Trail Sign Auction Ends Friday!

AMC Trails Department's Annual Trail Sign Auction ends this Friday! Find more information and place your bid today!>>

WINDBORNE grit and ice scour them. Porcupines gnaw on them. Sun and rain beat on them. And still, the wooden trail signs that help guide hikers in the White Mountains put up with it all, serving as silent guideposts in the woods and above the treeline, around the clock, often for years and years before they need to be replaced.

Each year, trail sign fans and supporters of the Appalachian Mountain Club’s trail stewardship program provide future homes for retired trail signs by submitting winning bids in the annual online trail sign auction. This year’s auction opened on eBay on Tuesday and continues until the close of bidding at noon on Friday, Dec. 2. As noted on the What’s New blog at outdoors.org, “All proceeds from the auction will directly support AMC’s trail maintenance efforts and, in particular this year, trail cleanup and repair work following Tropical Storm Irene.”

Six signs are available, representing such locales as the Presidential Range, the Zealand Valley and the Mahoosucs, among others. The Tuckerman Crossover sign is among those in this year’s auction. According to the description on outdoors.org, the sign “spent several long hard years living amid diapensia and mountain sandwort above treeline at the Tuckerman Junction. When not covered with rime ice or befuddled in fog, this sign directed countless numbers of hikers along the Tuckerman Crossover toward the Southside Trail and Lakes of the Clouds Hut.”

Fans of the Mahoosuc Range will likely recognize the Goose Eye trail sign, which had been located at the junction with the Carlo Col Trail since 1985.

A white-and-green Royce Trail sign is also in the auction and includes directional arrows and mileages for other trails and features in the area, including Burnt Mill Brook Trail, West Royce, Laughing Lion Trail and the Brickett Place.

The Cascade Brook Trail sign is billed as the only sign in this year’s batch to carry the Appalachian Trail logo. Others include an Osseo Trail sign and the Ethan Pond Trail sign. The auction is an important fundraiser for AMC’s trail maintenance program.

By: Rob Burbank- AMC

AMC Trails on Latvian TV

In early November a film crew from Latvian Public Television visited AMC Pinkham Notch to learn more about our trails volunteer programs. Latvia is a small country in eastern Europe with large amounts of public lands. There was great interest in AMC Trail Volunteers and their commitment to caring for our public lands here in the Northeast. It was their hope that we can help to strengthen Latvian volunteerism in the same way.

We spent a wonderful day with Eva Ikstena-Strapcane sharing stories, swapping experiences, and most of all finding common ground on a passion for helping to maintain the outdoor places we love.

For all of our Latvian speaking AMC members, enjoy! Even if you don't speak Latvian, the message of AMC's commitment to the White Mountains and the support of our Volunteers comes through.

A lesson in grassroots land and trail management in Bethel, Maine

Along the southern end of the three mile ridgeline of Sunday River ski area is 2,200 acres of undeveloped timberland, held in trust by the Bethel Water District. The land has remained undeveloped, save for selective timber cuts, since the gifting of the land from philanthropist William Bingham in 1925 for the purposes of conserving the water quality of Chapman Brook, at the time the main water supply for Bethel, Maine.

All this changed dramatically in 2007, when a catastrophic water event destroyed the watershed and rendered the Brook unreliable and unsafe as a primary water source. The land remains a backup water source for the town, but there is a subtle shift in the primary use of the land, a shift towards recreation.

The Bethel Conservation Commission has been tasked with developing a management plan for the thousands of acres, acres that include steep ledge with delicate lichens, thickets and bogs of spruce and fir, rushing brooks and mixed hardwoods. It is crisscrossed with old skid roads, as well as a preexisting snowmobile trail. The opportunities for locally managed moderately backcountry outdoor recreation, from mountain biking to hiking to Nordic skiing, are tantalizingly clear.

In the past year, a new organization has come together in Bethel, a new organization that is in a good position to contribute significantly to the conversation about development and management and maintenance of the Bingham land: Mahoosuc Pathways, a volunteer-led nonprofit organization.

The Mahoosuc Pathways is the end result of years of work from local groups in Bethel, from the Mahoosuc Land Trust to the Bethel Area Chamber of commerce, to develop frontcountry trail networks throughout Bethel. The Bethel Pathway, a paved and graveled route that winds through Bethel and is frequented by strollers, runners, and pedalers, is a tangible example of the need for community trails and of the success of building them.

This past Saturday, members of the Mahoosuc Pathways, the Conservation Commission, and other interested locals, at the base of Locke Mountain to have the first site visit of the property. As a person dedicated to the cause of community trail building, through my work with the Mahoosuc Initiative and now as the Vice President of the Board of the Mahoosuc Pathways, and to the cause of bushwhacking to new places, I was there among the throngs awaiting at the bottom of the chairlift.

The goal, as with all site visits, was to look but not draw conclusions quite yet. We wanted to see the ledges, the trees, and the animal scat. We wanted to see how the contours of earth and the scattered lines of roads looked on the ground before us. In short, we wanted to “ground truth” the property.

The land holds promise, in stretches of long hardwoods and in the current infrastructure of roads. Importantly and powerfully, the promise of the land will be harnessed and managed fully by the Bethel community. It will be interesting to see how the organic management develops in the next year.

Want to learn more? Check out the Mahoosuc Pathways facebook page (webpage to come soon).

Falling Waters Trail Reconstruction Project

National Forest Foundation 2011 Matching Awards Program

White Mountain National Forest – Falling Waters Trail Reconstruction Project

Over the summer of 2011 the AMC’s Professional Trail Crew worked on the Falling Waters Trail in Franconia Notch thanks to a Matching Awards Program Grant from the National Forest Foundation. They spent 9 weeks installing structures to mitigate serious erosion and provide trail definition and enhanced safety for hikers on the very popular trail.

The Falling Waters Trail is located in the scenic Franconia Notch leading from the Parkway, I-93, to the summit of Little Haystack Mountain. The trail passes many attractive waterfalls, crossing brooks six times, and climbs 2800 feet in 3 miles to treeline. It is part of one of the most popular day hikes in the White Mountain. Together with the Franconia Ridge Trail (part of the Appalachian Trail), Greenleaf Trail, and the Old Bridle Path the 8.6 mile loop is a must do for many hikers. This classic hike, and easy drive for millions, climbs to the crest of the Franconia Ridge, traverses the ridge, all above treeline, reaches the summit of Mount Lafayette, the sixth highest peak in the White Mountains, and passes AMC’s Greenleaf Hut. Its waterfalls, high peaks, alpine areas and stunning views attract thousands during all seasons.

Due to the extremely high use, steep terrain and rough weather, the trail has suffered serious erosion and widening. To mitigate this and prevent further degradation, the AMC’s professional trail crew installed and repaired rock steps, drainage structures, scree walls, cut steps in ledges, and improved stream crossings. The trail corridor was also brushed out, defined with rubble and debris to close unwanted travel off trail, and remarked with blazes and updated signs. The work was performed within our financial goals.

The primary goals and objectives of this project were to mitigate trail erosion, improve brook crossings, enhance hiker safety and rehabilitate the trail tread on the Falling Waters Trail. The Falling Waters Trail is one of the most popular hiking trails on the White Mountain National Forest (WMNF) and the extreme popularity of the trail had lead to above average trail degradation through the fragile ecosystems this trail passes through which include northern hardwood, spruce/fir forest, and riparian ecosystems. The purpose to the work funded through this grant was to create new trail structures, and improve existing ones, to mitigate the accelerated rate of soil erosion due to the high density of hikers. For almost a century, the heavy hiker use combined with heavy annual precipitation has severely eroded sections of the trail tread. In many sections of the Falling Waters Trail, hikers also veer off trail, behavior that damages flora as well as further accelerating trail erosion.

The physical work objectives of the project included hardening and defining the eroded trail tread by constructing and repairing native stone steps and adjoining scree walls. Rock water bars, check dams, ditches and other erosion control structures, which have proven their success over decades of use along the Northeast’s trail system, were constructed to control the flow of water to prevent further erosion. Additionally, as the work was done on one of the most popular hiking trails in the WMNF, the work provided a unique and valuable opportunity to educate the thousands of hikers who use the trail annually. Through the project, the general hiking public was able to see first-hand the actual work and care necessary to limiting hiker impacts. The trail crews often draw interest, as well as words of gratitude, from passing hikers. By performing this restoration work in such a highly impacted and visible area, the AMC’s professional trail crews were able to provide an implicit demonstration of trail and alpine stewardship at work. These goals were all met. 2,412 hours of trail work was done on the trail to mitigate the current state of erosion and to prevent further damage to the fragile ecosystems. The hiking public received a nearly immediate benefit from the work as the trail became more and more stable under their feet, as well as the intangible benefit gained from the feet-on education of hiking in the area while the project was underway.

The tangible outcomes of this project were the fruits of the 2,412 hours of trail work done by trail crews of 4-7 people from June 13, 2012 until August 19, 2012. Each week, the trail crews submitted a report of the work they did: 153 rock steps were installed, 7 rock check steps, 7 step stones, 661 feet of screewall, 2 large stream crossing were cleared of logs and debris, 9 steps cut and chiseled into ledges, 5,000 feet of brush cut out of the trail corridor, and 300 feet of side trails were brushed in and closed.

In terms of success, the project results speak for themselves and were shared with the surrounding community through osmosis. The nature of this project—mitigating current and preventing further damage to the trail—makes it somewhat difficult to both ascertain the full effect of the work and to fully publicize the true extent of the work.

The major challenge of this project related to the extreme popularity of the trail. The Falling Waters Trail remained open over the course of the project and as safety remains a high priority in all aspects of AMC’s trail work, it was necessary to plan and prepare the site for the many users of the trail, even as potentially dangerous and certainly technical aspects of the project were underway. We addressed this by placing spotters above and below the work site to alert and educate hikers about the situation they were walking into. Also, it was challenging to determine the best possible treadway and level of improvements necessary for the trail. The sheer number of hikers attracts a largely novice hiking crowd, who, being less confident in their footing along the trail require the trail being built to a lesser level of difficulty than would be necessary if catering predominantly to more experienced hikers.

Photos: D. Salisbury