Lessons learned from extreme storms, and their impacts on Adirondacks’ trails
By Mike Lynch
Then Tropical Storm Debby drenched the Adirondacks in early August, some saw it as a disaster. Glenn Glover saw it as an opportunity.
It allowed him to show how smartly built trails can withstand the impacts of downpours.
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The director of Barkeater Trails Alliance (BETA) put on his raincoat and visited trails in Lake Placid. The newer, sustainably built ones shed water and held up to the pounding rain. In an older ski trail built on a steeper grade without modern drainage features, run-off created a 2-foot-deep rut.
“Pretty much everybody in the outdoor recreation arena is thinking about climate resilience going forward,” said Glover, whose group works on trails in Franklin and Essex counties. “The vast majority of us have commitments either to land managers or to the communities that we serve to help maintain the infrastructure that we’re creating.”
Sustainable trails are meant to be permanent and require minimal maintenance. The idea is to spend money and energy up front in trail development. They are built with features, such as integrated water control systems. They often have hardened surfaces and gentle grades, using switchbacks on steep slopes.
Sustainably built trails have gained more recognition in the past decade as hiking and recreational usage spiked across the Adirondacks and Northeast.
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Environmental groups and user stakeholders pointed to trail erosion being exacerbated by the greater numbers of hikers going up the environmentally vulnerable High Peaks.
Glover said it isn’t even worth building trails unless it’s done sustainably because erosion can undo hard work quickly.
“We will build as much sustainable trail as the funding will allow,” Glover said. “We won’t build unsustainable trails to stretch that funding because that just becomes a maintenance issue for us in the future.”
The state Department of Environmental Conservation’s trail stewardship working group is currently drafting a set of standards for sustainable trails, Glover said.
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“Sustainable trail layout and construction is necessary when we’re constructing all of our new facilities,” said DEC Supervising Forester Robert Ripp. “Especially in the planning phases, staff will look to create sustainable trails by (placing) trails in locations that are resilient to large storm events.”
They also build bridges and culverts that are 1.25 times wider than the width of the stream “so it can handle that extra flood capacity,” Ripp said.
The Mount Jo Long Trail, Cobble Hill Trail and Mount Van Hoevenberg East Trail in the Lake Placid area are examples of sustainable hiking trails. So are the trails up Schumann Preserve at Pilot Knob near Lake George and the path up Buck Mountain in Long Lake.
The East Branch Community Trails in Keene and new bypass multi-use trail on the Jackrabbit near the Craigwood Golf Course in Lake Placid are the biking equivalent.
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In the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Appalachian Mountain Club and partners are working to rebuild the Franconia Loop Ridge Loop Trail.
Learning from mistakes
In recent summers, Vermont has been hammered by storms. Deluges have flooded rivers, torn up roads and washed away buildings.
Field crews and volunteers for Northern Forest Canoe Trail (NFCT) maintain a 740-paddling route from Old Forge to Maine and work on nearby routes such as the Lamoille River Paddling Trail. They have witnessed the damage flooding can do to recreational infrastructure, particularly in Vermont, and that is changing the way the organization approaches its field work.
In July 2023, flooding caused catastrophic damage for communities in Vermont and northern New York. Vermont’s LaMoille River rose eight feet above its banks, destroying paddling infrastructure along the waterway including a portage trail, signs and the 20-foot bridge at Dog Heads Falls. That was the second time in recent years a flood had washed out the bridge.
NFCT staff realized they needed to find a way to get people around the dangerous waterfall.
They rerouted the portage trail away from an area vulnerable to flooding. That allowed the group to avoid building a bridge over a side creek vulnerable to high waters. They built a stone staircase to the water and tied it into boulders and bedrock, making it extra secure.
Crews finished that project in June, paying for it with a flood resilience grant from the Vermont Outdoor Recreation Economic Collaborative, a funding program established by the state. The $30,000 grant paid for this project and a similar one on the same river.
“It did survive this year’s floods, so that’s a good sign,” Delhagen said. “It was pretty intense again.”
Further east in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the Appalachian Mountain Club and their partners are doing trail work with big crowds and climate resiliency in mind.
Like the NFCT and other groups, they draw upon their experience in building sustainable trails and learning from each new storm event.
Last year, AMC’s volunteer trail crew built a bridge in Crawford Notch. By December, floodwaters washed the structure about 15 feet downstream, requiring restoration.
“With more and more flooding, it changes the path of the river,” said Nora Sackett, AMC’s trails volunteer program supervisor. “This is actually changing where we’re placing bridges as well”
To make this bridge more flood resilient, AMC planned for the structure to sit on higher ground, strengthening the abutments and attaching it to nearby trees with chains or cables.
From a hiking standpoint, the White Mountains deal with a lot of the same issues as the Adirondacks.
The old New England trails were created through use, so many of them are steep and prone to erosion. Plus, many trails have seen large numbers of hikers in recent years, which can further deteriorate poorly built trails.
Because there are so many improperly designed trails and limited financial resources, land managers and crews rarely build new trails. They’re too busy fixing old ones.
A new labor class?
Matt Moore, AMC’s trails operations coordinator, has been working in the forest for decades, moving stones, shoveling dirt and planning new routes. One of the biggest changes he’s noticed is the need for more technical skills in the profession.
“When I started on seasonal trail crews, you wouldn’t see a tape measure or level on any of our projects,” he said. “Now they’re on every project. Trail work is more and more recognized as and treated as trades work”
That has led to a greater need for worker training and is one of the reasons AMC hosts Trails Skills College in the spring. The week-long session gets workers up to speed on traditional masonry techniques and use of non-motorized tools. It also “is bringing together private trail contractors and different agencies to share this ever evolving set of techniques and industry practices,” Moore said.
Some trails groups also see the need for training programs in colleges and recognition by the state and federal government that trail work is a trade. That would allow for things like apprenticeships that now only exist for recognized crafts such as electricians, carpenters and stone masons.
“We’ve seen the number of people interested in making a career in trails increase particularly as you see (more) new, sustainable trails,” said Julia Goren, Adirondack Mountain Club’s interim executive director. “These are very different, and the kind of work that gets done is the kind of work that somebody can do over a life, instead of just something that you did for a couple summers when you were young, and you had a really strong back.”
A wholistic approach
Warren County resident Steve Ovitt roamed the Adirondack Forest Preserve as a forest ranger for 25 years until retiring. Now, he’s making a living building trails through his own business, Wilderness Property Management.
Ovitt understands the importance of climate resiliency, and he said designing trails requires a combination of office and field skills. You need to be part construction manager and part forest ecologist.
Walking down the Cobble Hill Trail in Lake Placid, Ovitt pointed out the various planned features. Stone dust covered the beginning section of the trail, creating a durable surface. Where the path’s surface turned to soil, his employee used a small excavator to dig drainage into the side of the trail.
Ovitt noted the presence of yellow birches and other trees growing nearby. He looked around to see if the trees would hold up to future wind storms. He didn’t want to build through an area that would be covered with toppled trees in the future.
He also underscored the value of the soil. He noted that sugar maples grow in such “trail gold” because of its mixture of sand, silt and clay.
“Understanding our forest is the first thing that has to happen in order to make trails resilient for climate and also sustainable,” he said.
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This article appeared in a recent issue of Adirondack Explorer magazine.
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I would not cite Buck Mountain as an example of a sustainably designed trail. I went a couple of months after it opened and a lot of it was already just a muddy chute. There is no water diversion on the sloped parts of the trail, and the water runs down the trail for long stretches. Someone was coming down as I went up who slipped and fell a short way above me. The trail is dug into the ground so it collects water and acts as a gutter. I know there was a lot of fanfare for that trail being built to last, but it is substantially inferior to a lot of older DEC trails. Thank you for your reporting. You fill a need that would otherwise be largely unmet.