Outdoors Maryland; 1004

so Coming up, Dominations at stake in an exercise of man versus nature and man versus man. Improving state parks from the ground up and walking the Potomac River Gorge in search of the rare and beautiful next. Outdoors Maryland is produced in cooperation with the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, DNR, inspired by nature.

A few short miles from the fast-paced traffic of Interstate 95 sits in a oasis that's worlds apart, Susquahana State Park. Located at the junction of Pennsylvania, Delaware and Maryland near Havre to Grace, its gentle streams and abundant woodlands spread

over 3,000 acres. It's the perfect venue for kicking off the first of what organizers hope will be an annual event, the Dominator Adventure Race. Adventure Race is kind of like a triathlon combined with Battle of the Network Superstars. Our particular Adventure Race is mountain biking, canoeing, running and orienteering. Adventure racing is extreme sports. It's challenging your mind and your body. Sean Chalk is executive director of the CAM Corporation. CAM worked with Maryland's Department of Natural Resources on this event. The Department of Natural Resources actually approached CAM about 14 months ago and said they were kicking off State Parks 2000 and wanted a premier event to really highlight alternative uses for State Parks and they asked us to do an Adventure Race. The DNR cut trails cleared paths and put on an outdoor expo the day before the race. Perhaps

their most interesting contribution though are the three Rangers competing under the moniker Team Ranger. Wayne and I both have done a triathlon before a tucko. We've canoeing, biking and running. Not quite as hard as this one's going to be we've done before. Chuck Hacker, John Oler and Wayne Sudan are looking forward to the day's challenge. Like we're at right here, it's a parking lot. Anticipation builds as event director Tammy Kawaki counts down the final seconds. As the starting horn sounds, team members open their race packets to reveal their first task. A three-legged race for 20 yards before sprinting to start the biking leg of their adventure. Throughout the race there are these things called special tests which are these secret mental and physical challenges that we throw into the event basically to make the teams work together. It's really more a matter of how physically and mentally prepared you are. And I say mentally prepared because you have to be able to work as a team as well.

That's teams of three. So you have to be able to strategize as a team. As Team Ranger enters the course, everything seems to be going as planned. It's actually a Cloverleaf pattern. They go out on the mountain bike to come back to the transition area. They go out on the marine tearing. They come back to the transition area. They go out on the run. They come back to the transition area and then they go out on the canoe and come back. It's actually the fastest growing competitive sport in the country. High tech, Red Guwah, Beast of the East. It's modeled after things like the Echo Challenge. The first leg seems fast and furious as the energized racers pass the first checkpoint. Up to this point, Team Ranger rides near the first third of the pack. But the course has been pretty much the bikers friends so far with lots of straight track and downhill areas. The real challenge is yet to come.

You have to be in pretty good shape. You have to be very physically fit because you're coming up against some serious, serious physical challenges. The mountain biking is seven and a half miles, but it's not just seven and a half miles of mountain biking. They're highly technical trails. So you really need to know what you're doing out there. It's not for the novice sportsmen, but this is a sprint race. So you don't have to be the pro competitor either. A sprint race is something that qualifies you for something like the high tech or the Echo Challenge. I hope there will be no injuries. I mean, we are hoping there will be no injuries. But the reality is this is extreme sports and people are going to have scrapes, bruises. They're expecting that. We're hoping no one will be so extreme that they end up breaking some form. That's not what we want. We want people to be competitive, but safe. Team Ranger has not been so fortunate. In the process of navigating the course, Wayne

has suffered not one, but two spills over his handlebars. Fortunately, while this has slowed them a bit, the team has no plans of dropping out of the competition. Reentering the transition area, they prepare to take their first mental challenge, the Skittles test. As they come through the transition areas and as they come to different checkpoints, they are going to have special challenges. They are mind challenges and body challenges. Here, a blindfolded member of the team must arrange Skittles in a particular order, guided only by the instructions of his teammates. Meanwhile, other teams have turned their attention to the next challenge, orienteering. There are people who think that they're going to blow through this in an hour and a half to two hours because of the short route. But the truth is it's going to take at least two hours if not two and a half to three hours for the fastest team because of the orienteering, because of the special tests. They're not going

to blow through them. They're not that easy. We want them to be challenged. As they start the run, team ranger shows no signs of letting up. Most people are the general athlete. We have some people who are here looking to really win this race and take it like the best of them. We have other people who are here just to have fun and to try something new and to compete and see if they can finish. The sprint adventure races, which is what this is considered to be like a three to six hour race, has kind of just blossomed in the past couple of years. I think that the initial adventure race of all eventually is actually the eco challenge. Not everyone can compete in the eco challenge, but physically fit people who are looking for our challenge can compete in the Dominator adventure race. At the canoes, there seems to be some confusion on the part of the leading team.

What's next? What's next? What's up? What are you going to do here? Well, how about paddle? I think for about a mile and a half and hopefully I have a short run back to the finish line. At this point, team ranger is back up to the top quarter of the competitors in their class. The final mine challenge is undertaken while the team has paddled the mile and a half canoe leg. It involves the leave no trace concept. They have to study the night before. They're given information at the pre-race meeting and they have to study and they have to answer the quiz questions right. If they don't, they're going to end up having to carry two eggs with them as they line up the mother mountain. Team ranger lies through the canoe leg, aces its quiz and roars through the barrel obstacle and then they hit the wall. The final challenges involve substantial physical exertion

and with Wayne's injury. They have to pull together to make it over the finish line. The wall was a real challenge with Wayne's are a risk. Sorry, think about that when we start the run. We couldn't get over it. They had to get me over the wall, so I'm sure John's shoulders are going to hurt tomorrow. Oh, it's what I thought was going to be a real challenging especially physically. I wouldn't expect it. Well, we communicate all the way through, I think. It was a real team effort. Some of us are Wayne's a better runner. He kept us going there. He was our chair on right there in the canoe. Yeah, absolutely. We've run races before just running races and we used to stick it together. That went to problem. We've worked together for years, so it helps out. No, we never, I mean, it was always, let's get it done. Look at this guy. Oh, three out of them. Look at it. My god, they made free to wreck a

fish line. Put it out. He coming guys is one, four and a half of them. 33. Team Ranger. Team Ranger. Overall, event organizers consider the denominator a success and hope to return again next year. We really got a good turnout. We're very, very pleased. There was an adventure race up in Rocky Gap and they had 38 teams. We're getting around that. We'll be good, but we really wanted at least 70 because that makes 210 competitors. It's a really nice crowd. Then we are really pleased. As an inaugural event, we hope that that means that next year there will be a hundred and forty teams, which would be really great. Two teams all the way on deck of air. There's a rainbow right there. Like many other fishermen, Sean Jensen's application serves as both therapy and sport.

I'm from Bethesda and I work in downtown Washington as an attorney. I do personnel matters. What most of my work is and because of that, I have a lot of human resource problems and management problems that I work on. That's why I enjoy coming out here so much. It's a beautiful environment, but also because it has this river, this stream in it, which is fly fishing only and catch a release and that's the type of fishing that I prefer. This gem of a mountain stream runs through Cunningham Falls State Park less than an hour from the Baltimore and Washington Beltways. What is unique about this stream? It's accessible. It's very accessible. You don't have to hike in or back back into it. You can drive and walk from your vehicle.

It's important to protect environmental resources for their own sake, but these precious natural resources also offer real benefits to real people. For thousands of visitors to Maryland's 54 state parks and forests, an initiative called the Parks Improvement Program, PIP for short, promises to make the parks a little more usable. The Parks Improvement Program is a multi-year effort, three years, $3 million a year, aimed at improving the state parks infrastructure. The places that give people access, public access, trails, and all the different things that are in the state parks. Rick Burton is superintendent of state parks for Maryland. Many of them are small improvements, minor things that people may not immediately notice. Many others are very apparent and much needed. Cunningham Falls is getting about $440,000 worth of projects over the next three years. In some of those projects, in particular this year includes some new beach sand in the William House area.

Cindy Ecker is the manager of Cunningham Falls State Park. We're standing five shower buildings and nine mini cabins. We're also going to get a new playground open to William House area, which we've never had before. The boardwalk that we're walking on right now is funded through this program. Over on the other section, they're making a new parking lot for those folks that are mobility impaired. The boardwalk will lead to another observation deck that will also then have a grand view of the waterfalls. Ease of use is essential for park visitors, Howard Weinberg and Jamie Darrick. We came here because our kids really like the outdoors. This is pretty close and it's a really nice family oriented park with a lot of stuff to do. It's like canoeing, it's got showers, not with conveniences. We're both old backpackers, but when you have children, you need more conveniences. It's close and the kids are aged or with their kids are four and five.

You can't keep in the car too long, so it's real nice to be able to come up here without having to melt down in the car. For Steven Bernstein, the park offers something for the whole family. That's a beautiful day and we like the mountains. We like hiking. It reminds me of the mountain areas where I'm originally from. The waterfall is always nice because as you know, children love water. So you have to lure them out because they want to play at home. And if you tell them we go for a waterfall, that's what they like. They like to play and flash. Further east along Interstate 70, Patapsco Valley State Park is just minutes from the Baltimore Beltway. Chris Bushman manages the McKelton area at Patapsco. One of the improvements here at Patapsco Valley State Park as part of the Park Improvement Program is trail upgrades. And also signs like this one here to inform people about the trails so they don't get lost when they're using the trails and also so they know who is allowed to use the particular trail. Also here at Patapsco, we're doing some paving upgrades to some of our roads and we're purchasing some new picnic tables, grills and campground fire rings.

Patapsco's 34 miles of multi-use trails are among its most popular facilities. Patapsco's always had the best trails compared to other places. And it's hard to find good trails around anyway as it is that we'll let bikers on the trails. At least the athlete at Patapsco is just beautiful. When you come around some of these trails and you're looking at rivers, at least for me it's just really amazing. Just to get out here so close to home but yet feel like you're in the middle of nowhere almost. Well, several of us seems to get along back here pretty well. I mean, you've got horseback riders, you have bikers, you have people hiking, fishing. Everyone seems to get along kind of everyone respects each other. We are from Mount Arie and we're camping out at the League of Maryland Horsemen. We came out this morning about 9.30 and we're on a four hour trip and we're about a half an hour from being back. It's a great park. There's a ton of trails. We get lost sometimes in discover new trails that we've never been on before.

And it's convenient to the campground. We can't there probably least two or three times a month. So we're constantly using these trails. They're great, really nice. Earl Sykes is an avid hiker who's been through these woods many times. I like to hike all the parks along the Patapsco River. The day I came up here in the morning, we got really hot to take this five mile switchback trail in the Kilden Park. What I like about the Patapsco Valley Park is the combination of the wildlife along the river and the historic aspects of the area. I'm across many old ruins and things in the woods, I suppose from the logging days in this area. You always find something new to just keep your eyes and ears open. You always keep coming back. And Rick Burton wants Earl Sykes and many others to keep coming back. The importance of taking care of State Parks, especially with this great program, the Park Improvement Program,

is it enables the people who come here to gain better access, to have a better time, to enjoy it, to learn more about the outdoors, to learn more about the cultural and historic resources we have here. Pip does things like improving access, certainly, but also improving some signage. And other things will help people actually gain and enjoy and appreciate these places that really belong to them more than they ever had before. The Potomac River winds a rich course through America's history. Its natural evolution is as turbulent as humanities, a drama of raging floods, climate change, the rise and fall of species. The C&O Canal National Historical Park protects this heritage in nearly 185 miles and 20,000 acres of natural buffer, following the course of the Potomac River from Cumberland to Washington, D.C.

The botanical history is written in a language of subtlety and beauty, the blossom of a flower, or its silent and sad decline. In all, the C&O Canal protects 1200 species of native plants, more than 150 are state-listed as rare threatened or endangered. Some are globally rare. Richard H. Wigan has studied the rare plants of the C&O Canal for more than 20 years. He's a Western region ecologist with the Wildlife and Heritage Division of the Maryland Department of Natural Resources. We have a lot of rare species along the Potomac River. More so in the Potomac Gorge where we have more rare species, state rare species, than any other area of equivalent size in the state of Maryland. It's one of the best rare species sites probably in the Mid-Atlantic region, maybe even east of the Mississippi River. What's different in the Gorge is that you have a multitude of different, slightly different habitats side by side in a small area.

That's why we have so much diversity in the Gorge is because of the diversity of habitats allows a lot of different species that normally wouldn't live closely associated. It allows them to live here because of the diverse habitats that we have. With Dick Wigan on this cool spring day late in April is Diane Ingram, Natural Resources Specialist with the C&O Canal National Historical Park. Part of the National Park Service, it's working in partnership with the DNR to survey the lower C&O Canal for rare, threatened, and endangered plant species. It's a little bit more up and so we might find some along the edge there. The focus of the survey is to document rare plant species in the C&O Canal so that we can better preserve them. We know where they are, we can protect them better, and it also gives us insight in the biodiversity of the park as a whole, preserving all species, the rare ones, and the common ones is important.

Completing the trio of treasure seekers is Nancy Schultz, DNR field assistant for the survey. It's a daunting immersion into the lore of rare plants. Chant like Latin names. Okay, and what's the other name for at the Botanica? The climbing milkweed at Natalia Hopleyqua. Natalia Hopleyqua. Uncommon habitats. It's called scoured bedrock habitat. And detection of threats to rare species survival. Working their way toward the river, the team sets off in the wooded uplands of the gorge, ravaged by floodwaters, perhaps only once a century. Nancy's co-vils facility. This is a state endangered plant that occurs along the Potomac Gorge and a few other places in Maryland, and across the river in Virginia, a few other places in the world. There's a similar plant to it that's more of a Midwestern species.

We don't know why it occurs here and not other places. We need research to be done on lots of these plants to find out their life histories so that we can better manage these populations. You notice that this plant, this co-vils facility here, has been cropped off by the deer. And because of that, the amount of seed that this plant reproduces will be greatly reduced. And if you take that over the entire population area, you can have a reduction of 50, 80, 90 percent in seed production from year to year. This is an annual plant which means it produces seed which then grows a whole new plant next year. It doesn't overwinter. So when you take seeds away from this plant, you're reducing the amount of rare species. The researchers begin a gradual descent toward the river. After all of these years, Dick Wigan has given names to the unnamed nooks and crannies of this place. There's paw-paw bench, treasure trove ravine, frying pan pond.

Dick, what's this flower? The five pink petals in a large plant this time of year. It's almost always going to be wild geranium. One of our show year wild flowers down here, it's common. It's not a rare species, but it's a real beauty. A lot of people come down here to see it. Hey, Diane, look here. This is a beautiful plant that we have in the park. Common seed them. Seed them, turn at them. It's common, but to find it in such a lush bloom is really unusual. Gorgeous. A lot of people think that we're out here. All we're doing is looking for rare threatened endangered plants. I think our real mission here is to protect the land so that we protect native biodiversity, not just the rare species. This is Erebus Patens, a member of the Mustard family. It's an uncommon species in Maryland.

It's not listed as threatened or endangered, but you don't find it very many places in Maryland. Notice these shells, even though we're on the uplands here, this soil is actually partially alluvial. It's a mixture of sand and silt that was deposited by flooding and a mixture of that and upland loems makes a real rich mixture. One of the major reasons why we have so many rare species in this habitat is because of the flooding of the river, creating different habitats at different levels of flooding. We have here in front of us, and this is called Terrace Bedrock Habitat, where the river floods and scours the soil away takes a lot of plants with it. And then re-deposit some of the soil in the nooks and crannies of the rocks. A lot of the rare species that we have here in the gorge occur in this habitat, and it's a very rare habitat type. Maybe not known from anywhere else in the world. It may only be here. A month later, their island is transformed, botanically speaking, with a new progression of plants unveiling their blossoms.

One of the great things about this site is that we can come out here from the very first week in March, until some years until early December, and find rare species still either in flower or fruit. And there's no other site in Maryland that I know of where you can do that. Now, this is the Scutillaria Saxatellis, the Hartley Skull Cat. And it's only known from three sites in Maryland. This by far is our larger site. We have thousands of plants here in the gorge. There's another site up along the Potomac River. And it's officially listed in Maryland as an endangered species. These plants elongate while they're flowering, so the lower flowers will fall off and form these seed pods that you see here. And then the plant will continue to elongate and produce more flowers as it grows and grows. And it'll actually flower over a six or eight-week period and produce a lot of seed that way.

And this is a melica mutica. This is in seed right now. There's still a flower or two left, but it's mostly producing seed. It's a state threatened species, and the common name is an era of melic grass. It occurs at about 20 sites in the state of Maryland. Oh, look here. This is a state endangered shrub, or a state threatened shrub, I'm not sure which. This is Dirk Apolustris Leatherwood. You can see this has a lot of deer brows on it. Look at the birds nest here, too. This is the flower of the state endangered climbing milkweed. This is only known from about 10 sites in Maryland. This right here we're finding them today is probably more plants than I've ever seen in Maryland. About 10 or 15 plants over here.

So this is a real nice find. Is there any threats to this particular plant? Well, we have invasive non-native species, such as this tree of heaven here. And they outcompete our native species for space and light nutrients and so forth. Those entrusted with preserving our natural treasures feel the urgency of protecting places like the Potomac Gorge and C&O Canal before it's too late. It's incredible to consider that an area like this that is so scenic and with so many rare species and so natural can exist. Where we're standing now we're only about 15 miles from the White House. It's incredible that it has survived for this long. If we don't take care of it and worry about the natural aspects of this site, we're probably going to lose it over the long term too much use. Too many deer, too many invasive species. Drop into our website at www.mpt.org to send us your comments and suggestions.

Thank you.