Join us on August 23 for the Baker Trail Cakewalk, a 15-mile hike from the northern trailhead to the Cook Forest fire tower. It takes place at the same time as the Baker Trail UltraChallenge, our 50-mile ultra marathon! See the Cakewalk page for details.

We need stewards to maintain sections of the Rachel Carson Trail! There are a number of vacancies that need to be filled in order to keep the trail cleared and blazed. Please consider adopting a one- or two- mile section and help preserve this great asset.

Contact Mark Eyerman at 412-492-0375.

Split times for the 2008 Rachel Carson Trail Challenge are now available here.

The Rachel Carson Trail Challenge Promotion Committee wants to increase participation in the training hikes, the Homestead Challenge (18 miles) and the Family Challenge (8 miles) this year. We need people who can help us disseminate information about these events to their schools, churches, gyms, sports groups, and any other organization whose members might enjoy vigorous outdoor activity.

We now have a Media section on the web site that has information you can use for this purpose. There are articles that can be copied into newsletters, and one-page posters or flyers.

The Promotion Committee welcomes new members. Call Bob Mulshine at 412-741-0862 if you would like to get involved. We are meeting monthly now with plenty of work to do between meetings.

In addition to spreading the word about the events, the Committee works to get sponsors whose contributions will be used to maintain the trail and make the events better. Please contact us if you know of people or organizations that would consider sponsorship, or if you work for an organization that regularly sponsors outdoor events. We can offer recognition in our collateral, web site, and on our shirts in return for donations. We are also looking into sponsored clinics, such as a shoe clinic or a hydration and nutrition clinic, to do in conjunction with the training hikes. Any suggestions, especially regarding organizations willing to put on a clinic, will be appreciated.

You can email the Promotion Committee at challenge@rachelcarsontrails.org. (Be sure to put <notspam> as the first part of the message subject.)

Our email server receives lots of spam. An overwhelming amount of spam. In some of our mailboxes, the ratio is over 1000:1 (one legitimate message for every thousand spam messages). This situation has been consuming far too much of our volunteer time and resources.

Spam filters don't help us as they simply shunt messages deemed spam to a separate folder. We still have to examine them in case of a false positive (a legitimate message improperly flagged as spam), thus saving little time. Spam blocking software helps, but it too can't reliably detect all spam.

So, we've instituted a change to our server that requires any unsolicited email sent to us to contain the term <notspam> as the first part of the message subject. "Unsolicited" means your email address isn't known to our server. Your email address becomes known two ways: either we send you an email first (mailing list messages count) or you send us a message with <notspam> as the first part of the subject. (The email server will strip this off, so we'll never see it in your subject). Once your email address is known, you can correspond with us as usual.

If you send us an email without the <notspam> indicator and your email address isn't known to our server, you will receive a delivery failure in your Inbox. Simply open up your Sent folder and find the message you sent, click Forward, put <notspam> in the subject (make sure to include the angle brackets), and click Send.

It's unfortunate that we need to shift the onus for the spam problem onto email senders. We ask for your understanding and regret any inconvenience you may experience.