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

[Ken Murray]

Thanks for the shout-out. It's also in the Fresno Bee:http://www.fresnobee.com/2014/01/24/3731294/were-losing-our-sequoia-trails.html KenInformative 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...."