NEWFANE — Foot trails have existed in our forests and mountains for hundreds of years, since the settling of the region began.
In the last hundred years, some of these trails have gained reknown across the continent. In our region, in particular, we have the grandfather of all long-distance trails, the Long Trail, which meanders over the spine of the Green Mountains, from the Massachusetts state line all the way to the Canadian border, north of Jay Peak.
When James Taylor first stood on the summit of Stratton Mountain, in the early 20th century, and envisioned a trunk-trail spanning the length of the Green Mountains in Vermont, his vision centered around turning a largely ignored resource into a center of civic pride, regional recreation, and economic development. He was a visionary and a spokesperson who was largely responsible for generating the enthusiasm necessary for the trail's development.
The actual building of the trail, however, given the variety of opinions about how it should be done, as well as private land issues and who would use it, was ultimately left in the hands of the Forest Service and a few hardy and stubborn individuals who, over decades, routed, rerouted, and cut it from the bones of the Vermont landscape.
* * *
Back in the 1930s, building and maintaining mountain trails largely consisted of planning, cutting, and clearing. Today, the work of maintaining this resource is far different.
The Long Trail is managed and cared for by the Green Mountain Club, through the efforts of both volunteer and paid trail maintainers. In many areas, the U.S. Forest Service also provides many work hours and materials.
If you hike infrequently, or if you don't spend much time outdoors, it may be a surprise to you to know that, without the constant efforts of these people, many of the mountain trails you find in guidebooks would literally cease to exist in a very short time.
The people who volunteer their energy on this pursuit are generally those who have been enriched over the years by their time in the mountains and want to contribute in a meaningful way to the cause.
So what's involved?
When I speak to people about trail work - and doing so is my favorite pastime - the most common assumption is that it is simply trail “clearing.”
While clearing the trails of obstacles and cutting back the overgrowth is certainly important, it actually represents a small portion of the work involved in managing the Long Trail.
The basic elements of trail maintenance are clearing, marking, draining, and hardening.
***
Marking a trail is done with two devices: signage and blazing. All trails need accurate marking to avoid confusion, and to protect private landowners from liability and trespassing.
Volunteers are rarely involved with making signs but often are called upon to refresh the blazes. A blaze is either a painted mark or a plastic or metal placard nailed to a tree or post. In most cases, winter ski or snowmobile trails are blazed with colored plastic markers. The Long Trail is blazed with 2”x 6” white paint on trees and rocks along the trail.
This marking is also used for the famous Appalachian Trail, which piggybacks on the Long Trail from the Massachusetts border to the Killington area, before separating and heading east toward Hanover, N.H., on its long journey to Mt. Katahdin in Maine.
All trails that at some point connect to the Long Trail are blazed with blue paint. Trails in Vermont that are not connected directly to the Long Trail are often blazed with yellow paint.
In wilderness areas, trails receive less maintenance. Wilderness trails are often more narrow and have little blazing - or sometimes none whatsoever. This is intentional.
* * *
Clearing the trail may seem obvious, but there are some subtleties to it.
Obviously, every year, trees fall across the trail, and every year, the undergrowth insidiously creeps closer to the center of the treadway. Every three to four years (sometimes more frequently), a trail needs to be trimmed back so that it can be clearly discerned, and to avoid the “car wash” phenomenon that hikers experience from water-soaked branches and leaves as they press through.
“Deadfall” or “blow-downs,” as trees across the trail are usually referred to, must be cleared.
Every spring, the Forest Service will sweep its trails with a chainsaw crew and clear major blow-downs. Volunteers will often use chainsaws as well, though the Forest Service and the Green Mountain Club require any volunteer using a chainsaw on the trails to be certified for both safety and liability reasons. Both organizations offer certification courses to that end.
However, the overwhelming majority of trail workers use an axe and/or crosscut saw. In designated wilderness areas, it is required, as chainsaws are not allowed. These saws are lighter, and easier to sharpen and repair in the field. They are quieter and more practical when far from roads.
The general rule in trail clearing is to create an opening that is equivalent to a standard doorway that you would find in your home.
There are tricks to it. It is not necessary to clear every obstacle. Some blow-downs are easily stepped over and better left alone. Also, if you find the same small tree getting trimmed back every year on the trail side, it is better to remove the whole tree. This helps avoid the unattractive “tunnel” effect that can sometimes be seen.
* * *
Taylor was certainly ahead of his time, as today many people look forward to their time in the woods and hills for solitude, exercise, and spiritual renewal. However, the popularity of our trails created a problem unforeseen by the early trail builders - erosion.
Erosion control is the primary focus of a successful modern trail maintainer. As soft and often thin forest soils get trampled and compacted by the weight and scouring of many thousands of feet every season, the power of water can literally destroy a trail's treadway as it picks up momentum and takes the soil with it.
Unlike your driveway, or our dirt roads that can be quickly replenished with truckloads of fresh material, in the mountains, once the soil is gone from the trail, it is gone forever.
Creating and maintaining drainage is the primary responsibility in maintaining a trail. The type of drainage structure used varies according to the needs of the area. Some areas receive less use and have soils that drain more easily.
Vermont has a great deal of clay in the soil structure, which drains poorly and exacerbates the erosion problem. In some spots, a dip can be built, which is simply a shallow trench at a low spot to carry water off the trail. The dip will extend beyond the treadway as far as necessary to ensure that the water drained off doesn't find its way back onto the trail. This principle is true of all drainage structures.
Another tool is a “trailside ditch” or “trench,” a ditch running alongside the trail. Its best use is in catching water coming at the trail from the slope above, channeling it to protect the treadway, and then sending it away from the trail or across the trail with the use of a water bar.
Water bars are earthen berms or swales behind a shallow trench, usually reinforced with wood, rock, or both, that catch damaging water running down the trail, and divert it at an angle away from the trail tread and into the surrounding forest.
There are many types of water bars and many ways to construct them. There is also great debate among different trail managers about which styles are most effective, but any structure that accomplishes the goal is good, no matter the skill with which it was built.
Of great importance is cleaning these structures. Drainages take long hours and back-breaking labor to construct but if they are not periodically cleaned of debris and checked for efficiency, they can quickly become almost useless.
Properly constructed drainages will survive a lack of maintenance far longer than poorly constructed ones, but even the best will fail from complete neglect.
Therefore, the most important job of a trail maintainer (even more important than clearing) is the construction and maintenance of drainages.
***
The final aspect of trail maintenance is making the trail's treadway resistant to erosion by hardening it against impact. There are many forms of trail hardening, but all share one common trait: protecting the resource.
You may have presumed that the rock staircase or wooden plank bridge you walked over was put there for your convenience and comfort. Not so! They are actually built to prevent damage to the soils or wetlands.
Step stones are rocks placed in the tread to harden an area that's often wet and easily damaged. Puncheons are wood-plank or log bridges placed over a very wet or sensitive area.
A couple of years ago, I placed, with the help of some friends, over 60 feet of log bridges on the Long Trail near the Kelly Stand Road trailhead at Stratton.
The logs were cut from my own property, worked and shaped there, then trucked to the site, carried in pieces, and finally assembled on the trail. The area in question is always a muddy mess, and there is not a ready supply of rock that can be easily brought to the trail, so puncheons were the best option.
Turnpikes are another trail-hardening technique that involves building a rectangular box and filling it with gravel and small rocks. This strategy serves to lift the hiker above the problem area.
Another common technique is the “rock staircase,” which protects a fragile soil structure on a steep incline, while at the same time keeping hiker traffic at the center of the treadway, where it belongs.
Most trail-hardening techniques are aimed at keeping the treadway the proper width and protecting it. Wet, muddy areas are usually circumvented by hikers trying to keep their feet dry. This widens the damaged area, increases the problem, and makes for a very unattractive trail. A well-built rock staircase of two, three, or many steps serves to permanently protect the trail in that section, stems back erosion, and looks natural, which increases the enjoyment of the hiker. Everyone wins.
***
Usually, it's best to combine all the methods of trail maintenance into an integrated system of drainage, hardening, and trail definition. For example, in the Stratton area, my trail friends and I have been constructing a project that consists of many step stones paralleling a trailside trench. Then, uphill from that, we are creating a long water bar that connects to a spring. (This spring had been damaging the tread for years.)
The hiker steps over the water bar (which is tiled with rock for efficiency and stability) onto a long rock staircase protected by “scree” (large stabilizing rocks) on either side, and bordered on one side with a drainage trench that ties into the lower water bar, as well as to a rock water bar above the staircase.
Essentially, we are catching the water at the top of the slope, running it alongside a rock staircase (which stabilizes the slope), and then directing it into the drainage of a spring at the bottom of the slope. The spring is then drained into a trailside ditch near a hardened trail for another 75 yards before being channeled into an already existing stream that crosses the trail.
It's an integrated system of erosion control. The project is not yet complete, though already fully functional. It has taken about 12 days of labor over about 2 1/2 years to bring it to this point. So, obviously, this work is extremely labor intensive and time consuming. However, the end result will be to take a generally washed-out, poorly defined trail section, harden it against further damage, redefine the trail corridor, and generally make the area far more enjoyable and stable to hike on.
Those of us who have worked on it have the joy and satisfaction of knowing what was accomplished for all those who will use it in the future. All this work is done with hand tools. No tractors, no heavy machinery, no ATVs. Just 20-pound crowbars, mattocks, shovels, nylon slings, root axes, and sweat.
While I work on the trail independently with those I recruit to help, there are many opportunities to get involved. Both the Green Mountain Club and the U.S. Forest Service have volunteer Adopt-A-Trail programs, in which an individual or group can take responsibility for an entire trail or a section of one.
The Green Mountain Club has individual chapters that are responsible for various sections of the Long Trail. I work with the Worcester, Mass. Section, which takes care of the Long Trail from Kelly Stand Road to the bridge over the Winhall River. The Brattleboro Section cares for the section just north of it, all the way to Mt. Bromley.
The Green Mountain Club offers opportunities for week-long volunteer trail excursions (led by a paid leader) as well as for a paid crew. Volunteer opportunities on the Trail can also be found on the Green Mountain Club events calendar online.
When I used to be a Volunteer Section Leader for the Appalachian Mountain Club in the White Mountains, I had volunteers in my section who had been faithfully maintaining their sections for over 25 years! That's a work of love. Truly, trail maintenance is a secret joy that many of us cherish even more than hiking itself.
While the professional paid crews and the week-long volunteer crews generally tackle the more intense trail-hardening projects, most of the maintenance done by volunteers involves periodic patrols in the adopted trail area. In the spring after the snow is gone, this maintenance involves opening clogged drainages, clearing obstacles, and generally assessing the conditions; in the summer, it involves cutting back overgrowth; and in the late fall, it involves cleaning the fallen leaves out of the drainages, clearing obstacles, and perhaps refreshing a few blazes.
The Complete Guide to Trail Building and Maintenance is a good book on the subject. It was written by a friend of mine, Carl Demrow (a Vermont resident), and published through the Appalachian Mountain Club. It's a good resource if someone is interested in diving deeply into it. However, both the Appalachian Mountain Club and the Green Mountain Club have regularly scheduled trail work days led by experienced leaders, in which an interested novice can participate and learn.
Let's get dirty!