessary.

SAWS also will hold its second Wilderness Skills College in partnership with the Appalachian Trail Conservancy with two weeks worth of trail techniques and crew-leadership training. This past spring the conference was at the Ocoee Ranger District Work Center in Ocoee, Tenn.

Next spring, the hope is to hold the workshops here in North Carolina, Hodge said.

Sixty-five runners started and finished the first Assault on Black Rock Trail Race at Sylva’s Pinnacle Park on March 19, raising more than $1,400 for the Community Table soup kitchen.

The 8.3-mile course boasts a 2,700-foot elevation gain and forced participants to use hands and feet to scramble to the craggy pinnacle atop Black Rock. Organizers hope the first-time event – which is basically uphill the first half and downhill on the way back, with the last half-mile of uphill featuring a ridiculously steep climb – will catch on in trail racing circles.

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“I am very pleased with the turnout, although I am sure the good weather helped,” said race organizer Brian Barwatt. “… The thought that 65 people stood on the summit of Black Rock on Saturday (not including my volunteers) is awesome because I have been up there about a dozen times in the past couple years and have only seen three people on the trail up to Black Rock.”

Participants traveled from as far away as Atlanta and Raleigh.

The top three men and women finishers were:

Men:

(1) Chad Hallyburton, age 42 of Sylva, with a time of 1:31:17

(2) Andrew Benton, age 20 of Hickory, with a time of 1:33:12

(3) Sean Botzenhart, age 18 of Cullowhee, with a time of 1:35:19

Women:

(1) (11th overall) Ginny Hotze, age 50 of Asheville, with a time of 1:46:42

(2) (14th overall) Hannah McLeod, age 15 of Waynesville, with a time of 1:51:53

(3) (16th overall) Brenda Holcomb, age 38 of Cullowhee, with a time of 1:56:42

Once upon a time and not particularly very long ago, trail running in Western North Carolina was a fringe sport at best.

Hitting the trails instead of roads served as a refuge for longtime runners who couldn’t bear to give up their morning jogs but whose knees and joints simply couldn’t take the pounding anymore of feet-on-pavement. For other road-racing runners, trail running was a nice, scenic method of getting in some strengthening exercises. But in the main, serious runners primarily steered clear of focusing on trail running, afraid that while running off-road would indeed make them stronger, it might also make them slower.

No more. These days, trail running has burgeoned into WNC’s outdoor sport de jour. Some runners do nothing now but run on trails, avoiding road running altogether. Others, such as Brad Dodson of Haywood County, continue to enjoy both pavement and trails — Dodson, in fact, is currently training for one of the world’s premier road races, the Boston Marathon, set for April 15. He finds trail running complements his road racing.

ALSO: A mountain Assault: Black Rock Trail Race to aid Community Table

Dodson, 43, said he finds it much easier to run for three hours on trails than to put in, say, 20 miles on pavement.

“Running on pavement is really hard on your body, especially as you get older,” the former college track runner said.

Not to mention, Dodson added, the sheer meditative quality of running in the woods.

“All my life I’ve been looking at a clock and worrying about time while running,” he said. “Trail running is less about the time, more about just being out there — and it’s about enjoying being in the woods.”

A new business niche for region

Even the Nantahala Outdoor Center, the area’s biggest and oldest river-raft company, is getting into the act of trail running. NOC is working now on improving a series of trails behind the business’ main headquarters in the Nantahala Gorge in Swain County, with the plan of hosting a series of trail races in the future. Additionally, walk (or run) into the outfitters’ store and you’ll discover a recently added complete line of trail-running gear — from trail-running specific shoes to handheld water bottles.

“We got many requests to add those, from a lot of customers who wanted trail-running items,” said Lauren Dieterich, a trail runner herself and a member of NOC’s marketing department.

The outfitting company also has teamed with nearby Fontana Village to hold back-to-back trail runs Oct. 29-30, “to give people a whole weekend of trail running,” said Charles Conner, the company’s marketing department director.

The demand for trail races is definitely growing, Conner said, which is what prompted NOC to focus on improving the trails nearby the center and to team with Fontana Village. By improving its system of trails, NOC will be able to hold a race and offer perks runners enjoy after a hard slog in the woods — showers, maybe a live band playing music and more.

Conner said there are about five or six miles of trail available to NOC now, and that the trails can be connected into loops. Plus a few more miles of trails might be added on as well.

In May, the trail-running community will converge on NOC via the 2011 Smoky Mountain Relay, a running event that starts in North Mills River and ends at NOC in Wesser. This is the second year NOC has been a relay sponsor.

Runners will cover 205 miles of trails, forest service and rural roads. Teams of 12 runners each will cover the course in 36 sections, with each runner completing three sections of 2.5- to 10-miles each.

A new rule could make it easier to open up trails in national parks to mountain biking.

Mountain biking isn’t banned in national parks as a matter of course, although it is rare to find parks where it is allowed. Before allowing mountain bikes, a park must undergo an extensive environmental analysis heavily laden with opportunities for public comment.

The rule change would loosen the requirements, allowing what amounts to an “abbreviated analysis,” said Greg Kidd, a representative with the National Parks Conservation Association Asheville office. Needless to say, Kidd’s organization is against any truncation of the process.

“We feel strongly it is important to have the full analysis and that includes public participation and opportunity for the public to weigh in,” Kidd said.

But Kent Cranford, owner of Motion Makers bike shop in Sylva, thinks the current process is so arduous that it is essentially a barrier.

“This new rule change will make that process much easier. Right now it is an ugly process,” Cranford said.

Cranford said the rule change will streamline the process, not totally skirt it.

“My understanding is that it won’t remove any barriers of making sure mountain bikes aren’t going to damage anything. They are still going to have to go through the environmental process and the approval process,” Cranford said. But it wouldn’t be as burdensome, time consuming or costly to the park.

The rule change came at the suggestion of outgoing President Bush, a mountain biker himself, in his final days in office. The proposal could be dead in the water already, however.

“When Obama came in, they put a freeze on all rule changes that had been promulgated by the outgoing administration,” said Bob Miller, spokesperson for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “At the end of any administration there is a lot of rule making, or changing, as they go out the door. The new administration wants to catch their breath and decide which are in play. There is no telling when this one will move forward.”

A public comment period has been underway for the rule change and will expire Feb. 17.

To read the rule change, go to edocket.access.gpo.gov/2008/E8-29892.htm. To comment, go to www.regulations.gov and use the code 1024-AD72.

— By Becky Johnson

For years, Jack Lansford and his mountain biking buddies in Franklin would have to load up their bikes and hit the road for a minimum of 30 minutes before reaching the nearest trailhead. As any biker, hiker or paddler knows, the longer the drive to reach your play ground, the less frequently you find yourself doing what you love.