Tuscarora Trail
The Tuscarora Trail is a hiking trail in the eastern United States, following the Appalachian Mountains through portions of Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania. Its route is roughly parallel to, and to the west of, the Appalachian Trail. History The Tuscarora Trail was originally conceived as an alternate route for the Appalachian Trail, which had been built in the 1920s-30s. By the 1960s, and before it was protected as a National Scenic Trail, a number of segments of the Appalachian Trail were being encroached upon and sometimes closed by private and commercial landowners. To ensure the trail's continuity, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy began to consider alternate routes that could be used to bypass those threatened segments of the AT, with the goal of avoiding high-demand areas and maximizing public land usage. The alternate route was originally built in the late 1960s as two separate trails: the 142-mile Big Blue Trail in Virginia and West Virginia, and the 110-mile Tuscarora Trail in Maryland and Pennsylvania, which were separated by an unofficial crossing of the Potomac River. By 1997, a crossing of the river via a road bridge had been approved, and the two trails were combined to form a continuous