Trails
Hiking
Join ALDHA-West!
Mail Bag
Mail Bag is a response forum.
We encourage everyone to share their experiences, expertise and opinions on topics posted here. Check out this season's question: What is your most effective technique for coping with hiking in the heat?
To submit send to Webmaster
We encourage you to send us some of your images from the trails. We would really like to have a collection that could eventually lead to a photo of the day. To submit send to Webmaster
Designing Trails - A Look At Building Experiences
by Mike Dawson
How do you design a long distance trail for inclusion in the National Trails System? Well, let me first address the general process, and then give my opinion on that process as it relates to the Pacific Northwest Trail and the AT, two projects with which I have a good bit of experience.
People design "recreational" trails and spend lifetimes maintaining, building and rebuilding them for one main reason: there is an experience that they want others to be able to access. Many of the trails that we now use were built with other purposes in mind, such as transportation, access to minerals, or forest protection through paths to fire towers and for fire fighting. The advent of motorized vehicles and aircraft has made some of these motivations obsolete in the minds of many. As these reasons for building and maintaining trails have dimmed, many of those trails have been abandoned and lost because they weren't also compelling recreation trails. The trail system in Washington State has shrunk significantly in the last 50 years because trails were literally obliterated by roads, and remaining trail sections became isolated and useless. Shrinking budgets have caused agencies to simply abandon less used trails, and they have slowly become unusable.
Every long distance trail plan has a set of guidelines for locating segments. Most of the agencies and organizations that work with the trails have adopted some guidelines formally or informally. Trails that share the concept of the national scenic trails by designation or aspiration usually share a set of criteria that comes basically from those adopted for the Appalachian Trail. The AT found itself in crisis in the 1960s when sections of the informal trail were forced onto public roads and less-desirable locations in response to the boom in development and the sprawl of residential building. In response, the National Trails System Act was passed in 1968 and was further bolstered by amendments in 1978. For the AT, this meant a major effort by the ATC, the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service to develop guidelines for determining the best place to put the trail and how best to protect the trail experience in that location. An existing tradition in the volunteer community, coupled with a growing body of research, told planners that the AT's popularity was fueled by the ability of hikers to immerse themselves in a primarily natural setting. As such, the location of the trail away from motorized travel routes became a driving force. This was reinforced in the early to mid 1980s when a major crime on the AT lead to a major effort to analyze the factors that put hikers at risk. The answer was keeping hikers away from remote locations that were easily accessed by seldom-used roads.
Another clear factor in locating the AT was the effort to capture real gems of natural beauty as a part of the trail experience. From stunning vistas giving hikers the feeling of detachment from the human dominated world, to water features such as placid lakes and raging waterfalls, to exemplary forest ecosystems, there was an earnest effort to seek out and gather those experiences along the trail. Many wilderness areas in the Appalachians have received congressional designation in an effort to protect the most extended remote experiences along the AT.
The location of the AT and the other national scenic trails are also an influence in protection of the ecosystems that are such an important element of the trail experience. Certainly the hiking community has a long-standing and rich history of supporting the protection of the ecosystems along our trails. Indeed many of the real ecological gems along the AT would have no protection but for the fact that they existed along the trail for decades. Many important natural heritage resources were brought into federal or state ownership when they were purchased to protect the trail experience.
Another factor is the ownership of lands along the trail route. The design of the AT and PNT have been heavily influenced by the public land that already existed, and by the willingness of private landowners to sell or grant public access to their lands. Efforts were particularly made over a span of years to find locations through agricultural lands that would support rather than weaken existing land use. Some of these location compromises result in routes that mystify hikers, and it is hard to convey the trade-offs that were made due to factors that hikers never see. What seems like an arbitrary deviation from the obvious route fails to show hikers the subdivision, sewage lagoon or ecologically fragile site that they have been carefully led around. If the hiker never saw it, then the routing was successful.
With a relatively young trail like the PNT, compromises have been made to get the trail open and usable while ongoing efforts are being made to improve the trail experience. These planned improvements often require years to negotiate and build, so solving the problems is often a process that can only be judged through decades. In the 20 years that I worked for ATC, the progress was maddeningly slow at times, but with hindsight, the improvement in that trail over just 20 years were remarkable. Hundreds of miles of trail were moved from paved public and forest roads to more remote and protected locations. The quality of the average day on the AT improved remarkably. In less than 2 years with the PNTA we have made plans for major changes in the trail route in Olympic National Forest and National Park. We have already routed around an eight-mile road walk in the heart of the park, and have extended the trail mileage through the Buckhorn Wilderness by a factor of two. Within the grasp of PNTA and the Hood Canal District (USFS) is a new route for the trail that would replace dozens of miles on motorized Forest Service roads with a non-motorized route with beautiful vistas from the Olympics, to Puget Sound, to Vancouver Island and the San Juan Islands in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It will take years to do the necessary work to make that route a reality.
Another example is in the PNT route from Oroville, Washington to the Pasayten Wilderness in Okanogan National Forest. Recent improvements in the location of the PNT will soon mean about 165 miles of trail without a motorized road crossing, but to get there on the east side from Oroville there was a grinding 27 mile walk on paved public roads and Washington DNR motorized access roads. Working with volunteers in the new Oroville Pacific Northwest Trail Club, and with agency partners in Okanogan County, local ranchers, the U.S Forest Service, BLM and Washington DNR, we can now see the light at the end of the tunnel to replace 26 of the 27 miles of roadwalking with non-motorized trails and a beautiful rail to trail conversion along the Similkameen River. In fact, hikers will actually see that light as they hike through an historic 1900-foot rail tunnel on the route. The horizon for completing this project is probably 4-6 years.
So what drives people to devote an important part of their lives to make these trails the best that they can be? That's easy to explain to ALDHA-West members! The same life changing experiences that drive you to hike these trails, drive professionals and volunteers in the trail community to make those experiences available to the public. It's hard to believe, but over 75 years ago Benton MacKaye was driven to propose the AT for the same reasons that guide the development of long distance trails today. Even then MacKaye could see the need for us to get out into nature and travel in the backcountry to relieve and heal the woes of a modern industrialized world. He proposed a trail that in those days was thought for practical purposes to be endless. He wrote at length about building roads on the lower ground, leaving the ridgetops to hikers, and the need to recover a more human pace of life as compared to the accelerating pace of motorized travel. How many of our other writers in nature have echoed the theme for a hundred years or more, that the human race needs the opportunity to immerse themselves in the natural world for its healing effects. How could trail builders and maintainers resist the opportunity to play a part in such a noble enterprise? How could they resist days in the backcountry sharing work with like-minded souls? Fortunately they can't. If you haven't yet, come join us! With work continuing in several locations to link the major elements of our existing national scenic trails, you too can be an indispensable part of building the dream of MacKaye's endless trail.