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Photos Courtesy Friends of the Mountains to the Sea Trail
By Erin Smith
A beautiful crisp Saturday morning saw walkers take to the Mountains-to-Sea In a Day event in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the trail’s founding. The North Carolina Mountains-to-Sea Trail does have a section running through Bladen County.
Carl deAndrade, owner of White Lake Marine, helped to organize the walkers for the Bladen County section of the trail known as Segment 13b. The segment runs from Suggs Mill Pond Gameland to Singletary Lake State Park.
“Statewide they hiked the entire trail 1,175 miles and there were 1,600 participants. Here in our section, our section of the trail is 39 miles long and starts at Suggs Mill Pond gameland and ends at Singletary Lake. We had 26 people,” said deAndrade.
According to deAndrade a hike like this one has never been attempted before. He said the Friends of the Mountains-to-Sea Trail decided to mark the 40th anniversary of the trail by having someone to walk each section of the trail on the same day.
deAndrade said he got involved with the Mountains-to-Sea In a Day event because he and his wife, Diane, have been acting as Trail Angels for two or three years.
“Trail Angels are people that help through hikers that are through hiking along distance trail to have accommodations for night, to get a meal for night, have their laundry done, help them go shopping for groceries and all of that. So we’ve been doing that for about two or three years of rate MST and then when they decided to the 40th anniversary MST In a Day, Kate Dixon, the Executive Director of MST in Raleigh, asked me if I would volunteer to be the coordinator in this area,” said deAndrade.
Some of the folks who walked the trail in Bladen County included the deAndrade family, NC Senator Howard Lee who helped to create the trail and UNC-TV’s Tom Earnhardt, business leaders, and families.
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