Verne Orndorff

Okay. I was born on January 6, 1916, to Anna Oliver Orndorff and Christy S. Orndorff, at Norwich, Ohio — about four miles out in the country. Norwich is probably 200 people.

I went to a neighborhood school and walked a mile to school. We had eight grades, one room.

Then I went to another school in Norwich, four miles away, walking across the fields to that school every day. Then that school was closed, and I went to New Concord High School for the last two years of high school.

When I graduated from high school, I went to Muskingum College, which is in New Concord. I went there for four years — it took an extra semester, just because I didn't have a job and there were some things I wanted to take. I worked two years to pay for college, stayed out a year, made some money, went back to school, and finished at Muskingum College with a Bachelor of Science in Biology.

Then I went to work in a cement plant for a while, because I knew I was going to be drafted. When I finally was drafted, I went into the Army. I was allowed to go into the Army Air Corps as a weather student, and then finally a weather observer. I served four years in the Southwest Pacific as a weather observer.

Then I returned to Ohio State for seven more quarters to become a landscape architect. I was given a job with the Ohio Department of Highways — division landscape architect in Region 7, in Sidney, Ohio.

I worked there several years, then went to work for a nursery as a landscape architect doing design, and worked there a few more years. Then I went back to Zanesville, Ohio.

I married before I was discharged. I married Maxine Hannes, the girl I wrote to the whole time I was in service. We had two daughters. They both live here now, incidentally.

After that I worked in a steel mill for a while, waiting for an appointment to the national parks as a landscape architect with the federal government. I finally became a landscape architect with the Daniel Boone National Forest — which was then at Cumberland. About a couple of years later, Cumberland changed the name to Daniel Boone, and it's been Daniel Boone ever since.

I worked as a landscape architect doing various jobs in the landscape business: designing district ranger office sites, recreation sites, picnic grounds and campgrounds, laying out trails — and other jobs as well, such as designing clear-cuts to become visually acceptable.

Well, I thought I wanted to be a doctor. I took two years of pre-med at Muskingum College, and I decided I wouldn't be a doctor for all the money in the world. After I graduated from Muskingum as a biology major, I still didn't know what I wanted to do, so I went to Ohio State to become a landscape architect. And it kind of fit together.

Plants, and designing, and residential planning. I did that for several years, working with nurseries.

Oh, yes. And I had taken exams in federal applications.

I thought I'd do design, planning, and that sort of thing — more than what I actually did. My work turned out to be a lot of writing as well, and with the writing, I did many analyses of sites suitable for development — picnic grounds, campgrounds, or whatever.

First I came from Zanesville by myself and went to the post office, where the Forest Service was headquartered in Winchester at that time. I was there first one morning, before the office opened. I met Ruth Stafford — a very pleasant lady — and later I met the rest of the staff. But she was the first thing, and I decided then that I would like it.

In the Army — I was not one of these guys that hated the Army. I would like to go back and do it all over again if I could do the same things I did before. But I can't, of course.

Some of the first projects were laying out an additional portion of a campground that had been built by the CCC — the Conservation Corps. My boss directly over me was Joe Griffiths, and we were stationed on the fourth floor of the Mackley-Downey building. Joe was one of the most efficient men I've ever met. When the whistle blew at noon, no matter if Joe was dictating a letter, he put the microphone down and went home. When he came back he'd pick up the microphone and say, “—and so”— never missed a beat. The main supervisor was Robert Collins, a retired Army colonel.

They were very appreciative of what I did. They let me do my job and did not attempt to boss every move I made, but they were very open for suggestions and assistance if I needed any. That is something not very many supervisors do — they want to tell you what to do and everything you do. I was given pretty much free rein as to what I did.

1962 — March, I think.

Of course the foresters did the forestry. They marked timber and sold it, and did reforestation as needed.

There wasn't very much backpacking done in the Daniel Boone at that time, because most of the trails were day trails — one day would do it. But there were a lot of trails already existing when I came. Most of them were laid out by an assistant ranger in the Stanton district — Clarence Henson, he was the guy I was trying to think of a while ago. He was a good buddy; he and I were together up at Koomer Ridge the day Kennedy was shot, laying out a campground.

I was not a hiker at all, and I'm still not a hiker. I wouldn't put a load on my back and be a dummy for anybody. But I enjoyed working on the trail, and I did a lot of hiking — it wasn't really hiking, but a lot of walking. I walked the entire trail and flagged it all out.

We laid out many, many campgrounds and built them, and I was on one or more of them about every day, assisting the district rangers and their crews, giving advice, working with them, and maybe doing surveys of the site to develop a plan for them. The plans had to be submitted and approved in the Region — which wasn't really necessary, I didn't think.

Probably the largest campground was Koomer Ridge. There were some at Rockcastle — probably twenty different campgrounds all over the forest, some of different sizes. Some were just picnic grounds; some were campgrounds where you could camp. But when we first developed the campgrounds, we did not anticipate developing them for trailers. I personally felt that was not a viable use of national forest properties.

That's just the way I felt about it. To me, the national forest was supposed to give a forest experience, and supposed to be done in the rough, more or less — rustic developments where everything fitted into the forest. I didn't think trailer camping did, and I still don't. To me that is a private enterprise, and we shouldn't have been in it competing with private industry. Later it got to be: we had to develop them that way, against my wishes.

Yahoo Falls was one of the most interesting and probably the most scenic of all. Rodburn Hollow was a very nice development, but I think it's all public grounds now. I hadn't been back there for twenty years, and I went past the other day — I was shocked that it would be encrusted with all these private residences, right up next to it. Rodburn was a really nice campground, very convenient to the college, for people who liked to use the campground close to home. Koomer Ridge is one of the most used of all of them, because it's in the Red River Gorge area.

I liked Laurel River Lake better than Cave Run, because it didn't seem so commercial. It was right near a nice big campground that we built, and the water in it was always nice. Cave Run is quite often just muddy — silty, muddy. It's shallow and full of trash and floating debris.

I was out in the forest one day, and I met a group of Sierra Clubbers hiking around. Dr. King Solver, who was a Sierra Clubber, was there, and he — or one of the men — asked me if we had a trail that went from the north to the south end of the forest. That was the first time I ever thought about it. That sounded like a good idea, so you might say from that day forward I planned trails that would connect to existing trails and eventually could wind up as a complete trail, with that in mind. Finally it became a project approved by the forest supervisor, and I laid out the rest of it.

It seemed like something some people would really like to do, and it would be a trail that would attract a lot of people. I had some friends that are great hikers who would probably like to hike it.

Mostly backpackers that actually did backpacking. I had an Army friend that came with his family to visit me; they loved to camp and pack and hike. They would hike on the Appalachian Trail and trails like that, which were already in existence.

I don't remember any exact date. It was in the early '60s — two, three, four, five along there. I can't remember dates.

There were other trails that went to places that needed additional trails to give access. At Clear Creek Furnace there was a trail that goes toward the Locks, toward the Carrington Rocks — if you're familiar with those. We finished laying out the trail out there, and then went south on the ridge tops from there, into the next county — Menifee County, into Powell County.

There were quite a few trails in the Red River Gorge that Clarence Henson had laid out — he was a fire officer, I think, in the Stanton district. He laid out some pretty good trails in there that connected to sites like Swift Creek — the Rock Bridge up Swift Creek, and one down Swift Creek to the Barge Combs Creek overlook.

They had to have grades that were easy to hike — grades that would not be conducive to erosion. And trails that led to scenic spots, historic spots, places for refuge from storms, places where you could get food and water, make phone calls and get mail, or call for help and get first aid for injuries. And especially a resupply of water. To connect trails together, you nearly always had to be on ridgetops, not down streams.

They would not go to any particular destination — you'd just come to a river or a stream, and then you had a lot of stream bridges to cross, construction problems, getting across the side streams. Quite often the land is very steep next to a stream, which makes a very expensive trail construction project: hard to maintain and hard to keep navigable.

Some hunters use them, and people that are seeking solitude — the experience of nature study, wildlife, and just enjoying the forest: being out where you can commune with nature and enjoy the forest as a forest.

I helped lay out some trails in state parks — at Breaks Interstate Park I went over and helped lay out trails for a week one time. They were very similar. The trails over there had been neglected for a long time, but that is a really beautiful park. We laid out maybe ten miles of trail in there.

Usually you find a logical starting point where you have adequate parking or lodging, where people can begin the day — and close to where you can get food and a good place to sleep. The trails at the state parks are very good for that. The way you lay out a trail: you get a roll of flagging and you tie it on this and that as you go, and the trail construction crew comes along and builds it.

They have to dig in grades so that the trail will drain off, and so that it's not too steep to walk on. They have to put in water breaks: if water is supposed to run laterally across the trail, we put a horizontal water break to turn the water down the trail.

You always carried an Abney level to keep the grades. You know what an Abney level is? It's a level that you can sight a point that's your head height above the ground, and it gives you a reading — percent elevation or declination from where you are. We tried to keep them under 8 percent — 8 feet drop or rise in 100 feet — so the trails weren't too steep, and you wouldn't get a lot of water accumulating or running fast on the trail.

Never used a compass.

I had topo maps. They showed me where I was, where all the breaks in the land were and where the streams were, and from where you started to where you were going.

A topo map is a group of lines that are at certain intervals — 20, 40, or 60 feet, depending on the area — above sea level. The maps are made by the U.S. Geological Survey; they map the whole United States. You can get them from the offices that sell them, or sometimes from the highway department, or different farm organizations. You can get a topo map of your own farm if you want one. Right now I'm working with the Muskingum County Fair Board, laying out a trail on the fairgrounds that will be used for hiking, walking, nature study — maybe even exercise trails. But I hope it will never have any horses or vehicles on it.

Because horses make fat tracks with their feet. They also drag their hind feet going down a grade and cause erosion. The tracks fill with water, they stir up the soil, make it erode easily — and they also drop manure every so often in the trail, which people don't like to walk in or smell.

Wheeled vehicles channel the water down the trail and cause it to get into quantities that will cause erosion very quickly. I've seen, in one year's time, where these guys did hill-climbing with their wheeled vehicles: six and eight feet deep. Tell me that won't happen on a trail.

It has ruts as deep as that door, down to the bedrock, and the trees were hanging off it. Now the horses — sorry, I kind of got lost. A horse drags his feet going downhill, on his hind feet. That causes a slide, loosens the soil, and makes it very easy to erode with rainfall. A horse can walk through a lot of mud; the horses make mud in the trail, where the footprints stand full of water, and they make walking for a hiker very unhappy. In the wintertime it freezes, and the whole thing makes a big mound — because water expands when it freezes, and one small spot grows.

The horses are also an intrusion on the solitude factor — the natural communing of a person. And the ORVs, of course: they make noise and they make ruts. They are very obnoxious to the hiker.

Those have wheels on them, too. They also make dirt channels, and they destroy fragile ecosystems if they get off the trail. They cause the runoff water to carry silt, which also destroys the ecosystem and changes the streams down the hill.

I envisioned them mostly for hiking — either a day hike or an extended backpack trip — and for nature study. It gets you to see some of these interesting sites: what I call the Swift Camp dam, the Rock Bridge. Those things you cannot see without hiking to get there. And of course there are a lot of cliffs that are very interesting; you can study the geology of the place.

It tells you in here: June 23, 1979. That was when they had the dedication ceremony.

It was the meeting of all the people interested in the trail. The Undersecretary of Agriculture came out and officiated at the dedication, and awarded me a certificate of appreciation. It tells you in there in full detail.

I got a whole $25 savings bond from the Forest. Can you imagine that? Another guy I know got a $50 savings bond for saying, “Let's use magic markers on survey stakes.” Where's the justice? And I probably spent hundreds of hours in my own time, working long hours.

I would go to a certain place to start — on my map I would draw a line: I'm going to work on this section today. Maybe it was in the Stearns area or wherever, and we'd follow this line on the topo map to get to where we were going that day. We'd tie ribbons every 50 or maybe 200 feet, depending on how thick the growth was in that particular area — sometimes you had to tie them fairly close, sometimes you could stretch it out. Usually orange flagging, tied about head high so they're easily visible.

The map gives you what the terrain is going to be: how steep it is, what problems you're going to have with cliffs and crossings of water and streams and things like that, and with highways. We had to lay out the route to try to get to an area where you could cross. Like at I-64 near Moorland: the trail came to where there was an overhead bridge that you could cross without having to get into highway traffic. At Cumberland Falls State Park it crosses the river there, on the bridge. At Laurel River Dam it crosses the dam. At Cave Run Dam it crosses below the dam.

I made all those decisions. Every decision ever made anywhere on that trail, I made. And every private land that we had to cross — I had to make the connection with the landowner.

That was one of the toughest parts of all. It took a lot of tact and a lot of talking, sometimes. But most of the men were very agreeable, as long as it was enforced; they didn't seem to mind. The only one they had trouble with was south of Moorland: after you cross Route 32 going into Moorland, it came down onto the highway there, and it should have gone across and down the ridge clear down to Triplet Creek. But the guy would not give us a right-of-way. No way would he give us a right-of-way.

I don't even follow the trail anymore. I don't really want to know if they changed it.

It was all done with my philosophy of where the trail should go and why, and what should be done to make proper connections. But now — like at Triplet Creek, you know they built a bridge for us there? The bridge cost a mint. You didn't need a bridge wide enough for a semi-trailer for a trail. All I wanted was maybe a swinging bridge: $500, instead of $50,000.

It was bad because it allowed these horses and vehicles to cross, and that did damage to the trail everywhere. And it ate up a lot of money that wasn't necessary — it took it away from the primitive experience that the trail hiker wants. He wants some hardships; he wants some trip areas. At Laurel River Dam, I think you had to wade across the spillway in some water, and it might be slippery — but you were able to get across just the same. Those are the things that I think hikers like to enjoy: those little hardships. Maybe some older people — grandmothers — might not predicate that, but they hike a lot, too.

We had a trail crew from the Stearns district; a lot of women worked on the trail down there. They had a trail hiking club.

I never hiked with them, but they were people that were interested in the trail and wanted to see a good trail built.

There are lots of places where we had to insert switchbacks. Switchbacks aren't good if you can see the trail from above or below, because people will cut across — and when they cut across you get erosion, and you get construction costs, and damage that you just can't repair. Sometimes they are necessary, so you try to either make them where you can't see them, or make them so gentle that people do not object to staying on the trail. I notice at Cave Run there are switchbacks that are very long and gentle; they're hard to cut because they're so long and gentle that you just stay on the trail.

That's the idea: you make it so easy to stay on the trail that you don't want to be climbing up and down. Although if people can see it, there are people that are natural cheats — they want to cheat the system, even if it's maybe more difficult to jump over the bushes and rocks than to take a nice clean trail that's only going to save them five seconds. They just naturally want to. You can see that on the trails across the campuses at the universities: they'll leave the path and follow a deer path — the shortest distance between two points. Those are the things you have to guard against.

The scenic spots and the geological study areas: the arches and the waterfalls and things like that that are exciting to see. And something of historical note — some old mill creek dams, water wheels, log flumes. They call them flash dams: you could pull out a plug and let a whole lot of water go down the river with a big load of logs on it.

That would save them a lot of dragging timber out with mules, going up and down steep grades. They could float it out — like on Swift Creek. At the Rock Bridge there's a little waterfall upstream about 100 yards; at the top of that was a flash dam, where they had a dam that they could pull a post out of, let the dam go, and the logs would go down. Sometimes men would ride on the logs and keep them from clogging up.

I don't know how deep they were, but they must not have been too awfully deep — just enough power to let the water build up a mass that would carry the logs down when the river normally didn't have that much water in it.

There was a moonshiner's cave, where we developed a steel site with whiskey barrels and jugs and thump kegs and all that stuff in it. We put a chain-link fence across that one. It's just below Rock Bridge, maybe half a mile — off the trail a little bit; a side trail goes to it. It's signed, I think, still.

That was an interesting place to stop and view. I was there one day with a couple from the district, and we looked up at that old furnace — and here's a rattlesnake, come out about ten feet high, and turned back into the rocks with his head back in there. I said, I think I can take this pole and reach up there and put it through that loop of snake and pull him out of there. Well, I put the pole through the snake and went to give it a flip — and the snake was tucked in there pretty tight. He broke the pole in two! He could have come down onto my head. He was kind of a funny thing, a rattlesnake. Some people might say that's funny; other people might not. That's another thing: I usually had to wear snake leggings, because some of these trails were through very thick growth — you couldn't see whether you were stepping on one or not.

That took time. Maybe you'd do that several times before you would find a route that you could go through a laurel thicket and not run into a cliff that rose up and shut you off. The contour lines don't always show every little hump: 20 feet can be a big jump between the next line. It won't show it on the map, but it will stop you in your tracks. You didn't want people to have to climb up a cliff, or subject themselves to places where snakes might be able to hide behind the rocks when you go by.

There are a lot of ways to build them. You can build a suspension bridge with two cables — one to walk on and one to hold on to, four or five feet above the other. Or you can make a tread with cross planks on the bottom one and maybe two handrails on top, and walk on a solid bridge.

There are a couple there. There's Red River, there's one at Triplet, at Hollow Creek, down at Sinking Creek — a whole bunch of suspension bridges. They're not too hard to build, really, but they are kind of scary. The one at Red River was pretty high. Chester Morrison built that one.

He was a district worker from the Stanton district. Chester lived just under Chimney Top Rock — there's a house down below there where he lived. He'd leave his car out across the river; sometimes the water was low enough he could ford the stream with his car, but usually he had to go across on the swinging bridge. He lived there because his wife inherited the property from her father. She died four or five years ago; she was a good friend of ours — we played games with Chester and Dottie. Chester was a good construction man, so he built that bridge. I don't know if anybody helped him or not. He lived in Danville; I think he's moved since — I don't know where he lives now. I've got his address at home.

I left it up to the district to build whatever bridges they needed. Some of them built the bridges; some of them built the steps — stair steps — and some of them didn't. The worst one was where they competed with Cave Run Dam: they neglected to build stairways up from Road 32, which should have been built right off. I don't think they've built them yet, and that's a hard way to come down that highway.

Which is another case of where getting an easement wasn't the easiest thing in the world. The trail was originally to come down halfway down the hill toward Moorland, from 64, on that side of the hill. But the lady down there would not give us a right-of-way.

I don't know. I think she wanted to sell it for a fortune — or maybe she could. I don't know.

There was an existing road from the end of the trail, just past Pine Mountain. The trail goes a little bit farther up the ridge and crosses the state line, and from there on to Pickett State Park there was an old road that it followed into the state park, up on the ridge above Rock Creek.

It's on an old railroad grade, and you have to cross Rock Creek twice there. That can be kind of dangerous, because it's a watershed — it's a fast stream. But it's also a beautiful stream. Rock Creek is a beautiful stream, incidentally.

The ranger had a big briar patch out there in a big open field, and he decided he would get rid of the briar patch by using herbicides. He went out there and sprayed on a hot, sunny day, and the stuff vaporized and blew across and killed several acres of forest across Rock Creek.

Trees are not very well protected against herbicides. A lot of people kill their own trees in town spraying the grass. You've got to be very careful when the sun's out.

I don't remember that particular placement. I did sleep in the fire tower on Pine Mountain. We were fishing down in Rock Creek for trout — we ate trout cooked on a piece of foil on a fire grate. Good. We finally made the trail come down to Rock Creek and go up close to its shores. And I remember going down there with Jim Spears from the Corps of Engineers and laying out the trails that went on into Pickett State Park, up Thompson Creek — I don't know the name of the creek up Rock Creek.

We needed a crossing there, just a little bit from the mouth of Rock Creek at the Big South Fork. I don't think any bridge was ever built there while I was there — still not. It's kind of funny, because when you get to that end of Rock Creek, from all the acid mine drainage it's completely red, just at that part. But up at the campground it's a trout stream — pure water.

See, there's a lot of mining done on what I call this side of Rock Creek, up on the ridgetops. A lot of that mine acid came down. There were a lot of spoil banks that were on fire, and the smoke from the fires killed many, many acres of national forest above them, along the ridgetops. It was in pretty bad shape back then. But we didn't put the trail on any of those spots.

I remember Yamacraw. I don't remember anything about the bridge.

I call it Ye-hoo.

That overhang is an area almost as large as a football field. And the falls itself is 116 feet high, though there's not much water most of the time. We did a lot of development in there, with trails all around the Yahoo Falls area. Then I guess it's now managed by the Corps of Engineers — they gave that part away. I don't know why the Forest Service did that. It's a national recreation area now.

No — I never heard of anybody falling off there. There was a place at the top, close to where the water comes over, where there's a little retaining wall, and we used to walk out and look over. There were copperheads down on the ledge before it went over the bank — nearly every time we'd look.

We crossed the railroad — the big tracks — just north of Stearns Ranger District on 27. Then down to Barren Fork Horse Camp, just south of Cumberland Falls. When we came out of Cumberland Falls we crossed over a pretty big stream and came up an old log road. I can't remember now, but—

I think that was a contest, and I don't know who named it Sheltowee. But Sheltowee means “big turtle” — to the Indians, that was their name for him. I don't know who came up with it. I think it was Bob Strosmeier that wanted to call it a trace. I don't know what trace means to him, but it doesn't mean anything to me. Why would you want to call it that? I just want to call it a trail — and that's what it was. It wasn't somebody's path that you took over, or a path that led to some particular something. There is nothing at the end of it that you want to visit — especially on the north end, it just stops at the end of the forest. There's nothing there that would induce you to walk the trail to get to it.

It's just a little marker on the road. The trail didn't even lead to that marker.

It joined at the ridge top; you had to kind of be careful you didn't cross into the paper company. But I don't think they would have really objected to the trail being on paper-company land — though they may not have been much in favor of protecting it, because they raised trees for pulpwood.

Don Fike is one of a kind. He is a weightlifter supreme — really a muscle man; he did a lot of weightlifting. And he was a great guy for search and rescue for the national forest: climbing the cliffs and pulling people off the cliffs that got hung up there. Don's a great guy — he worked with me a lot, a real good friend. I really don't know why he won't retire; he's still working there. I think he's one of these guys that thinks he wouldn't know what to do if he retired.

I never missed a day after I retired that I didn't go out and play golf, for 10 years in a row, and had a great time. Then they closed the depot.

The Army depot at Avon — halfway between here and Lexington. That's where I played golf. It was an Army depot, and they had a golf course of eight or nine holes. I got permission from them for the Forest Service people to play golf there; I think I was the only one to ever play.

We didn't get to play for free, but green-fee membership cost me like $75 for a year — play all I wanted, every day except Saturdays and Sundays and holidays. I had friends; we played two or three times a week.

Since retirement I spent a lot of time writing novels, and then I got to writing poetry. I have a book full of poems in here, with 387 of my poems in it.

I remember one. I call it “The Green Peach.” — “Green as grass, hard as a bullet — stupid ass, white as a bullet!”

Some of them are pretty long. Most of them are moralistic, or give solutions to problems — good advice to young people and old people. Some of them are just humorous, like that one. And some of them are just what this old fogey thinks about things.

Well — if you write poems. I have five full book-length novels. I haven't published any of those. But I did publish the book this last January. I paid for it myself — self-publishing, I guess you call it. I had two hundred copies and they went so quick that I've been trying to decide whether to have another printing. I sold them for $20 a piece, and some people say they should have charged more. They are good poems, and most have been very well received.

Poems for Living, Laughing, and Learning.

In the section where it talks about the dedication ceremony. They were never officially closed; hadn't been used for 20 years; trees this big growing in the middle of them. Old roads through private lands — I was able to convince the local county governments to give me a right-of-way as long as the trail was needed there.

Mostly because they're lazy. They want to ride — that's why they ride horses.

And the same thing is true of the off-road vehicle rider: they're not going to go out and volunteer to build trails. And that's why, at times, these volunteers were practically the only maintenance the trail got.

You can also carry them in on your back. But I noticed, in parts — especially Cave Run — there's a lot of horseback use. A tree falls over, and the horseback people go around the tree and create terrible erosion around it. But they could easily pack a chainsaw in on their horse and cut through the tree to get through. Don't look for that. It just doesn't happen.

A Honda is one of the favorite riding ORVs. That's the only one I think of.

Hikers, of course. They hike because they enjoy the forest experience.

I had that title on here, but I messed it up — I started getting this stuff in and I couldn't get my word processor to quit.

“Hikers, horses, and Hondas” — that's the conflict on the trail. The trail maintenance volunteers dried up because the horses and Hondas are not compatible with hiking.

The forest supervisor, the regional forester, and the chief of the Forest Service in Washington. They sit at desks and they don't really know what goes on on the ground — so they think it's a good idea. They have been sold on the multiple-use concept: the forest is used not just for forestry but for recreation, water quality, and various other things besides timber. The timber is very important, and watershed protection is another thing that's very important.

No. Because it makes getting rights-of-way even more difficult. When you have to convince a landowner to allow it — not just hikers. You see, when the trail was laid out, they envisioned the trail as a hiking trail — not a horse trail or an ORV highway. And it caused a lot of animosity between the landowners and the Forest Service when the Forest Service decided, after the trail was all laid out and they had gotten permission to use their land as a right-of-way, that they would introduce horses and ORVs — which were not in the landowners' thinking when they gave the right-of-way. Probably not any of them would have given it then.

I don't know — it didn't last very long. There are a lot of people that want to ride their Hondas and their trail bikes. You see them on television all the time — no wonder they think it's okay.

The Sierra Club and the Stearns Hiking Club, mentioned in there. Then there were CCC kids — and they were Happy Pappies, and Green Thummers, and people like that. That isn't all of them, but that's some of them.

That's a program for old people — maybe out of work and destitute. The government gives them a job doing that stuff.

I measured it on the map. That is a figure that the Forest put on; I think they cut off the section that goes seven miles into the park.

I made it with a map wheel on the map, and I did 265 miles. Then I think maybe they had somebody actually walk it with a wheel on the ground, and they got 254 miles. But I don't think they walked the portion in Tennessee.

You may have missed some loops. It's hard to get the exact measurement: the curves cause your wheels to not record all the actual distance, the way an actual wheel on the ground does. And going uphill you can't record all that. It's just a little bit, but it adds extra distance.

I don't know. I haven't been on the trail today; I haven't walked any of it in the last 25 years.

No, I'm not worried about it at all. I have one last question: is somebody going to smarten up and take the horses and Hondas off of it? I think the London Ranger District probably won't do that.

No, I don't think so. I think they were all part of the Forest then. The supervisor's office gave the direction for all districts, and the district ranger did as he was allowed to do under the supervisor's regulations.

I think that's probably because of the area south of Livingston — where you come to the top of the hill and there's a bridge over I-75 — and then a section south of that which goes on some old roads. They get in there, probably.

And the horse people — horses, in Kentucky, are sacred.

It's true. But I don't have a horse for my horseshoe to go on. This is my foot.

A turtle. A little three-and-a-half-inch metal stenciled disc: when you stenciled it with a stencil brush, you had a turtle showing that identified the trail as Sheltowee — so that if you got off it, you knew you were not on the Sheltowee anymore. It was stenciled on trees and rocks, things like that, where you couldn't carry the signs away. People are always trying to steal your sign.

Yeah. I designed that turtle, to identify the Sheltowee Trace — which means “big turtle” in Indian talk. That is the name of the trail because of Big Turtle. Daniel Boone National Forest was named after Daniel Boone, the Big Turtle — although Daniel Boone never walked on this trail, or in that direction of the trail, anywhere that I know of. He might have crossed it — he may have crossed it in a lot of places — but probably never actually walked on any of it, any distance.

No. I just cut out the circles like the spots on the turtle's back. You've seen land turtles; they have very distinctive markings on their backs and their heads. I made it out of metal, so that they could use it over and over with a stencil brush. It's a brush that's real round, with real stiff bristles; you dub it on some stiff paint and dab it, and you get the design without running. You don't have to be an artist to draw a turtle every time.

I designed the Sheltowee Trace emblem in the form of a stencil turtle that could be painted on trees and rocks and other permanent fixtures alongside the trail.

No — I don't think I ever thought about Daniel a lot. I think a lot of people do when they're out there hiking the trail. A lot of people think they're somehow communing with that history.

It's a very small interior rock house. There's a shingle that was found in there that says “E. Boon” on it — whether he made it or not, it was found in that enclosure. Now it's all fenced in; the entire rock house is fenced from edge to edge, and there's a little wooden walkway. Also there were troughs of wood that were found there that were supposed to have been used in making gunpowder from niter, which you usually find in these caves.

I would just like to add that the horses and the Hondas are not compatible with hiking trails, for all the reasons I gave you in there. And that's why — well, when I read the article in the Herald — well, you can quote anything in there that I've said. I don't pull any punches.

What we're going to do — I'm the only one that flagged any part of that trail in the original.

I'm the only one that did any flagging on that trail, except for the trails that already existed — which were done mostly by Clarence Henson in the Red River area. And there's another one that goes from Cumberland Falls State Park up to the mouth of Laurel River — that's about 12 miles long — and that was already there. That's probably a popular section, because the Cumberland Falls development was probably built in the '30s, when they built the lodge. The lodge was built by CCC workers, I think. It was real rustic, built back in those days when the CCC was popular. And it's a beautiful trail, too, that little section — you go past Dog Slaughter Falls. There's one place on that trail, about halfway from one end to the other, where they found a man and his wife and a small child living under a rock overhang. That was while I was working with the Forest.

That was their home. They were just squatters.

I suppose they went out and got something to eat, maybe. But that was their home. It was done in the past; people probably wouldn't do it today.

I was proud of it, because it represented perhaps a year's work all together. And a lot of days I would work ten hours instead of eight. If quitting time came and I had another mile to go to get to my destination, I didn't quit and go home — I stayed and finished it. And if I had to go to Ohio to get a crossing right-of-way, I went and got it from the people that owned the land up there. Those things they didn't figure on, when they gave me a $25 savings bond for my efforts.

It was the hundredth one that was built as a national recreation trail — it got that designation. It was a trail basically designed as a national recreation trail; it had met certain standards to become a national trail. I don't know what they are, but they must have been pretty important.

The national forest is a lot of land, when you consider the whole lot. In the West, most of the Rocky Mountains are national forest. The Pacific Crest Trail was one of the trails I got information from — I talked on the telephone to the guy that laid out a lot of it, and he sent me his books and information about trails.

Just a lot of things, really, but nothing in particular. Just what you should do and shouldn't do.

The experience, yeah. The Pacific Crest Trail goes from Canada to Mexico, almost on top of the mountains. I think it's one of these all-purpose trails where you can ride a horse; but most of it's above the tree line, and that's a different sort of a thing.

I've been on the Appalachian Trail, and I wanted to have Appalachian Trail shelters. You know what I'm talking about — the little three-sided thing that you could weather a storm in. But we had a supervisor who said, “We don't build any Appalachian Trail shelters.” I tried to get the Sheltowee to utilize rock overhangs that would provide some of the same features, but couldn't really provide it at all. Those also had facilities for restrooms and things like that — that's kind of nice, but maybe not necessary. But I don't like people going out and just making a big restroom out of the Forest.

I got a letter from one of the girls I sent a copy of my poem book to. She said she remembered going to the forest with me and hiking up to Natural Bridge State Park, and she had walked off the trail without any adult supervision — and how she got chewed out for doing that when she got back. She said they all went up on the Taylor Knob fire tower, and she saw the toilet paper, and she asked where the restrooms were in the fire tower. She said she figured it out when she saw the toilet paper in the treetops.

My name is Verne Orndorff. I was born in 1916, and I worked in the Forest Service from 1962 to 1980. I worked on the Sheltowee Trace as part of my duties with the National Forest Service as a landscape architect.

I'll call you. I got some pictures in here of them — when I was in New Guinea. I have a picture of myself with a beard, when I was in New Guinea in the service. I was four years in the Army: three of them in Australia, and a year in New Guinea.

I was a weather observer.