2009 Volunteer of the Year

SORO
Don O’Neal is Nantahala Hiking Club’s Trail Supervisor for 60 miles of A.T. for the past seven years, contributing more than 5100 hours of volunteer service to the Appalachian National Scenic Trail. Many Trail improvements and rehabilitation projects have been overseen during his tenure, including relocation of the Trail above Wesser bald shelter and the construction of a new shelter and privy at Wayah Shelter. Included in his service to the Trail is the monitoring of purple frigeless orchid and creeping sunrose (rare plants) at Standing Indian as a natural heritage volunteer and as the guidebook editor for ATC. He is the former president of NHC, an A.T. 2,000-miler He also plays the penny whistle.

2008 Volunteer of the Year

SORO
Lawson Herron of the Georgia Appalachian Trail Club was named volunteer of the year for the Southern region. He joined GATC in 1999 and has been named GATC overseer of the year and trail worker of the year. In 2007, Herron contributed 955 hours in 94 separate trips, earned a Konnarock t-shirt, led many GATC maintenance trips and, as chair of the clubís structures committee, led projects to reroof two A.T. shelters, rebuild two moldering privies, paint six A.T. shelters and install food-hoist cables at four A.T. shelters. Since 2000, he has volunteered more trail-work hours than any other GATC member—3,250 hours.

VARO
Anne Maio of the Mount Rogers Appalachian Trail Club (MRATC) is the volunteer of the year for the Central and SW region. MRATC’s newsletter editor and photographer for several years, she also served as club secretary for two years and as RPC representative for three. She has worked with camps, schools, and colleges to bring young people to the A.T. for projects ranging from removing invasive exotic plants to side-hill improvements and stream water testing. Maio has helped construct and maintain shelters and privies, as well as being a trail maintainer, and has been the chief blazer for the clubís Trail section for several years. Last year, she participated in the wildlife monitoring program, moving a motion-sensitive camera to prescribed locations and forwarding photographs. She has spent many hours trying to comply with FCC licensing requirements for the clubís portable radios. Finally, she has not only led hikes, but has even signed up people she happened to meet out on the Trail as new club members.

NERO
Larry Ely is the 2008 volunteer of the year for the New England Region. A long time AT Volunteer in the White Mountains and member of the Appalachian Mountain Club, Larry has volunteered as a Trail steward, and served as a leader of other volunteer Trail stewards in his area for several years. He is also active in A.T. management – serving as a representative to the New England RPC. His recent work with local communities in the Mahoosucs has been instrumental in creating a growing region-wide initiative to coordinate land use and outdoor recreation opportunities.

2007 Volunteer of the Year

SORO
Jim Mowbray is the 2007 Volunteer of the Year for the Southern region. Jim has volunteered more than 2,000 hours since April 2005 as a ridgerunner in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. The award recognizes his service in a number of areas—educating visitors on good stewardship of park resources, ensuring the function and sanitation of shelters and privies, performing Trail maintenance (from sawing downed trees to cleaning all the water bars on the 72-miles of Trail in the park), and gathering information and mapping Trail-work needs for ATC crews to use in planning their work in the park. Additionally, he has completed a report on resource impacts from visitor use at A.T. shelters in the Smokies between 1985 and 2006.

VARO
Laurie Foot Volunteer of the Year for Central and Southwest Virginia region. For more than 20 years she has been an active member of the Natural Bridge Appalachian Trail Club (www.nbatc.org). She has held the offices of president, vice-president, and membership chair and club treasurer. She has helped maintain a section of the Trail for 20 years and coordinates the clubís telephone tree and its Adopt-A-Highway project. Foot has completed the A.T. and is a field editor for the Thru-Hikers Companion. She and her late husband Bill were instrumental in getting the A.T. pedestrian bridge over the James River (named in Billís memory) constructed. The couple was the first to traverse the American Discovery Trail (ADT), and she is a past president of the ADT Society and currently serves on its board and as newsletter editor. She also serves on the steering committee of Virginia Greenways and Blueways and on the Lynchburg Master Trails Team committee. She often makes presentations to groups and is a valued spokesperson not only for the A.T. but for all hiking.

NERO
Steve Smith, of the Appalachian Mountain Club's Berkshire Chapter, is the New England regions Volunteer of the Year for 2007. Under Smithís leadership the chapter reported an impressive 90 percent completion rate for boundary maintenance work along the A.T. corridor throughout Massachusetts. In addition to keeping up with both maintaining and monitoring the boundary, he has been a leader in mitigating encroachments in the Trail corridor and educating Trail neighbors about living next door to a National Park. Smith was a member of ATCís former Board of Managers and currently serves on the Conservancy's Stewardship Council and the finance committee.

2006 Volunteer of the Year

SORO
Clark Wright, an ATC life member since 2002, is the 2006 Volunteer of the Year for the Southern region. Before joining ATC, Wright took a leave of absence from his legal practice to walk the A.T. from Springer all the way to Pennsylvania with a friend. In 2003, a lobbyist friend and former thru-hiker directed Clark to N.C. State Senator Joe Sam Queen. The two of them began a successful drive to secure approval of a special ìFriends of the Appalachian Trailî state license plate. Twenty dollars per plate goes to ATC, and the funds are dedicated to A.T. management and protection in North Carolina through the Southern Regional Office. Thanks to Wrightís leadership, ATC has, since fall 2005, received more than $40,000 from the license plates.

VARO
The “Pulaskiteer,” Bill Rogers, of the Tidewater Appalachian Trail Club, is the 2006 Volunteer of the Year for the Central and Southwest Virginia region. Bill has been with the club for nearly 30 years, serving at various times as president, trails chair, and education chair, and continues to be an active trail maintainer, newsletter contributor, and teacher of trail maintenance and Leave No Trace workshops. He served three terms on the ATC Board of Managers, and now serves on the Konnarock Steering Committee.

MARO
The 2006 Volunteer of the Year for the Mid-Atlantic region is Dick Barrick of the Cumberland Valley Appalachian Trail Club. Dick joined the organization in 1991 and was assigned a section of the A.T. to maintain. In addition to his maintenance and monitoring work on the A.T., he also worked on the Darlington and Tuscarora trails. Barrick chaired the Maintainers Committee from its inception in 1996—walking the club's 17-plus mile A.T. section several times a year and noting problems for future work parties (most of which he participated in) and replacing maintainers as needed. A three-time certified sawyer, he took care of blowdowns throughout the valley. Barrick stepped down from his club positions in 2006 for health reasons, but recently reported that he has regained some strength and has been out walking on the trails.

Also in 2006, Volunteer of the Year recognition was made posthumously to long-time New York-New Jersey Trail Conference (NY-NJ TC) member Dick Redfield, an avid hiker and hard-working contributor to the hiking community. In addition to maintaining trails, Redfield spent countless hours volunteering at the Conferenceís office. He was part of the trail crew that developed sections of the A.T. in Dutchess and Putnam counties and, until his death in August, 2006 after a seven-year battle with leukemia, was a corridor monitor on the Graymoor section of the Trail.

NERO
The 2006 New England RPC Volunteer of the Year is Elsa Sanborn, who has served as treasurer of the Maine Appalachian Trail Club (MATC) for a total of more than 20 years. MATC's finances are more complex than most volunteer organizations as the club publishes the guidebook to the A.T. in Maine, maintains its own seasonal Trail crew, and employs ridgerunners and caretakers. The club has maintained a balanced budget during her tenure and was able to build a substantial reserve fund. When the club took on the task of fighting the Redington Wind Farm in 2006, which required spending large sums of money and tracking hundreds of individual donations, Sanborn managed those added responsibilities as well as her usual duties, which are as vital to the success of the Club as the work of any "Mainetainer" or crew member.

2005 Volunteer of the Year

SORO/VARO*
Phyllis Henry of the Smoky Mountains Hiking Club is the 2005 Volunteer of the Year for 2005. Phyllis has worked to strengthen both the volunteer and agency commitment to the section of Appalachian Trail in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Phyllis has helped to revitalize the efforts of the club, has helped to find funding for Smokies A.T. projects, and has organized award-winning National Trails Day Events to attract new volunteers to the trail work.

For 2003 – 2005 there was a combined Southern Volunteer and Partner of the Year

NERO
Dick Blake of the AMC-Connecticut Chapter and Don Whitney of the Green Mountain Club shared honors as the 2005 Volunteers of the Year for New England. Dick has done an outstanding job of coordinating A.T. corridor-monitoring efforts in Connecticut since that program's inception in the 1980s; and also led the effort to design, plan, and construct the first designated and fully accessible A.T. segment along the Housatonic River in Falls Village. Don is a stalwart volunteer of the GMC's Ottauquechee Section and, like Dick, has been coordinating corridor-monitoring efforts since the program began. Don is also a master privy builder who has designed and built pit, composting, and moldering privies.