TRAILS TRACKS INTERVIEW
Brothers of the brush hook An interview with Charlie Dundas
By Mike Passo
“The thing that excites me is when I go out and I see people using our trails and I see families on the trails, you know? It pleases me and excites me that I’m beginning to, once again, see moms and dads and kids on trails, not just the mountain bikers.”
—Charlie Dundas 36
forest dweller, with a booming voice and a huge white beard. quite professorial. His stories are fabu- lous and endless, and you always know exactly where he stands. And he has been building some of the best trails in the world for over 60 years. I decided to interview Charlie as a means of helping young, up-and-com- ing members of the trails community to understand the history of trail building through the eyes of one of the best and most experienced trail builders alive. If you are interested in becoming a trail builder and making a life around trail building, you could do much worse than spending some time in the shad- ow of this trail guru. Take his class. Work for his company. Your time will be very well spent. Charlie is from Huntington, West
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Virginia, and has spent his entire life based in the deep woods and steep hol- lers where he plies his trade. He owns a trail construction company called Tri- State Company, and has been constant- ly in business for over 30 years. Over that time, his business has expanded to many other states in the Mid-Atlantic and Southeastern U.S.
My discussion with Charlie was long and wide-ranging, and I did my best to distill some of his great stories and wise messages below.
How did you get started in trail building?
Charlie started his trail building
career at the tender age of 14 with his local Boy Scout troop. “When I started building trails, it was kind of the result of there being no trails in my area. The troop would need to drive 200 miles to
SPRING 2018
AmericanTrails.org
harlie Dundas has been my friend and colleague for many years. He is a larger than life
just kinda thought it would be good if we could build our own trails,” says Dundas.
Charlie and his fellow boy scouts found some old 1913 topo maps that showed the roads and tracks that criss- crossed the woods of his area and start- ed piecing them together for their use. would eventually become the Kanawha Trace Trail, which just celebrated 55 years of continuous use. The Kanawha Trace is a 32-mile trail leading to the beautiful Kanawha River, and except for a few sections that follow roads, it is entirely on pri- vate land. Charlie says “I believe this is the only trail of its kind in the country, as far as I know. It is incredibly unique, and requires a lot of maintaining rela- tionships with each landowner on this trail.” Troop 42 out of Huntington, WV still maintains this amazing trail. Charlie and his fellow scouts would hike the beginnings of the Kanawha Trace by bushwhacking the old roads, sleeping in barns and out- buildings, and making relationships with each of the land owners they met. building equipment— a bunch of brush hooks— to keep the trace free of brush. This lead to their self-imposed moniker “Brothers of the Brush Hook.” But everyone else called them the “Dirty Shirt Gang.”
What was trail building like when you started?
There are very few other trail builders in this world that can boast almost 60 years of experience. When he started, his slate of tools looked an barn shed of any 1950s era farm. “Starting out, we used what are called brush hooks and idiot sticks. These were blades on sticks that cut weeds.
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