David Lippy was sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic in Orlando when it hit him.

“The city was so congested with vehicles,” he said “I had to go three miles to work from my house and it would take me a half hour one way.”

We’ve had a good run in the watershed. The Town of Waynesville has sponsored spring and fall guided hikes in its 8,000-plus acre watershed since 2007. The hikes provide a great way for residents and other interested parties to see this wonderful resource that has been placed in a conservation easement to insure the town has an ample supply of high-quality drinking water for generations to come.

The last time I went camping I was 10 or 11. I was in my grandparents’ backyard, snug in my sleeping bag between my older sister and cousin Jake. I laid awake nervous about a ravenous bear attacking the tent, or maybe a ghoul from one of the scary stories my dad had just finished telling.

During the next several weeks, thousands of people will leave from Springer Mountain in Georgia and begin the 2,184-mile trek to Maine along the Appalachian Trail.

SEE ALSO: Follow me, into the wild

For some, the trip is a lifelong dream. They have meticulously planned what to bring, where to stop, how many miles they want walk each day. They have queued up their own resupply boxes, packed with fresh headlamp batteries, deodorant and their favorite candy bars, ready and waiting to be shipped to “mail drops” along the trail.

For the past year, the National Forest Service has been taking inventory, collecting public input and meeting with outdoor interest groups to wrangle its expansive web of nearly 1,600 miles of trail in the Nantahala and Pisgah national forests into a better, more sustainable network.

This month, the forest service will share its preliminary assessment from the “Trail Strategy Initiative” with mountain residents.

It’s all started with a phone call.

A lifelong thirst for adventure led Ronald R. Cooper to a love of backpacking, where he soon began hiking around the Grand Canyon and beyond. But, he was in search of a new challenge, one that ultimately tied together his Native American ancestry with his own modern existence.

Last Saturday, Sept. 15, was surely a gorgeous day to be ridge running high in the Plott Balsams — clear blue skies dotted with white puff-clouds; temperatures in the low to mid 60s; a great day for a hike. Not even the weight of chainsaws, brush cutters, loppers and/or swing blades could dampen the spirit or curb the enthusiasm of the dedicated crew of trail-keepers that set out from Waterrock Knob to Yellow Face and on to Blackrock.

As the legend goes, Earl Shaffer, the first man to hike the Appalachian Trail from end-to-end in 1948, used leather footwear without socks. He only sprinkled foot powder in his boots each morning — some say he used sand — to keep them dry and prevent blisters.

The first women to solo-hike the trail in 1955, 69-year-old Emma “Grandma” Gatewood, forewent the boots and sand and opted for Keds tennis shoes and a light knapsack.

 A million acres of national forests sounds like a lot, and indeed it is. But consider the 8.6 million people who visit the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests every year and those vast green swaths that checker any map of Western North Carolina don’t seem quite so big after all.

It took more than a decade, a lot of detective work and a protracted legal case to clear the way for a new portion of the Bartram Trail in Macon County now under construction.

The Bartram Trail Society maintains a 100-mile memorial trail in Western North Carolina in honor of the naturalist William Bartram, who traveled through the region in 1775 on a botanical mission to collect exotic, new-fangled plants from the New World for the English crown.

A large section of the trail in Macon County is stymied either by private land or the Little Tennessee River. Hikers trying to do the entire Bartram Trail have to come out of the woods and hoof it along the highway through Franklin from the Fishhawk Mountains section to the Nantahala section, or they must find a canoe or kayak and boat down the river.

Some 10 to 15 years ago, Burt Kornegay, then president of the Bartram Trail Society, began an effort to cut down on the amount of highway hiking. The Bartram Trail Society wanted to reroute a portion of the Bartram Trail in the Otto community, specifically from its Buckeye Branch exodus in the Tessentee Creek area to Hickory Knoll Road.

“This would knock out several miles of road hiking,” Kornegay said. “We were trying to reduce that.”

Kornegay saw a for-sale sign on one piece of property where the society wanted to reroute the trail. He and his wife went out on a limb, he said, and bought the piece of property for about $17,000 in expectation that the society would buy it from them, which it ultimately did.

“But then, there was still a little weird piece of private land,” Kornegay said. “For some reason, it had just been sort of a lost piece of land and had sat there for all this time, for over 100 years.”

Unsorting the story of that “weird” piece of land — a critical link to get the trail rerouted — became the task of Highlands lawyer Richard Melvin, who donated his time to helping the Bartram Society on the matter.

Deciphering boundary lines and surveys of old tracts are never easy.

“In the old titles, you’ll often find overlap with descriptions to this rock and that tree,” Melvin said. “We had to find out where it lies.”

But, there was a rather unusual hurdle for this particular tract: figuring out who the heck owned it.

“We finally found out the last owner was Nimrod Jarrett,” Melvin said.

Nimrod Simpson Jarrett was a major landowner across Western North Carolina, owning thousands of acres. Jarrett also farmed, traded ginseng, and owned mica and talc mines. He owned slaves and served as a colonel in the Macon County militia. Jarrett lived in the Nantahala community where Appletree campground is today.

In September 1871, Jarrett set off for Franklin from Nantahala on a business trip and was robbed and killed. A man named Balias Henderson was found guilty of the crime and was subsequently hanged in May 1873.

Melvin said he couldn’t determine that there were any heirs to the piece of property in the Hickory Knoll area of Macon County that Jarrett had owned. Melvin said that Jarrett had had children, but that those children had moved west or otherwise left the county and abandoned this particular piece of property. Perhaps he had so much land, the executor of his will couldn’t keep track of it all, and this piece was simply lost in the shuffle. But for whatever reason, the title was still in his name — 150 years after his untimely murder.

The land is surrounded by U.S. Forest Service land on all sides but one.

Melvin filed a quitclaim deed on the land on behalf of the Bartram Trail Society. The group, after the seven required years passed, gained legal title after no one came forward to contest the claim.

Walter Wingfield, current president of the Bartram Trail Society, said the land was then sold to the U.S. Forest Service for its appraised value.

The Bartram Trail Society does not build trails on private land because of liability issues, which is why it sold the property to the forest service. Some of the money from that sale will be used to help build the new 3.8-mile section of the Bartram Trail.

The new property is very steep and rugged, Wingfield said, meaning that private contractors with trail-building equipment will be required, not just volunteer labor. A grant is also being sought to help pay for the new trail.

As for the robbery and subsequent murder of Jarrett that led to this legal quagmire?

“I think the murderer got 50 cents and a pocket watch out of it,” Wingfield said.