A Model For Paumanok

With an eye toward what could be done on the proposed Paumanok Path, which one day may stretch with few interruptions from Miller Place to Montauk, two East Hampton Trail Preservation Society members, Lee Dion and Ilmar Ratsep, recently hiked the 184-mile length of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, now a national park, which in the mid-1830s ran a losing race with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad toward the Ohio Valley.

The two East Hamptoners trekked along the long-defunct canal's towpath, where mules at one time drew barges of coal bound from Washington, D.C., to points west. One of those points was Harpers Ferry, Va., which lies at the confluence of the Potomac River, along whose north side the canal ran, and the Shenandoah.

"It was a magnificent feat of engineering," Mr. Dion said of the canal on his return. "It's an 800-foot descent from Cumberland [the canal's western terminus, in Maryland] to Washington. There are 75 locks. The lock keepers' houses are still there. The towpath is like a country road. Then, too, you walk over aqueducts, and through [the 3,118-foot-long] Paw Paw Tunnel. When you realize that everything was practically hand-dug, and that it was before electricity, it's pretty amazing."

Pyrrhic Victory

"Most rivers flow north-south," he added, "but the Potomac flows east-west. It gave access to the Ohio Valley and the West."

Near Harpers Ferry, once the site of an armory authorized by President Washington that attracted the interest of John Brown and his abolitionist raiders, and of the Union and Confederate armies, Mr. Dion and Mr. Ratsep visited the Antietam battlefield, where 23,000 died or were wounded in the Civil War, a Pyrrhic victory that stopped Gen. Robert E. Lee's invasion of Maryland and Pennsylvania.

The East Hamptoners averaged about 18 miles a day, often camping in hiker-biker campgrounds provided by the National Park Service, though flood runoff that resulted in wells being disconnected sometimes prompted them to get off the route.

Not Continuous

"We'd like to see similar hiker-biker hostels along the Paumanok Path," said Mr. Dion.

The 100-plus-mile Paumanok trail, he noted, "is not uninterrupted, like the canal. It's about 95 percent complete in the Town of East Hampton. You can walk all the way, with only minor detours, from the East Hampton-Southampton Town border to Montauk Point. In Southampton Town there are big gaps, though we intend to close them in time."

"There's still a lot of work to be done, but we're gaining on it all the time," Mr. Dion added.