Originally Posted by
ki0eh
I think I can take some of this on, I think I'm the only GET Board member who regularly posts here anymore.
Benton MacKaye back in 1921, great visionary as he was, saw a network of foot trails through the Appalachians as a desirable goal. In the 1960's, a number of foot trails came into being, some (the Tuscarora/Big Blue) envisioned as a future route for the then-unprotected A.T., some (such as Finger Lakes Trail, begun in 1962, and PA's Mid State Trail, begun in 1969), initations of the A.T. concept arising in local areas. The PA Mid State-Tuscarora Link Trail (now Standing Stone Trail) might have been the first inter-trail explicit linkage in the later 1970's. As each trail grew incrementally Lloyd MacAskill's 2000 Appalachian Trailway News article articulated the linkage concept, extended further by yours truly in a response letter to that article published later in ATN.
The appeal, I think, to trail organizers was to seek greater validation of each group's own "little" trail due to connectivity to a larger whole. I think it's turned out that the appeal has been greater to trail volunteers than to long-distance hikers who seem largely more interested in the social aspects of hiking and not necessarily motivated by the network concept initially espoused by MacKaye and renewed by MacAskill.
The "why do we need another trail?" question honestly continually comes up. Perhaps the most basic answer is in the nature of the volunteers who work on it. I think some are motivated by pride in their local areas, feeling what they have is a more authentic, rustic, or scenic area than the next closest A.T. section. Some are perhaps seeking a freer rein in their volunteer activities than they see in, most commonly, the A.T. Some, perhaps, have worked on the AT and/or the NCT and see the GET as the next challenge in their nearby locales.
Working on the GET is not necessarily exclusive for volunteers, for instance I maintain both an A.T. section and a GET section. It's certainly not mutually exclusive with completing the Allegheny Trail as the disjunct section of the ALT is also the first disjuncture in the GET coming southbound. The feeling among those who work on the GET seems to be that greater connectivity makes us all stronger - volunteers and dayhikers are to some extent motivated by the thought they are part of something larger. The dearth of LD hikers has been somewhat puzzling to many of these folks.
Due to the Superior Hiking Trail being in a different time zone it's not likely that it competes with the GET for volunteer resources, it also seems to be progressing fairly well even though it's still not officially also NCT due to that needing an act of Congress.
Without NST status the GET is freer to make adjustments to local conditions and local resources, at the cost of not accessing the full power and resources of the Federal Government. Frankly, given both the conservative localities through which the GET passes and the preoccupation of the Federal Government with other priorities, in my opinion the GET can be far stronger and grow better as an alliance of like-minded non-profits than as yet another unrealized "government" trail.
Due to this autonomous direction of resources, "completion" is somewhat in the eye of the beholder. The A.T. in the eyes of ATC is not necessarily completed because there remain sections of suboptimal route and unprotected corridor. The GET concept is still somewhat flexible in its endpoints, and chunks do not yet meet the mapped-or-blazed-if-not-both criterion of hikability. If completion means an off-road corridor through the length of Alabama, or shelters every 10 miles, that's probably decades away.
It is likely as "complete" as the A.T. that Earl Shaffer thru-hiked in 1948, but Earl's successor on the GET still hasn't been found. To be fair resupply will be more of a problem than Earl had, due to the withdrawal of retail activity from comparable rural areas in the intervening decades. Certainly land management rules have hardened too.