[pct-l] Why California’s Trails Are Disappearing From Our Maps

[Nick Thelen]

Informative article outlining how and why we are losing our Wilderness trails published Jan.24, 2014:
http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2014/01/24/why-californias-trails-are-disappearing-from-our-maps/ideas/nexus/

Quoted snippet from the article:
"...Most trails require work every year, or they deteriorate. But such maintenance doesn’t always happen. 
Two years ago, I led a crew to repair a portion of the remote Pacific Crest Trail, which had gotten no 
attention in almost a decade. This is one of our great national scenic trails, yet it took my crew of 
15 two hours to find it. It was so terribly overgrown that it took 30 days of work over a three-year 
span to clear just a few miles of trail. 

This sort of thing is not just a labor of love but also a labor of public health. Trails need maintenance 
not only because people wish to travel in the wilderness, but also because poorly maintained trails erode 
the watershed, diminishing the quality of water in Central Valley cities. 

Volunteers, of course, can do only a small part of this work. At least that has been the standard thinking. 
But now, there are only volunteers. With no one else chipping in, we don’t merely lose access to trails. 
We lose trails altogether. 

The trails are organized into a system, and “system trails” are required, by law, to be maintained. But when 
trails can’t be maintained, as is the case now, the government complies with the law by “decommissioning” 
poorly maintained trails from the trail system. And decommissioned trails literally disappear from maps. One 
of the best mapmakers for the Sierra, Tom Harrison, tells me that Forest Service personnel regularly instruct 
him to remove trails from his maps. Eventually, no one knows the trail was ever there...."
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Scary how trails simply "disappear"...the ramifications cannot be positive for future generations...

- Nick