Cheaha Mountain State Park, Ala. —- The rumble of the front-end loader died away, the 10,000-pound boulder finally in its place.

From the rocky overlook, the land fell away to the wooded valley that stretched out west 2,000 feet below. The shadowy humps of mountains to the north and south touched the low clouds.

Snaking into the woods was the Pinhoti Trail, a footpath that early this month was finally connected to the Appalachian Trail and now can take a hiker up the spine of the mountains from Alabama 2,504 miles to Mount Katahdin in Maine.

Tom Cosby, a hiker and marketing director of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce, watched the boulder being placed in its spot, marking the Pinhoti Trail's highest point in Alabama.

It was the culmination of more than two decades of work and the fulfillment of a vision first articulated in 1925.

"This puts Alabama on the map as a mountain-hiking destination," Cosby said.

The Pinhoti also stretches south and eventually will be completed to Flagg Mountain in Coosa County, the southernmost mountain of the Appalachian system. Backers hope eventually to make the case for getting the Alabama extension recognized as the official southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail, which would require an act of Congress.

From Cheaha, Alabama's highest mountain, it's 334 miles up through the remote regions of the Talladega National Forest and through the Chattahoochee National Forest in northwest Georgia to the beginning of the Appalachian Trail at Springer Mountain.

Currently, the trail takes about six months to hike. Adding the Pinhoti connection would extend that hike by about a month.

"For those hardy souls who want to hike the length of the Appalachians, you really ought to start in Alabama," Cosby said.

An Alabama extension was envisioned even when the Appalachian Trail was only an idea.

At the founding meeting of the Appalachian Trail Conference, the father of the trail, Benton MacKaye, laid out a vision for a trail that would run 1,700 miles from Georgia to New Hampshire, "with extensions proposed to Katahdin in Maine, in the north, and, in the south, to Lookout Mountain in Tennessee and then to Birmingham, Alabama."

A senator from Maine had the trail extended into that state in the 1930s.

Not until the early 1980s did the real work of making the Alabama connection begin.

That's when Mike Leonard, then a Birmingham lawyer, started looking at a map and dreaming.

"When I was a teenager and in college," the North Carolina native said, "I spent a lot of time hiking on the Appalachian Trail. When I got to Birmingham, I was looking at a map and I thought, 'Gee, it would be interesting to link the Pinhoti Trail to the Appalachian Trail.'"

He got involved in the effort to have the national forest land around Cheaha protected as a wilderness area.

When that work was completed in 1983, he started trying to put the route together on paper, determining the possible paths and landowners.

In 1986, Leonard returned to North Carolina but stayed active in the effort to connect the trails, lobbying Congress and working with Georgia groups and Alabama's land conversation fund, Forever Wild, for money to support land purchases. Leonard estimated that the project, with the help of Forever Wild, the Georgia Conservation Fund and the National Forest Service, has led to the acquisition of about 7,000 acres in Alabama and 400 in Georgia.

"I've spent more time hiking around Capitol Hill and Goat Hill [site of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery] talking to people about the Pinhoti Trail than I ever did hiking it," Leonard said. "I'm hoping to solve that problem. I'm 55. I'm in pretty good shape. I've got some hiking left in me."