The Art and Science of Trail-building

The science of trail-building is better known than the art. Trail construction and re-construction is often a contract to a contractor. The ranks of those who volunteer seem swollen by engineers and those from the building trades - people who like to build things. In Pasadena, employees of JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory) are avid hikers and turn out to help the trail system in the mountains next to their workplace - the San Gabriel Mountains. Yes, even rocket scientists like to help out here on earth.

Certainly there is a science to trail building. I've read the contractor's specifications for building new trails and be surprised at how exact they are--spelling out the regulation tread width, grade and much more. Governmental agencies often conduct exhaustive environmental studies before allowing a shovel to hit the ground.

There is an art to trail building, too. A well designed trail is a kind of living sculpture. Some modern trail-designers practice Feng Shui, the Chinese art of arranging elements (indoors or outdoors) in order to create flow and harmony.

True, few trails were designed with Feng Shui, but many of the best trails have it - a harmony with the landscape, its features and attractions, a pleasing arrangement of color and texture, form and lines. A hand-built trail goes easy on the land. Even if it's just been completed, a hand-built trail has a way of looking like it's always been there.

A good trail designer has the eye of a landscape painter - or at least a landscape architect. Landscape, at least the way a trail designer uses the word means the sum total of an area's characteristics, particularly those that distinguish it from another area. The landscape's distinguishing patterns include its natural features - geography and flora - and may include its cultural landscape and structures as well. These landscape features combined with the four basic elements of color, texture form and line create an area's landscape character, which distinguishes it from its immediate surroundings.

Hikers are a visually oriented bunch. What you see on a trail is what you get and what you get from the hiking experience is often determined by what you see. And exactly what a hiker sees on a trail is often created by the trail designer.

One element of view is called sightlines - the forward view and rear view seen by a hiker on a given part of the trail. A good trail has good sight lines - that is to say, the path, real or imagined, that a hiker's eye follows when perceiving changes and contrasts in color, texture and form. A landscape itself has lines in it in the form of ridgetops, city skyline, the border between floral communities or between the natural and built worlds.

How the trail designer shapes the trail can shape a hiker's experience. Choosing when a trail should be contoured around a slope or switchback up it and switchback down it, can give two entirely different hiking experience.