We're so happy that you found our site useful and also hope that you will consider adding to the information that we have posted here. This website is a work in progress. Without the submission of other AT hikers, this site would have little value.
All we really do is post information submitted about AT parking/access areas. Since the AT is constantly changing, our site also needs to reflect these changes so we are depending on you to help us.
You will find a link at the bottom of our main page as well as each state page
for submitting AT parking/access areas and AT pictures. We just need to know
where to post them so you will need to tell us the state as well as the
corresponding section (as posted on our website) where the information belongs.
All information on our website is posted in North to South order so when
submitting pictures it would be most helpful to know where your picture should
be ordered among the current pictures.
So you would like to know more about us? I really can't figure out why or what
you might like to know, but I'll fill you in about how our webpage got started
and why it's here, who we are and what our interests are, and for those geeks
out there, some information about our hardware/programming setup.
Webpage Stuff
The first thing you should know about this site is that it is a totally
volunteer effort. We do not sell any information nor do we publish any
information other than what is posted here on this website - nothing commercial
about it. We have no plans on selling any advertising on this site nor would we
utilize any programs that would compromise any personal information on your
computer. The only personal information we would use is a reference to your
email address regarding information that you have submitted with your
permission. This email address is displayed in a manner that screen scraping
search programs cannot retrieve a useable email address. This is just our way
of promoting something we love. We started a good many years ago when we were
trying to find trail heads in PA (we’re slackpackers). We started looking for
access points using a PA Gazetteer and Delorme mapping software. At this point,
we wrote to the various PA groups for help. We figured if we were having a
problem, so must a lot of other people. If you look in PA, you’ll see that we
have provided the information for a lot of these trailheads. As the PA AT site
became more and more popular, we began receiving requests for information for
the entire trail. As we will never be hiking the entire trail, we are reaching
out to hiking enthusiasts to help us help others by submitting information for
the sections/areas they are familiar with. We did some initial data input by
obtaining information from some older State's AT Trail Guidebooks that we were
able to get from our public library for states other than PA. As we have found
out a lot of this information is outdated and is in need of current
information. The Appalachian Trail Conservancy has been giving out our web
address for quite a while now to anyone that requests parking/access
information as well as having a link to our site from theirs.
When we started out, our website was just static html pages on our dial up
provider. If you'd like to take a look here it is:
Link to original Site. When we became frustrated with dialup slowness
we graduated to a cable connection. That is when we first hosted the webpages
on a computer in our home. At that point, one of our older PC's could handle
all of the internet requests. As we gathered more data, we realized we needed
to start storing the information in a database. Since Microsoft Access came
bundled with our office products, that is what we first used.
Hardware/Programming Setup
Today we have a dedicated server that resides in our home running on Windows
Server 2003. The current webpages are .NET code and the data is stored in a sql
server database. We are currently using only 20% of our disk storage so there
is plenty of room for more beautiful pictures from you. We take this
application and its data very seriously that we perform daily backups to
another computer and also keep a weekly off-site backup. Cyndi does the
majority of the website coding with David pitching in to help with database
calls and testing. We both share in the data entry - actually posting your
information on the website. If you experience any technical problems with our
web site, please notify us at at @ rohland.org.
If you have anything nice to say about the site we like hearing that also. We
just want to let you know that we appreciate all of your feedback.
We do have other web sites on our server but by far the most popular is our
Appalachian Trail website. Feel free to browse through our family websites and
also visit pictures of places that we have traveled to at
http://rohland.org
If you are interested in how many people are using our website you might want
to take a look at these statistics:
| Monthly history as of May 15, 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Who We Are
On a professional level, Cyndi is an ex-school teacher and current
ASP.NET/database computer programming consultant and David is an
Oracle/SQL-Server Database Administrator.
Cyndi is an avid gardener with a large vegetable garden and un-countable flower
gardens. She also enjoys cooking and forming ideas on how to change the house
and drive David crazy.
David enjoys wood working and building things (most of which were Cyndi's
ideas) from multiple decks to kitchen cabinets and end tables.
Throughout our married life, 34 years and counting, we have always enjoyed
doing things together. We are both avid readers and enjoy the outdoors and
nature. Joint hobbies include camping, hiking, biking, canoeing, traveling,
cross country skiing, dancing, and scuba diving. In our early years we did a
lot of tent camping. We then graduated to a pop-up when our children were
young. We took a couple of vacations, US and Canadian Rockies where we rented
motorhomes and found that we were a lot more mobile and really enjoyed that
type of vacation. When we out grew the pop-up, we sold it and decided to take
some non camping vacations. We realized that we missed camping and went back to
a tent. Tenting made packing for weekend getaways cumbersome so we purchased a
motorhome to take us to many places on short notice.
| We used to take short hikes to areas that were within driving distance of our home. Cyndi attended a group hike on a section of the PA AT with the local nature center. She really enjoyed it and took the rest of the family to the same area. Then when our daughter entered college in the Delaware Water Gap area, we decided to day hike more of the AT. At this point we decided to attempt to complete the entire PA AT by day hikes. We finally finished hiking the PA AT on October 22, 2006. So what's next? We've already started New Jersey and will probably also do some Maryland hiking next year. | 
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When we were finishing up a section in Boiling Springs in 2006 we stopped at the
regional AT office there. A second grade class had left a request for AT hikers
to share their experiences with the class. So we now have expanded our site to
include an Appalachian Trail site for children:
http://childrensATpage.rohland.org. Let us know what your children
think of it.
Other places we have visited and have done some slackpacking include Newfoundland,
Nova Scotia, Ontario, California, US Southwest canyon area, Alaska, New
England, and of course - PA our home state.
Winters can be quite long in PA, and we've found that winter cruising is a great
way to escape the cold grey weather. We have a lot of pictures from places
we've visited on our personal website.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank everyone who have helped make this site the wealth of
information that it is. Without the help of all of the people who have
submitted information (we list them all on the state detail pages), we wouldn't
be here to help you. Many, many thanks to all of you.
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There is one person that that as of November 2007 has contributed 551 parking entires, 292 milemarkers and 786 pictures. That is a total of 1,629 submissions and he is still sending us information - David Cullen. David is an unbelievable source of information about Appalachian Trail access areas. We owe David one huge thanks. David's trail name is Moses since he has been wandering around on trails for over 40 years. We were lucky enough to meet up with David on the Trail in October of 2006 at Lehigh Gap, PA. We met up with David a second time in October of 2007 in Maryland section 5. On that hike he reached over 1,000 miles on the AT. Congratulations David! |