Trails and Tribulations

   You have this problem. As a boatman, you like to take your folks to special places. You like to seek out the new; the novel. You want it to seem like a wild and remote area, not a heavily cairned and constructed route. But time passes and you find more and more stabilized routes, more steps, more cairns.

   What do you do?

   Kick the cairns? Find a new trail route? Grumble and complain?

   The Park, too, has a problem. People go places. They use their feet. They make tracks. As more and more people find out about more and more obscure places in the Canyon, they go there. They take their folks there. Tracks appear. Trails form. Lots of them. If enough people use the route, even the most environmentally sensitive routes will begin to show impact. Sometimes the sites themselves begin to suffer. That’s a problem.

   What can they do about it?

   Monitor the situation. Try to decide if damage at a given site is occurring through multiple trailing or resource damage. If it is:

   Try to establish and stabilize a designated trail with cairns or trail construction. Block access to the more destructive routes and revegetate them.

   If damage continues, close the area.

   Hold it. It’s not us and them. These aren’t two different problems. It’s one big problem and we all need to work to a common solution. How can you help?

   Prevent multiple trailing. Improve passenger education. Teach folks how to stay on rocks and off cryptogams; how to recognize the trail as opposed to a blocked off trail; how to walk softly.

   Realize that the cairns are there because some people really don’t know the way. Kicking them over creates a worse problem.

   Be especially, super, ridiculously careful to find low impact routes when you’re off trail. Don’t create a new route that the next curious person will follow. And the next, and the next…

   Sign up for the October 24 resource management trip; learn more about the hows, whys, and how-difficults of restoration. Put your two cents in.

   It’s like with everything else. You can be part of the problem or part of the solution.

Brad Dimock