Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, October 24, 1993                   TAG: 9310240100
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: D1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Ed Shamy<
DATELINE: PEAKS OF OTTER                                LENGTH: Medium

SOON, WATER SHOULD BE ALL THAT FALLS ALONG THE TRAIL

There's a trail just north of the Peaks that switches back and forth for a mile and a half from the Blue Ridge Parkway to the Fallingwater Cascade and back up again.

It's an attractive place - a spill of mountain water over a steep, mossy stack of granite - but the trail has been as treacherous as it has been popular. Narrow and rooty, steep, cutting through slim rock notches and over sloped, slick patches of bare rocks, the Fallingwater trail sprained its share of ankles and sent a generation of hikers tumbling.

The National Park Service had considered improving the trail for years - the cascade spills from parkway land to Jefferson National Forest land - and finally set about the task in April with $50,000 to spend.

Five men, led by John Hicks, were to stop erosion and build retaining walls and mortar together rock steps and lay gravel and - and here we arrive at the problem - clear boulders from the path.

Your options are obvious. You could whack at the granite with sledgehammers, but those rocks have lasted tens of millions of years on the mountainside because they're not soft. Hammers could be plenty of exercise, but mostly futile.

You could jackhammer it. But how would you get a compressor down into a ravine so steep and tree-covered and inaccessible to pickup trucks?

You could detonate. Dynamite is quick, and it's effective. It's also expensive, restricted only to pros and potentially deadly.

"You never know," says Danny Peters, "when a grandmother from Canada is going to walk by with some kids."

Peters is the head maintenance man for a long stretch of Blue Ridge Parkway that includes the Peaks.

The trail is closed to hikers on weekdays while the park service crew works, but not everyone pays attention to signs. Dynamite was ruled too dicey an option, which is just as well. Blasting seems so politically incorrect, so environmentally brutish, on National Forest land.

Work began, and the crew improvised at every turn. The men built chutes down which to pour gravel, and they pried loose small rocks to shore up sagging earthen walls. They saved flat rocks and used them to build steps.

They muscled 10-by-12-inch timbers down the hill and spiked them together to form retaining walls. The park service bought a $2,100 motorized wheelbarrow - it looks like a mini-Sherman tank with a convertible top - to lug gravel down the path to places where they needed to smooth the trail.

The crew recently has struck pay dirt on the boulder quandary.

They drilled inch-round holes a foot or more into the offending boulders. The drills were powered by a small generator that could be carried up and down the trail.

Into the holes, they poured S-Mite, a cement-like compound Danny Peters bought for about $5.90 per pound. S-Mite isn't new to the world, but it's new to this group of park workers.

"It's been money well spent, from what I can tell," Peters said.

As it dries, the stuff expands so forcefully that it cracks the rock.

Within a few days - presto - the boulder snapped like a Saltine.

No muss, no fuss, no messy dynamiting, which raises the eternal question: If a boulder cracks in the forest and no one's there to hear it, does it make a noise?

Who cares?

The boulder-free Fallingwater trail will be finished by December.