URL: http://www.abqjournal.com/opinion/guest_columns/273860opinion12-31-07.htm

Monday, December 31, 2007
Where Trails Lead: Our Heritage
By Stewart Udall
Former Secretary of Interior
    Eighty years ago, when I was a boy growing up on a ranch near St. Johns, Ariz., trails formed the contours of my world. I'd take a trail to get to a neighbor's house or follow one along the river if I were looking for stray cattle. Trails were the most practical way of getting around in those days. But they were also irresistible to me. I'd walk a trail just to see where it led.
    As we near the 40th anniversary of the National Trails System Act, I look out on a footpath that leads past my house into the mountains and think about the age-old pull of America's trails— the ones that led through the Cumberland Gap and over the Continental Divide, across the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada.
    One of the greatest overland migrations in history followed a trail. During the mid-1800s nearly 400,000 emigrants walked or rode over the Platte River Road, the dusty thoroughfare formed by the convergence of the Oregon, California and Mormon trails. The first drafts of American history are recorded in the diaries of the people who followed frontier trails. They also can be read in the crude inscriptions and epitaphs scrawled on rocks and grave markers along the way.
    Much of that history would have passed into oblivion, ploughed under or paved over, were it not for the National Trails legislation signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1968. The idea behind the National Trails System Act was to ensure the survival of our historic corridors. Those of us who endorsed the legislation wanted to make it possible for Americans to share some of the adventure, the toil and even a bit of the danger experienced by our forebears— the native people, explorers and pioneers who first laid eyes on the American scene.
    Today, the National Trails System encompasses more than 40,000 miles of trails. They extend from Maine's Mount Katahdin, where the Appalachian National Scenic Trail begins, to Nome, Alaska, where the Iditarod Trail ends. Wisconsin's Ice Age Trail traces the southern terminus of the last continental glacier to push down over North America. The Trail of Tears National Historic Trail follows the route taken by some 16,000 Cherokee when they were driven from their ancestral home in southern Appalachia in 1838 and forcibly relocated in Oklahoma's Indian Territory.
    The longest trails celebrate the American outdoors. The 2,150-mile Appalachian Trail, built in 1928, was the first. It was followed by the slightly longer Pacific Crest National Scenic Trail, from Canada to Mexico, and more recently by the Continental Divide National Scenic Trail that winds more than 3,000 miles from the crown of Glacier National Park in northern Montana to the aptly named Hatchet Mountains at the southwestern tip of New Mexico. Traveling on foot or horseback down any one of those trails provides an intense exposure to a world that would otherwise be accessible only in history books and atlases.
    Unfortunately, the National Trails System Act did not include a budget for completing all of the trails or preserving their historic environs. Instead, the trail system has relied heavily on the contributions and hard work of volunteers. By the year 2,000, volunteers had put in more than a half-million hours building, maintaining and protecting the trails.
    Over the years Congress has appropriated some funds to help complete work on the trails. But there is so much more to do fill all of the gaps, including a 45-mile stretch of the Continental Divide Trail in New Mexico that would allow hikers to walk the same terrain that the Spanish explorer Coronado passed over in 1540.
    The future of our trail system will continue to depend on the generosity of private land owners as well as the continuing efforts of volunteers.
    Supporting our national trails is more than an exercise in nostalgia. Think of how much richer a child's knowledge of history might be after a few days spent along the Lewis and Clark National Historic Trail.
    Imagine how a student's grasp of our constitutional liberties might benefit from a drive along the Selma to Montgomery National Historic Trail, where civil rights marchers braved billy clubs and tear gas in 1965 to campaign for voting rights for African American citizens.
    As I sit in my home in Santa Fe, I think of the significance of one of our most storied frontier trails. In 1846, Col. Stephen Watts Kearney led his Army of the West down the Santa Fe Trail to claim New Mexico territory and later California for the United States.
    The annexation of those lands marked the triumph of Manifest Destiny, the idea held by many at the time that America was destined by divine providence to expand its dominion from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
    A national trail is indeed a portal to the past. But it is also an inroad to our national character. It tells us how we got where we are. Our trails are both irresistible and indispensable. And while I may not be hiking the Continental Divide Trail from Canada to Mexico any time soon, I am doing everything I can to help with the monumental task of completing it.
    It is up to all of us who care so deeply for the future of this great country to join in this uniquely American undertaking of building, maintaining and protecting these unique treasures. I hope you will join me, for the sake of the generations to come.
    Stewart Udall represented Arizona in the U.S. House from 1953 until President Kennedy appointed him Secretary of Interior in 1961. He is the father of U.S. Rep. Tom Udall.