Appalachian Trail Sign Attracts Photographers

DAMASCUS, Va. – On almost any given day, especially during this town’s upcoming Trail Days festival, you can find somebody snapping a picture at the Appalachian Trail sign in the Damascus Community Park.
Bryan Blevins doesn’t think much of it.
But his parents, Linda and Eugene Blevins, sure do.
They love to brag about how their son, Bryan, built this sign as an Eagle Scout project in 1990.
“I wanted a sign basically that would welcome people into town,” said Bryan Blevins, a 1993 graduate of Holston High School.
But no one in the Blevins family ever thought that this picturesque piece of pressure-treated lumber would turn up on postcards, in books and even be made into a refrigerator magnet.
“Somebody told me one time that it’s one of the most photographed things on the trail,” Bryan Blevins said.
Bryan’s wife, for one, the former Amanda Odum of Abingdon, also posed by the wooden arch for her bridal portraits.
On the Internet, too, you can find all kinds of hikers posing here, marking their journey through Virginia, said Bryan Blevins, an assistant communications supervisor at the Washington County Sheriff’s Office Dispatch.
Blevins, a U.S. Navy veteran, is only casually familiar with the Appalachian Trail, saying he has hiked just parts of the famous footpath on “short little trips” around Damascus and Johnson County, Tenn.
Even so, thousands know about his contribution to the AT.
“The sign is more famous than I am,” Bryan Blevins said, laughing. “And, that’s the way I want to keep it.”

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