Wearing Away at Erosion Risk: The Central Trail Maintenance Problem

AMC Outdoors, May 1998

By Carl Demrow

Erosion is the cancer of trail maintenance. Once started, it is difficult to arrest and can kill a trail. As with cancer, however, you can try to limit the risk. Trail hardening, clean drainage, regular maintenance and monitoring—these are the low-fat diet, regular exercise, and routine physical exams of trail maintenance.

Trail hardening involves "hardening" the part you walk on—the treadway—with rock. This prevents compaction, which decreases soil’s ability to absorb water. Hardening takes many forms, such as rock steps on steep slopes or bridges through bogs.

Drainage is anything built to remove water from the trail. It takes the form of wood and rock water bars, drainage dips (mounds of soil built to move water off a trail), and ditches. Drainages are set periodically along a trail to prevent both excessive water volume and speed—a lethal combination—and may be no more than 50 feet apart on a heavily used trail with a steep grade.

Critical to avoiding costly and damaging problems is monitoring and maintenance. Trails are just like homes—if you don’t stay on top of home maintenance, and regularly inspect parts of your home for damage and needed repair, things can get expensive fast. We rely on trail adopters, hikers, agency staff, and others to keep us informed of problems so we can nip them in the bud.

If all goes well, this preventative medicine will keep erosion at bay and avert the kind of major damage that requires extensive repairs.

Five Battles: Intro  | Heavy Use  | Erosion Risk  | Our Legacy  | Mother Nature  | Money and Labor