Tweetsie Trail & Quarry
Photo Credit: AllTrails.
Appalachian Paddling Enthusiasts (APEs) partners with Keep Carter County Beautiful (KCCB) to coordinate cleanups at the Tweetsie Trail and Quarry, a 9.6-mile rails-to-trails that follows the former East Tennessee & Western North Carolina Railroad between Johnson City and Elizabethton, TN.
In 2021, the event took the form of an Earth Day service project that generated a great turnout from the local community. APEs had a total of 11 hardy volunteers come out to help with this quarry cleanup effort.
The landscape around the quarry pit is steep with vertical wall cliffs in many spots, and it is overgrown with brush—so it is not an easy site to access with paddlecraft. Some of our volunteers worked on cleaning up the banks around the pond and helped the paddlers take out trash that they collected floating in the pond.
We hauled more than half a pickup truck of trash from in and around the pond to a dumpster that KCCB provided, including a couple trail traffic signs that were returned to the Johnson City Parks & Recreation Department.
APEs volunteer Matt Dalton removes a board at the 2021 Earth Day cleanup at Tweetsie Trail.
Read about local news coverage of the events:
Tweetsie Quarry cleanup.
The 2021 event took place on Earth Day.
Eleven APEs volunteers participated.