The Forgotten Trails

I stand on the shoulders of those who came before me. The result of my toil is not mine, and not theirs, but representative of the place that we all strived to travel through. The patch of earth I dig, the trees I hew in half and the streams I lay bridges across are marked on some maps, but not on others. And not all of the trails I build are of my own design or hand.

Like anyone else, I grew up and found bikes because they brought joy. I didn't care if the dirt ribbon I followed was built by human hand or by other means. My first mountain bikes were made of steel, had at best 100mm of elastomer suspension in the fork, and sure as hell didn't have a computer mounted to the stem.

If anything stood out, it was the sheer number of trails I found on old maps. They no longer appeared on any application or in planning documents for trail building. But it didn't take long to realise that these forgotten trails were much more to my liking than those found online.

Trails from the Civilian Conservation Corps era (1930s) were steep, rocky and led deep into the backcountry. Trails made by indigenous people (3000 years old+) followed sinuous paths through valleys to peaks and meadows. Booster map trails (1800s) led to dilapidated cabins and gold rush mines. And as the destinations of these trails fell out of favour, the government simply erased them from published maps and stopped maintaining them.

Over decades, government spending on trail maintenance dwindled and public interest in trails and the outdoors faded, leaving these trails to be swallowed back up by nature. Today, there are over 160,000 miles of trail in National Forests in the US, yet only 50,000 miles are maintained. The remaining 70% of trails? The government has declared it is $313 million short for what it needs to repair them.

And that's why I find myself out here digging a line no longer plotted on maps. From the top of Pine Mountain I face north towards the Mojave Desert, the foreground a mix of pines and firs, some burnt long ago and some generations younger. The trail here lies under a few inches of dirt, its path only discerned by old crosscut logs every few hundred feet.