WHO is really RUINING the trails

Описание: Sharing trails often causes discussions about who is to blame for trail erosion. So who is really destroying the trails?

Easy (but wrong) answer: the trail users and especially the people using it in a different way from my preferred way of traveling trails.

A less obvious, but more nuanced answer is... trails are going to get destroyed whether you are using them or not. Not just by traffic. But by water, wind, gravity and vegetation. Furthermore, trails don't simply appear out of thin air. If you tread any patch of earth often enough you'll get some kind of track. But no trail can exist with any quality without hard work and maintenance. But here's the catch... there needs to be a good reason for inveting time, energy and money into maintaining a trail.

A good example is the trail I'm sitting on in this video. The Queyras is without a doubt a world class place to experience mountains by hiking or mountain biking. The trails look very natural. You'd be forgiven that they are the way they have always been thanks to historical use by the locals for agriculture, trade, mining etc.

After spending 3 full days riding with a local mountainbike guide, I wasn't just amazed by his incredible knowledge about the trail network. But by his stories about dozens of people putting in dozens of days of back breaking work per year to maintain the network. Cutting vegetation, removing debris and hindersome rocks, channeling rain and meltwater, building steps or making dangerous sections more easy to navigate and so on.

It's not only here and not only him. While I was guiding in Iceland there were always volunteer groups working on the trails. While walking and while riding bikes I have come across people doing trail work on multiple occasions, my guide friend Sam in the Tarentaise is always going on about trail maintenance and my guide friend Bram in Slovenia is putting in back breaking work to repair his local trails after big summer storms.

Locals working on trails of which most people think they are simply there. Locals living in small end of the valley villages that are gradually getting emptier.

Ash, famous from the Trans Provence and Stone King Rally races is leading a new wave of rediscovering trails, working together with the locals to clean them up and attracting bikers (and hikers) to enjoy them. Needless to say, this not only helps spread the load of traffic. It also helps channel traffic because people prefer nice trails and those people need to eat, sleep etc. Which makes them bring income to dying villages.

So contrary to popular belief, sharing knowledge about trails and actually using them is not a bad thing in the vast majority of situations. Especially now you know that trails don't just exist without a significant amount of human intervention.

Unless a trail is illegal to ride, you are doing the right thing by spreading the knowledge and spreading the love. More known trails leads to less intense traffic in the same spots. Respectful interaction with the locals gives them a reason to put time and energy into channeling the local traffic over the trails they choose to maintain instead of not caring about the trail use because it's not worth it for them. And you bring income to often forgotten corners of the world.

If you are keeping trails secret so only you and the people of your choosing can erode them. Are you really doing the right thing?

Dieter Van Holder
UIMLA International Mountain Leader
Bachelor degree in geography
Lover of both hiking and biking