 A West Liberty native is preparing to walk from Slade to Inez this weekend with the hope of raising both funds and awareness in order to help confront environmental issues facing the residents of our region. Austin Shuck, president of the Appalachian Pioneer Program, sat down to discuss these issues with us as he begins making the final preparations ahead of his weekend long journey. I'll be walking from Slade to Sallesville, Kentucky to Paintsville and then to Inez which is where they have had issues accessing clean water for going on 21 years now. There were around 27,000 citizens that lived there and now there's 11,000. And so what was already a very decimated area economically obviously has had major repercussions if you have essentially half your population leaving in a 20 year base. That's going to be extremely detrimental. And so what was already where Lyndon B. Johnson declared the war on poverty, you could argue now that it's even worse especially in modern times when we have dudes flying by outer space rockets and we don't even have clean water in eastern Kentucky. But as far as for the money we'll be raising, that will be going to Morton County. So what we really like to do with that is to really bring enough awareness where we can get some grants into the area. What I would love to do is to implement water filtration systems into underprivileged people's houses. Just giving people bottled water constantly over and over and over and over is not an answer to our problem. That's actually going to create a pollution issue. If I'm not mistaken, I feel like I've already read quite a few stories about where the water is just so bad there that people will just throw trash into the water. I can't even drink it so what's the matter? And so it's like going to the point to where we obviously don't want that to happen anymore. And we would like to be able to clean this. Here at Pikeville Medical Center's Heart and Vascular Institute, we have assembled a comprehensive team of cardiac specialists bringing expertise from all regions of the nation and the world. We have coupled that with cutting-edge technology, providing them the best equipment and operating rooms available. The result is comprehensive cardiac care for the people of our region that is second to none. The Heart and Vascular Institute at Pikeville Medical Center. While his walk will end and on is in order to draw attention to and raise funds for their water cleanliness issues, the starting point of his journey will also serve as a spotlight for an entirely different issue facing the environment of another area. So this upcoming weekend, I will be walking from Slade, Kentucky. That is actually where the Red River Gorge and the Natural Bridges. And part of the reason that I'm going to start walking there is they're about to be putting in a development in that area that could be potentially very detrimental to the environment and the things that we love so much about that area. And it's not that we don't want development to happen in the region and we don't want people to have new jobs. It's that we're really worried that this is going to be a similar circumstance of what happened with coal or what happens with a lot of the times when people come into our area and essentially strip all the resources. It's good for 20, maybe 100, maybe 200 years, but then they're like, all right, we're out of here now that all that we need is gone and then we're left with the bill to pay. It's really sad to see that we have this beautiful piece of land that is so sacred to us. And it's like one of the last remaining sanctuaries that we really have. Kentucky is one of those really untouched places. For more information on this weekend's event or the Appalachian Pioneer Program, Shuck encourages viewers to visit both the GoFundMe page for the event and to sign the petition against the Red River Gorge Development Project. You are also welcome to message him via social media directly. For Mountain Top News, I'm Joshua Sloan.