forestry. While working as a Forest Examiner in the early teens, he performed groundbreaking research on the impacts of forest cover on runoff in New Hampshire's White Mountains. This was during a time in which an intense debate regarding the connection between deforestation and irregular stream flow was occurring, and MacKaye's scientific evidence that forest cover controlled stream flow helped in the creation of the White Mountain National Forest. Progressive politics In 1913, while still living in Washington, Mackaye helped form a social activist group called the Hell Raisers. Composed of government workers, congressional staffers, and journalists, the informal group aimed to raise public awareness about social and political issues. He married the suffragist Jessie Belle Hardy Stubbs in 1915. Appalachian Trail MacKaye's article An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning, which called for the construction of the Appalachian Trail, was published in the October 1921 issue of Journal of the American Institute of Architects. The article was partly inspired by the Green Mountain Club which had helped usher in Vermont's Long Trail. The article triggered sixteen years of effort, organized through hundreds of local trail associations and community groups, to blaze and build a 2,192-mile trail along the crests of the Appalachian Mountains. Pinhoti Trail "The Pinhoti Trail is considered the realization of forester Benton MacKaye's original 1921 vision of a trail extending the length of the Appalachian Mountain chain, connecting several existing trails, and sprinkled with permanent camps and constructed to "stimulate every line of outdoor non-industrial endeavor," including recreation, recuperation, agriculture and study. He hoped to spark a "back to the land" movement to relieve the ills of urban industrial life." https://www.bhamwiki.com/w/Pinhoti_Trail From the Pinhoti Trail Alliance. The PTA Facebook account has the most history and current trail conditions online. Legacy In his 2002 book Long Trails of the Southeast, writer and avid hiker Johnny Molloy wrote that the Benton MacKaye Trail "is what I imagine the Appalachian Trail was like many decades ago—a lesser tamed path, steep in places, rough in spots, and still evolving". On June 17, 2011 he was inducted into the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame at the Appalachian Trail Museum as a charter member. References Bibliography Anderson, Larry. 2002. Benton MacKaye: Conservationist, Planner, and Creator of the Appalachian Trail. Johns Hopkins University Press. . Cevasco, G. A. and Richard P Harmond. 2009. Modern American Environmentalists: A Biographical Encyclopedia. Baltimore, MD :