FOLEY – Former Gulf State Park Superintendent Hugh S. Branyon passed away on March 6, three days short of his 77^th birthday.

Branyon leaves behind a kind and loving stewardship of Gulf State Park dating back to the 1960s when he worked at the park under Monroe McLeod before assignments at other state parks took him away. He returned to Gulf State Park as the superintendent in 1976, longtime employee Milton Rittelmeyer said.

“I don’t like to use the word ‘great’ that often, but he was a great person and a great man,” Rittelmeyer, who worked at Gulf State Park for 34 years, most of those with Branyon as superintendent, said. “He was a great boss and just a great person. He made you feel good. Every time you talked to him you felt like he lifted you up. He treated everybody fairly.

“It’s a sad day definitely for Gulf State Park and the City of Gulf Shores.”

His legacy is one of the most popular and unique trail systems in the Southeast, the Hugh S. Branyon Backcountry Trail that runs from Alabama 161 in Orange Beach to Alabama 59 in Gulf Shores with several branches intertwined in between. The majority of the system is in Gulf State Park.

Branyon said in 2013 he had worked to be in a position to improve the trails in the park for years, but whenever he managed to find the money, a more urgent need would arise.

“This trail here actually took 20, 25 or 28 years,” Branyon said. “We had several grants and then we’d have a hurricane or a fire to take the money away.”

The first portion of the trail first opened in 2007, thanks to the work of Branyon and Orange Beach’s Coastal Resources Director, Phillip West. With the blessing and help from Branyon, it has blossomed to more than 15 miles of paved walking and biking paths.

“Not too many years ago a young fellow walked into my office and he said ‘I understand you’d like to have a trail through the park,’” Branyon said at the dedication of the Coyote Crossing Trail in November of 2013. “I said yeah, if I can get the money. He said ‘Can I help you work on that?’ And he did.

“If it hadn’t been for Phillip West this thing wouldn’t have happened.”

The respect and the desire for developing the park’s trail was mutual between the two men.

“We made a deal – we’ll go to try to find money for every phase and we’d go to him to ask for his blessing,” West said. “Every phase we tried was built with his blessing. It’s been a great partnership.

“The only way we felt we could thank him for working on it so passionately was to name it after him. It didn’t seem like enough at the time, just naming some trails after such a great advocate, such a great person. They ought to be naming parks after him.”

But the Branyon name has become nationally known as recognition of the trail has spread far and wide.

“When we became the first of its kind to get national recreation trail status and you start seeing it in publications around the country, hopefully that meant a little something to him,” West said. “He told me recently he was proud to have the Branyon name on the trail so I was really glad.”

Although his legacy may be tied to the trail, Rittelmeyer said Branyon’s steady hand-on park operations and knowledge of inner workings of state government are part of his endearing legacy as well.

“He knew every governor from Jim Folsom to Bob Riley,” Rittelmeyer said. “He knew everybody. It was incredible the amount of people he knew. If he didn’t know someone, every person he met he turned into a friend because he was such a positive person.

“Knowing how things worked and getting things done and getting the right people there to get things back in order. His knowledge on everything about state government and the state parks was the biggest plus he had.”

Rittelmeyer also remembered Branyon as a great storyteller, and one of those stories told to West helped name one of the branches of the trail.

“Rattlesnake Ridge was named from a story he told me,” West said. “They thought about doing a trail from the state park to city hall and I think it was Mayor Ellis at the time. They were walking and there in the trail was the biggest diamondback rattlesnake he’d ever seen. That’s where we got the name.”