AT land aquisition news!

[TJ aka Teej]

From the Trail News section of the A.T.C.'s website

http://www.appalachiantrail.org/trailnews/index.html

Funds Appropriated to Preserve Pochuck Mountain
U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer and Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Rep. Sue Kelly have announced that Congress has included in a just-passed appropriations bill $1.3 million from the Forest Legacy Program to help the Trust for Public Land [www.tpl.org] purchase about 600 acres surrounding the Appalachian Trail on the New York-New Jersey state line. The Pochuck Mountain land is home as well to several streams that flow into the Wallkill River and the Wallkill River National Wildlife Refuge, which the Trail traverses on the New Jersey side.
October 31, 2003

Tennessee Senators Apparently Secure Rocky Fork Funds
The outlook has been bleak all year for Appalachian Trail land-acquisition funding, between record federal deficits and repeated diversions of the money for firefighting, but Tennessee Senators Bill Frist and Lamar Alexander have managed to include in the pending interior appropriations bill the second installment of $3.8 million sought by ATC for the so-called Rocky Fork tract [http://www.appalachiantrail.org/prot.../conserve.html]
on the Tennessee-North Carolina border. The bill awaits final action in both the House and Senate. Last year, the first $4 million was appropriated, and the Forest Service has been negotiating to acquire all 10,000 acres in the tract, hoping for this and a third funding bill in 2005. The Trail crosses 1.2 miles of the 2,649-acre Tennessee section covered by the pending 2004 appropriation and borders it for another two miles.
November 3, 2003

[tribes]

Good to see this.....it is right in my "backyard"