Blue Ridge Country May/June 2023 - 30

'THE APPALACHIAN TRAIL SAVED MY LIFE'
Forging a New Trail in Life
A series of tragedies steered Joe Morris toward the Appalachian Trail-
and a new calling.
By NANCY HENDERSON | Photos courtesy JOE MORRIS
F
or four long, difficult years, Joe
Morris had endured one loss after
another. His father died of cancer,
a close friend in a car accident. The
family defense contracting business,
Morris's primary source of income
for 27 years, closed its doors. He and his
wife divorced and his daughter went off
to college.
" My life completely fell apart, " he recalls.
So
in 2010, the Greeneville, Tennesssee,
native started hiking the Appalachian
Trail. Along the way, Morris took
lots of photos and compiled some of
them for a book.
" I was a very lost person trying to fill
time, and the trail, as it does for a lot of
people, represented a transitional point.
A lot of people that go to the trail are
healing from one thing or another or
they're transitioning from one period
of life to another. I just walked. I didn't
have anything else to do except walk,
pray and cry. "
Wrapping up one of his section treks
in the spring of 2012, he headed back
to the parking lot where his truck was
parked in Burke's Garden, Virginia. Out of
the blue, a couple of volunteers handing
out water and oranges to the weary hikers
asked him where he lived. " There's a
trail club there called Tennessee Eastman
Hiking & Canoeing Club, " they told him.
" They build trails and clear them and do
maintenance. They could use some help. "
" I had no idea that volunteers did 95%
of the work on all these pathways, " Morris
says. " That applies to state parks, most
greenways, the AT, you name it. It's done
by all-volunteer labor. "
He decided to give it a shot. What
more, after all, could he lose? That summer,
he joined a crew spreading gravel
on the trail at Round Bald near Roan
Mountain.
" I worked like a mule, not only figuratively
but literally, " he jokes. " The belt
was around my waist because we had to
pull this thing uphill. You had to kind of
lean back and walk backwards pulling this
large, vibrating gravel compactor. I could
not get out of bed the next morning. "
Several years later, the volunteer coordinator
confided to him with a laugh, " I
didn't really think you'd come back. "
" That was how it started for me, " Morris
says. " It was not really any fancier
than that. I started coming with a regular
Thursday crew and now it's just exploded.
It's essentially the entirety of my life.
I spend most of my days planning or doing
outreach for some trail system somewhere.
It's been the best thing that's ever
happened to me. "
Now the Southern Projects Coordinator
for TEHCC, one of 31 clubs under a
volunteer service agreement with the
Appalachian Trail Conservancy, Morris
oversees a crew that maintains a 134mile
stretch of the AT from Spivey Gap,
North Carolina, to the Virginia-Tennessee
state line.
It isn't a desk job, either. Twice a
week, he accompanies a small group of
volunteers to repair damaged trails and
build new ones. He is constantly searching
for fresh recruits through his Trail
Maintainers podcast, Facebook, Meetup
and other social media outlets " to try
and find new people to energize them to
come out. There's a job for everybody,
male, female, young, old. ... It doesn't
have to be demanding physical labor. It
can be something as simple as reporting
accurately the location of a downed tree,
what size it is, where it is, with a picture
with something in it to give it spatial
reference so we know what materials to
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Blue Ridge Country May/June 2023

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