Treasure on the Trail: Saving a 1938 Appalachian Trail Shelter
On a March day in 2025, Carolina Mountain Club’s Tom Weaver and some 35 volunteers ascended Tennessee’s bald-top Walnut Mountain and surrounded a three-walled log hut like ants. Within about five hours they had dismantled the 1938 Appalachian Trail shelter, which had been slated for removal by its owner, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy (ATC). Aside from the bottommost wood, rotted out from direct soil contact, the American chestnut logs were in surprisingly good shape—a portent for the structure’s next incarnation 14 miles down the road.
photo by: David Huff
The shelter in its new location.
Inspired by a similar Virginia project, the mountain club (also known as CMC) sourced grants from the ATC’s Tennessee and North Carolina specialty-license-plate programs to reconstruct the Adirondack lean-to in downtown Hot Springs, North Carolina, through which the famous 2,000-plus-mile route passes. “There are Appalachian Trail blazes right in the sidewalk,” says Weaver.
Crossing state lines meant hoops to jump through, but also many hands on deck: the town of Hot Springs and CMC, of course, as well as the ATC; the Appalachian Ranger District of North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest; Cherokee National Forest in Tennessee; and both respective state historic preservation offices. After input from historians and archaeologists, the shelter’s bones were sprayed with a preservative and meticulously reassembled atop a concrete pad and new foundation in the summer of 2025. CMC will maintain it in perpetuity. Now even non-hikers can witness a rare work of historical trail craftsmanship, originally built by the New Deal–era Civilian Conservation Corps, and engage with a fully accessible interpretive exhibit.
“It really is enhancing the prestige of Hot Springs as a trail town,” Weaver says.
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