The post last week about why local parks have so few visitors generated a raft of thoughtful commentary. One of the last to chime in was veteran Bay Area trail builder Jim Preston, who described an ideal of trail aesthetics that had never really occurred to me before. His main points:
- The old mining, ranch and fire roads that pass through our parks are not trails in any “hiking” sense of the word.
- Trails designed specifically for non-motorized traffic are easier to maintain and have less impact on the environment.
- Aesthetics matter — there are right and wrong ways to design and build trails. Accepting steep old roads designed for motor vehicles and horses is not the right way. Designing and building narrow, switch-backed trails through mountainous terrain makes the experience of using them more enjoyable. That’s what aesthetics are for.
I wrote the original post tweaking a guy who was ragging on all the nasty, brutish trails in Bay Area parks. Most of us responded from the perspective of people who are so grateful for the goodness we already have — hellish Henry Coe climbs and all — that we’re a little hesitant to demand more and better trails. Our outlook:
- We’re tough, we can handle these hills. Who cares about crybabies who can’t hack them?
- We’ve got more trails than we can ever hike already, why carve new paths through the woods to get new ones we don’t really need?
- Won’t better trails just encourage the masses to make a train wreck of all our wild goodness?
That outlook seems a bit reactionary in light of Preston’s comments, especially when I factor in my own experience with design.
I’ve worked with some of the best graphic designers on the planet — I’d be one of them if I had the chops, so I tend to side with the purists on matters of aesthetics. It’s why my blog has a design I tweaked on my own rather than a template somebody else was content to get by with.
I’m moving into Preston’s column on the necessity of doing trails right. The operative challenge being, huffing up those old mining roads is nothing compared to the bust-your-ass business of building new trails and keeping them maintained. Other side of the coin, though: once the beast is built, all future hikes will be a walk in the park.
That’s an ideal worth shooting for.
Thanks for the post Tom. A few of points:
1) Scattered scientific research seems to support a positive physiological reaction in humans from aesthetics. While much more research is needed there is enough evidence to say that we should consider aesthetics for our own health and well-being, including longevity. Just be aware that trail aesthetics is probably important to your body and mind.
2) Most of trail building concerns getting water off the trail and protecting the tread. Trail builders should know about grade reversals, dips, outslopes, and sheeting the waterflow. The alternative to a steep fall-line rut is not a city park path however.
Short sections can go steeper than 15% but usually we try for no more than a 10% grade. Much depends on the soil and expected traffic. If you need waterbars across the trail then it is designed poorly and is difficult to maintain. SCC Parks uses dozers to maintain the roads but they are trying to install grade reversals and knicks. Annual culvert maintenance costs money but the county is stuck with this for now.
3) When designing trails you select control points. The trailhead is one by default. The careful selection of these points can make a trail interesting and even challenging. I like to place control points near rock outcrops and viewpoints. When designing for hikers or mountain bikers we try to add some challenges for the advanced users.
4) I often hear that we should be thankful for all the great terrain and trails we have around the Bay Area. I don’t believe that criticizing the existing trails is somehow being ungrateful.
For those who like steep fall-line trails would you please donate a few dozen hours a year to maintaining them.
– jim
I was at Henry Coe yesterday, and the three routes to Manzanita Point give a quick lesson in trail aesthetics.
It was no big deal to drive my car over the road to deliver our water jugs (dry camp). I’ve hiked that road and it isn’t much fun, though the view from the top is lovely. The Spring Trail and the Forest Trail get to the same place by hugging the contours along the side of the ridge. The Spring trail is level with nice views from the meadows. The Forest Trail is a bit of up and down, all through trees (big surprise). I like the Forest Trail when the mist comes in.
Either of the hiking trails are much more pleasant for hiking than the road.
You can see a great example of fall-line erosion on the road where all three routes meet close to headquarters. Nasty, nasty ruts. Even worse than your average Houston city street.
But Walter, the road has more steeps and is therefore more macho! 🙂
You’ll see more wildlife on those trails also. I want to build far more single track in Coe. I’ll get to that issue some time in the future.
That’s a very perceptive post, Jim.
I think the “more trails has more impact” is a bit of a red herring, for a few reasons.
+ First, just one stretch of steep, rutted fire road has more impact than any distance of well-constructed narrow gauge/”singletrack” trail. Those ruts are sediment that ends up deposited in the watershed somewhere.
The study that MROSD did on El Corte de Madera (which expected to find that bicycle use was a major erosion source) found instead that steep fire roads and the ranger truck traffic on them was the primary source of erosion and consequent siltation, and the long-term plan now primarily involves the decommissioning of miles of fire road, letting it return to singletrack width or rerouting it altogether.
+ Narrow gauge trails can be constructed with very little impact compared to roads, especially on sidehills (compare a two-foot cut to a ten-foot cut). They can simply go around trees and rocks (or even over rocks), whereas to build a road, you must pull them out.
+ Once a suitable narrow gauge trail has been constructed, the fire road can often be decommissioned and revegetated, with a net positive environmental impact. (This is happening on its own to many of the old ranch roads deep in Henry Coe, which are no longer graded and don’t see enough use to keep the tread compacted.) Some roads are necessary for ranger or maintenance access, but especially in the East Bay, the proportion could be dramatically reduced without a reduction in access to facilities.
+ Worrying about “too many visitors” is a self-defeating proposition in the long term. If people stop using park trails, then people stop caring about parks and open space, they don’t support it or vote for candidates that do, and we lose it. Besides, the average person doesn’t cover the ground that we do, certainly not if they have kids. Give most people a nice, easy mile-long loop at the entrance with lots of benches to rest on and they’ll stay on that. In my experience, the number of people drops dramatically once you get about half a mile into the park.
+ Finally, as someone who rides a bicycle as well as hikes and backpacks (go ahead and flame me, I can take it, I’ve backpacked for over 15 years), I can offer a few interesting points from the perspective of someone who’s covered some of the same trails (in Coe, for example) both on foot and on wheels…
+ The same things that make a trail aesthetically pleasing to hike make it fun to ride a bicycle on. Narrow trails that follow natural contours of the land instead of always being glued to ridgelines, and which go over or around natural features instead of breaking them up or cutting them down, are more fun no matter how you’re traversing them.
+ The more wild, rocky, and twisty, and the less “sanitized” a trail is, the slower people will go on their bicycles, and the less likely they are to have bad interactions with a hiker or an equestrian, because the fundamental problem is the difference in speed. Steep fire roads encourage you to ride fast down them because, well, it’s hard not to. Forcing bicyclists onto fire roads with a 20% grade and then complaining that they go fast is like building a freeway and complaining that cars go fast on it.
+ The bicycle community is very large and really into trail work IF they have access and can build trails they like (see: Waterdog Park in Belmont/San Mateo). Fortunately, as previously mentioned, the trails they like are the same trails hikers like.
Narrow-gauge trailbuilding may provide an opportunity for a rapprochement between the two groups. Mountain bikers don’t like getting lumped in with motorheads like the Blue Ribbon Coalition, because they can’t ride at all on trails churned up by motorcycles (try riding your bike through deep loose dirt or deep sand…it just doesn’t work), and noise and stinky exhaust is no more pleasant on a bicycle than it is on foot. However, USFS policy and the tireless anti-bicycle efforts of many people in mainstream environmental groups like the Sierra Club, which treat them just like motor vehicles, have forced them into that corner because the alternative is not being able to ride anywhere at all.
Many people in the mountain biking community are aware of this problem and torn by it. They would love to be strongly preservationist and environmentally active, because they like the same open spaces and trails hikers do…but when it seems like the first priority of the environmental community is to ban people on bicycles in the name of “preservation”, what is to be done? This is why there isn’t more high-profile mountain biking activism: one side wants to ban them completely, and the other side tears up the trails they want to ride.
Mountain bikers are 29% of the Western population, tend to be younger, and have a lot of energy…imagine if some of that energy could support the preservationist movement.
OK, I kind of got off the original topic here, but I was on a roll and one thing led to another. Thanks for listening.
Steve: an impressive treatise, if I do say so!