Mark Stanfill

On Friday, 44 college students and 10 volunteers moved a mountain — sort of.

One rock at time, the line of youthful trail builders turned one strip after another along the steep slopes of the Cumberland Plateau above Sale Creek into a smooth walk through the woods.

These and other students, about 310 in all from 13 colleges and universities, are spending parts of five weeks building new segments of the Cumberland Trail through Hamilton County.

The trail, eventually expected to stretch 300 miles from Signal Mountain to the Cumberland Gap on the Tennessee, Virginia and Kentucky border, is rewarding, they said. But it’s not for sissies.

“The worst part is finding out that what you thought was rocks are actually pebbles, and then you find actual rocks and they’re huge. And you have to move them,” said Kristina Bennett, a sophomore and biology major from Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Ill.

Her dry-pan remark brought a chuckle from her fellow workers as she took a rest after lunch on the leaf litter of the forest floor with her head on a friend’s knee.

“I’m so comfortable here. I could stay here all day, as long as nothing is crawling on me,” she said, prompting more laughter just before a trail manager urged the young people back to their tasks of raking leaf litter, prying surface rocks from decades of cover on the rocky ground and packing down the dirt to make a level walking trail.

Cumberland Trail Conference General Manager Tony Hook said this crew, part of the 12th annual Cumberland Trail Breakaway, built more than 2,000 feet of trail in just over two days.

“Now we’ve hit this rocky area, and we’ve had to slow down,” he said.

Breakaway 2009 is part of a national alternative spring break program for college students to help give back to communities across the country. Depending on the policies of their schools, some students get college credit, some get community service credits and some just get a pat on the back and the feeling of a job well done for their week’s work.

The Cumberland Trail is the star of Tennessee’s newest state park, but the state doesn’t build the trails. That’s left up to the nonprofit Cumberland Trail Conference, and the spring break effort is always the group’s largest single trail-building effort, Mr. Hook said.

Kari Grace, working the project with her twin, Emmy Grace, both sophomores at Illinois Wesleyan, said seeing the difference made by their day’s work each evening as they walk out of the woods toward camp makes the effort worthwhile.

“The best part is getting to see the fruition of your labor and know that our kids can come and walk on this someday,” she said.

On the Cumberland Trail, the first group of students arrived Feb. 22, and the last will leave on March 28, Mr. Hook said. This week’s students were from Illinois Wesleyan, Hamilton College in New York, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, the University of South Florida and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

To date, about 170 miles of the eventual 300-mile trail is open and maintained for hiking, Mr. Hook said.

“We’ve got about 130 miles left to build,” he said.

Some of that — about 90 miles — still must be acquired by the state.

“The land owners are willing to work with the state, but it’s a process that sometimes takes a long time,” he said.

In recent years, the trail has been the center of controversy thanks to rock miners and lawsuits. In 2007, hikers discovered about 75 to 100 yards of the trail — built by volunteers in other years — had been ripped up by rock miners digging the mountain stone for construction uses. The state does not own the mineral rights to much of the park, and a lawsuit over rock mining there still is pending.

To build a trail from a woodland floor, workers must design, flag and lay out the trail. Then they must clear off the duff: the leaves and organic mat on the ground. After they’ve reached the mineral or clay part of the soil, they cut away stray roots that would send up shoots, move rocks and sometimes build rock steps or walls intended to protect the trail from washouts.

For Kristen Shalosky, of Miami, a student at the University of South Florida, this year marks her second stint of volunteering on the trail.

“I fell in love with the work,” she said. “I like the physical labor part of it and being up in the mountains. And I actually thought it was a really cool project.”

Shan Shan Zhao of China and Illinois Wesleyan, has only been in America for seven months. She joined the program after telling her advisers she’d like to do something about the environment.

“It turns out I like it so much. I imagined we’d be cleaning up the road or something, but actually we’re making trails,” she said. “It’s terrific. We’re building trails from nowhere. And now it’s a pretty trail in front of us. It’s so satisfactory.”