ORONO -- The Maine Appalachian Trail Club will hold its annual meeting April 14 at the University of Maine at Orono to honor a UMO student volunteer group that has aided MATC for over a half century.

MATC will honor the Maine Outing Club at an 11: 40 a.m. ceremony during the 8 a.m.-4 p.m. meeting in Nutting Hall. MOC works on the AT somewhere in Maine two or three times each year. Ten to 20 people, but sometimes up to 30, spend long weekends getting tired, muddy, and sore doing a variety of projects. .

"I remember the ‘cut and peel’ weekend around Memorial Day in 1994 and being so tired at the end of the day I wanted to go to sleep. But there’s a rule. It must be at 7 p.m.," says MOC member and volunteer leader Chris Dorion.

"About six weeks later, the MOC worked with MATC to haul the logs to the site. The 18-inch-diameter deacon seat logs took everybody," Dorion says about this outing to continue building a new lean-to at Bald Mountain Brook.

From its first maintaining 17 miles of AT in 1949, MOC has helped mark the trail by painting trees and rocks, clear blowdowns, construct lean-tos and privies, build waterbars to control erosion, roll boulders into a beaver flowage so hikers could cross, relocate the trail periodically in areas with sensitive plant growth, and more.

MATC, a volunteer group of some 600 members, maintains the AT in Maine from Grafton Notch some 271 miles to the edge of Baxter State Park in which MATC volunteers also help maintain the final 15 miles of the AT to the summit of Katahdin.

Information about MATC can be found at www.matc.org.

MOC member Robbie Goodwin, from Lake Placid, New York by stone work completed in 2004 on the Appalachian Trail near Bald Mountain Pond by 29 MOC members. The stonework replaced 60 feet of rotting bog bridge with a stone-veneered causeway and tile drains. Rich growth of wetland plants such as sedges have stabilized this formerly wet, muddy trail area. Photo by Chris Dorion.

Two groups of MOC members prepare to head for their work sites on Moxie Bald Mountain in 2005 for a rock-work and causeway project and a brushsawing task. Photo by Chris Dorion.