"Many of them were built for purposes that no longer exist - cattle drives, mining prospecting, early U.S. Forest Service fire patrols - while others were packed by the footprints of the Chumash people well before the colonization of North America. Sections of trail cling to steep slopes that seem to barely resist gravity, shedding soil and stone with each winter storm."
"Over the past decade, I've restored hundreds of miles of Forest Service trails, from the Sierra Nevada to the eastern seaboard, often using outdated agency maps to find paths that have otherwise been wiped out from landscapes both physical and digital. I've seen how a single missing trail line in a dataset can alter a federal budget request by hundreds of thousands of dollars - since appropriations requests are tied directly to the total mileage in an agency's database."
Trails in California's Los Padres National Forest are fragile, often carved into sandstone and built for obsolete uses like cattle drives and mining, with some created centuries earlier by the Chumash. Storms, deepening drought, and intensified floods accelerate erosion, causing trails to slip off slopes and drainages to blow out during atmospheric rivers. Outdated maps and eroded datasets hide real conditions, affecting maintenance priorities and federal funding because appropriations tie directly to recorded trail mileage. Restored corridors can vanish within a season without continual upkeep. The Forest Service manages hundreds of thousands of miles of roads and trails, straining budgets and capacity.
Read at High Country News
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]