Nat Scrimshaw
This article continues a series examining the Franconia Ridge Loop Restoration and what that experience can teach us about the future of trail management in the White Mountains.
- Five Years of the Partnership to Restore Franconia Ridge
- What We Did Right in the Franconia Ridge Loop Restoration
- What We Could Have Done Better: Lessons from the Franconia Ridge Loop Restoration
- How We Got Here: The Historical Roots of the White Mountains Trails Crisis? (below)
- Rethinking the White Mountain Trail Management System (to come)
In this essay
In the previous articles, I reflected on what we accomplished through the Partnership to Restore the Franconia Loop, what we did well, and where I believe we fell short. For some readers, the critique may have been startling given the extraordinary resources invested in the project. By the time the work is fully accounted for, nearly $2 million will have been invested in the Franconia Ridge Loop.
I believe what we achieved was tremendous, and we should not diminish those accomplishments. But neither should those accomplishments prevent us from confronting what I believe are structural problems in the way we restore and maintain trails in the White Mountains.
We are facing something of a perfect storm: steadily increasing recreational use, a changing climate with more intense rain events, limited public funding, changing nonprofit priorities, and the particular geography and geology of the White Mountains, all acting upon a trail system whose basic alignments and management traditions were established generations ago.
To understand this problem, I think we need to understand how we got here.
My perspective is inevitably personal. I have worked on White Mountain trails for more than 50 years. But the story begins much earlier, with the creation of the recreational trail system itself.
Trails as Socio-Ecological Systems
We usually think of a trail as something physical: a tread winding through a particular geography and ecology, shaped by soils, rocks, vegetation, water, weather and climate. But trails are also socio-ecological systems. The physical trail intersects with culture, economics, technology, institutions and human behavior.
Why people go to the mountains, how they get there, what they expect to find when they arrive, how many people come, who pays for trails, who maintains them, and even what people believe a mountain trail should feel like all influence what happens to that strip of ground.
Traditional recreation ecology gives us important tools for studying visitor impacts and behavior. But I think we need to go further. We also need to understand the cultural, economic, technological and demographic forces producing that behavior. In the White Mountains, that story begins in the nineteenth century.
A New Idea of Nature, Trains and a Middle Class
Three transformations during the nineteenth century helped create the White Mountain recreational economy: a changing cultural understanding of nature, a transportation revolution, and the emergence of an urban middle class with some disposable income and leisure time.
The cultural transformation is often associated with Transcendentalism, born here in New England, but it was broader than that. Romanticism, ideas of the sublime, landscape painting and nature writing all contributed to a profound change in the way Americans understood wild landscapes. Mountains and forests, once regarded primarily as obstacles, resources, or places to be brought under human control, acquired another meaning. Wildness could have spiritual value. Mountains could be places of contemplation, physical challenge, health and renewal. They became places of re-creation.
At roughly the same time, railroads transformed who could reach them. Rail access from Boston and other New England cities expanded rapidly during the middle of the nineteenth century. Concord was connected by 1842, Plymouth by 1850, Gorham by 1851 and North Conway by 1874. Journeys that once required difficult combinations of roads and stagecoaches could increasingly be made predictably by rail.
Meanwhile, New England’s economy was changing from one dominated by agriculture, small workshops and maritime commerce toward factories, cities, finance and wage labor. The benefits were by no means equally distributed, and extended vacations remained largely the privilege of the prosperous and emerging middle class. Nevertheless, something new had appeared: a growing urban population with both the desire and, increasingly, the means to escape the city for recreation.
The White Mountains became one of America’s earliest major mountain vacation regions. Grand hotels, boardinghouses, guides and stage services grew around the new visitors. Summer communities developed. And once people arrived, they wanted places to walk.
The Trail Clubs Build a Recreational Landscape
What followed was one of the defining features of White Mountain history: the proliferation of organizations devoted to creating and maintaining recreational trails.
The White Mountain Club of Portland was organized in 1873, the Appalachian Mountain Club in 1876, the Waterville Valley Athletic and Improvement Association in 1888, the Wonalancet Out Door Club in 1892, the Squam Lakes Association in 1904, the Dartmouth Outing Club in 1909 and the Randolph Mountain Club in 1910. Other organizations followed. With the exception of the White Mountain Club of Portland, these organizations continue in some form today.
Here my own family history intersects with this larger history. My great-grandfather, Arthur Goodrich, was a charter member of the Appalachian Mountain Club and became the first president of the Waterville Valley Athletic and Improvement Association in 1888. Waterville developed what may have been the country’s first true interconnected system of recreational trails.
These clubs weren’t maintaining trails provided by government. They were creating the recreational landscape itself. They chose destinations, selected routes, cut trails, constructed shelters and published maps and guidebooks. In doing so, they also developed ideas about what hiking should be. That last point matters enormously today.
Edmands and Hart: What Is a Trail For?
By the end of the nineteenth century, an interesting disagreement had emerged within White Mountain trail culture. It concerned something more fundamental than how to build a trail. The underlying question was: What is a trail for? Two extraordinary figures provide contrasting answers: J. Rayner Edmands and Warren W. Hart.
Edmands, an MIT-trained engineer and early AMC leader, was one of the most meticulous trail builders in White Mountain history. His paths climbed gradually, winding across slopes rather than heading directly uphill. He carefully graded tread and, above treeline, rearranged rocks to create remarkably stable walking surfaces. Cairns were positioned with similar precision. The Randolph Path, northern Gulfside Trail and Edmands Path still preserve his influence.
But why did Edmands build trails this way?
The answer isn’t entirely clear. Guy and Laura Waterman suggest several possible influences. Edmands had traveled in the West and observed graded mountain trails there. His wife’s physical limitations may have influenced his desire to make mountain paths easier to travel. It has also been suggested that he believed making the mountains accessible to more people could build public appreciation for them at a time when destructive logging threatened the White Mountains.
We should be cautious about assigning any one of these motives too much weight. What we can see much more clearly is what Edmands actually built.
Edmands seems to have understood a trail primarily as a means of passage through the mountains.
The mountain itself provided the wildness, difficulty and grandeur. The trail did not need to add unnecessary obstacles. His job as a trail builder was to find an intelligent route through the terrain and then construct a footway that allowed people to travel it. His oft-quoted principle, “Always rising, never steeply,” captures that philosophy remarkably well.
His reasons were not the same as ours. Edmands wasn’t considering climate resilience, recreation ecology or sustainable trail design in the modern sense. Nevertheless, the physical consequences of his philosophy look strikingly contemporary: follow the contours, moderate the grade, create a stable tread, and work with the terrain rather than simply clearing a route toward the summit.
Not everyone approved.
To some of Edmands’s contemporaries, these carefully engineered trails were too civilized. One early hiker contrasted the older “rough, scratchy” paths with Edmands’s trails, where hikers supposedly streamed up the mountain like a “transplanted tea party.” AMC itself noted in 1900 that it did not intend to construct Edmands-style smooth, graded “boulevards.”
A few years later, Warren Hart gave that idea spectacular physical form. As AMC’s Councillor of Improvements from 1908 to 1910, Hart and his crews developed an extraordinary constellation of trails in the Great Gulf, including Six Husbands, Adams Slide, Buttress, Wamsutta and Madison Gulf. Hart deliberately sought dramatic terrain. His trails climbed steep ridges, slides and ravines.
Difficulty was part of the experience
The Watermans write that while many trail builders were concerned with the comfort of future walkers, Hart wanted to challenge their imaginations. His trails brought hikers into direct contact with the roughness and wildness of the mountains.
So perhaps the Edmands-Hart contrast is best understood not as two different construction techniques, but as two different ideas of what a trail itself contributes to the mountain experience.
For Edmands, the trail was principally a passage through wild terrain. Good design allowed the hiker to experience the mountain without making the footway unnecessarily difficult.
For Hart, the trail could become part of the adventure itself. Its steepness, roughness and audacity could intensify the experience of wildness.
Edmands’s approach remained an exception in the White Mountains. The rougher tradition became deeply embedded in White Mountain hiking culture. We still celebrate “White Mountain miles,” rocks, roots, mud, scrambles and enormous stone steps. Difficulty has become part of the regional hiking identity.
However, a trail that is intentionally challenging is not the same thing as a trail that is physically sustainable.
That distinction mattered relatively little when a steep mountain path received modest use. It matters enormously when tens of thousands of people travel the same alignment every year. Boots loosen soil, water follows the trail downhill, rocks and roots emerge, hikers bypass obstacles, and the corridor widens. Add increasingly intense rainfall and the process accelerates.
What was once simply a rugged trail, under sustained heavy use, becomes an eroded trail.
And this is where Edmands suddenly seems surprisingly relevant more than a century later. We do not need to adopt his particular aesthetic or turn the White Mountains into a network of carefully manicured “boulevards.” But perhaps we need to recover the question that seems to have guided his work:
What does the trail actually need to do?
Sometimes its purpose may indeed be to offer challenge and adventure. But on a trail carrying tens of thousands of people through vulnerable terrain, its most important job may be something closer to Edmands’ conception: to provide a durable passage through the landscape while protecting the mountain landscape around it.
A New Player: The Federal Government
The next great transformation was institutional.
By the turn of the twentieth century, intensive logging and forest fires had devastated portions of the White Mountains. Trail clubs and conservation organizations that had helped create the recreational landscape also became advocates for protecting the landscape itself. The Weeks Act of 1911 authorized federal purchase of forest lands at the headwaters of navigable streams. Land acquisition in the White Mountains followed, and the White Mountain National Forest was formally established in 1918.
This fundamentally changed the institutional landscape, but it did not mean that government simply took over the trails. The recreational trail system predated the National Forest. The clubs, communities and organizations that had built it did not disappear when federal ownership arrived.
Instead, something unusual evolved. The federal government increasingly owned and managed the land, while nonprofit organizations and local trail clubs continued to maintain trails, operate facilities, organize volunteers and bring generations of accumulated knowledge to particular places.
The foundations were being laid for what we would now call a cooperative trail management system.
It was not created from a master plan. It grew organically from history. Government arrived after the trail clubs, and rather than replacing them, increasingly worked alongside them.
The Appalachian Trail and Cooperative Management
Then came an experiment on a continental scale.
Benton MacKaye proposed the Appalachian Trail in 1921, and the Appalachian Trail Conference was organized in 1925 to coordinate the growing network of clubs building the route from Georgia to Maine. From the beginning, volunteers and trail clubs played a central role in creating and caring for the trail. That cooperative tradition eventually developed into today’s formal management system involving the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, state agencies, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy and trail-maintaining clubs.
The relationship between this model and the White Mountains ran in both directions. White Mountain trail clubs had already demonstrated that nonprofit organizations and volunteers could create and maintain extensive public trail networks. The Appalachian Trail took that principle and organized it across thousands of miles and many jurisdictions. In turn, the AT helped reinforce and eventually formalize the cooperative model in places such as the White Mountains.
Today the National Park Service explicitly describes the Appalachian Trail as managed through a “cooperative management system.” Agreements underlying that partnership date to the 1930s, while federal legislation in 1968 and 1978 created the foundations of the modern system.
It was, and remains, a remarkable achievement. But it also embedded an assumption that becomes important later in our story: a substantial portion of the physical care of a public recreational resource could be provided through nonprofit organizations and volunteer labor.
Depression, War and a Changing Federal Role
The next two decades complicate any simple story of steadily increasing recreation.
The Great Depression certainly reduced the private means available to many people for travel and recreation. But it simultaneously brought an extraordinary expansion of public investment in conservation and recreational infrastructure. New Deal programs, particularly the Civilian Conservation Corps, put people to work building and improving trails, shelters, roads, campgrounds and other facilities on public lands.
For a time, government had something that today’s trail managers can only dream about: enormous numbers of people whose job was to care for public landscapes.
World War II reversed much of that. CCC operations ended, labor and materials were redirected to the war effort, and gasoline rationing and travel restrictions reduced recreational mobility. Nationally, recreation visits to National Forests fell from roughly 18 million in 1941 to around 6 million during the war. But this was a pause, not a reversal. When the war ended, an entirely different era of outdoor recreation began.
What If Edmands Had Prevailed?
Before following that story, it is worth returning briefly to Edmands.
What if his philosophy of carefully graded, contouring trails had become more influential in the White Mountains?
Our trails would probably be longer. They would traverse slopes more frequently. We would have more climbing turns and fewer direct ascents. Perhaps the White Mountains would feel somewhat less rugged. But we might also have inherited more trails whose basic alignments were better suited to the extraordinary levels of recreational use that were about to arrive.
That doesn’t mean Edmands was right and Hart was wrong. Nor does it mean an Edmands trail would somehow be immune to the impacts of modern use. Hart was designing an experience as much as a footway, and the rugged mountain experience his trails helped define is now an important part of White Mountain culture.
Neither man could have imagined the conditions under which these trails would operate more than a century later. The problem isn’t that our predecessors built the wrong trails.
The problem is that the world around those trails changed.
The Coming of the Lug-Soled Army
Guy and Laura Waterman gave the postwar transformation a memorable name: “The Coming of the Lug-Soled Army.” It is the title of a chapter in their Backwoods Ethics, and it captures an essential point in the history of recreational impact. Practices that had once caused relatively little damage when undertaken by a small number of hikers could have very different consequences when repeated by thousands.
After World War II, American recreation changed at extraordinary speed. Rising incomes, paid vacation time, widespread automobile ownership, improved highways, inexpensive gasoline, suburbanization and increasingly sophisticated outdoor equipment made the mountains accessible to far more people.
Nationally, recreation visits to National Forests rose from approximately 18 million in 1946 to more than 100 million by 1961, more than a fivefold increase in only fifteen years. The Forest Service itself later described the postwar period as the beginning of modern recreation on the National Forests and acknowledged that the agency struggled to keep pace with the surge.
The old rail-based tourism geography also gave way to an automobile geography. Instead of spending weeks at a grand hotel or boardinghouse, visitors could drive from Boston and other metropolitan areas, hike a mountain and return home. The mountains became accessible not simply to vacationers but to an expanding population of weekend recreationists.
The lug-soled army had arrived. And it kept growing.
By the late 1960s, the White Mountains were experiencing a backpacking boom severe enough to overwhelm an important part of the existing management system. AMC’s shelters and campsites faced increasing litter, proliferating campsites, sanitation problems and ecological damage. In 1970, AMC placed a seasonal caretaker at Liberty Springs, beginning what became its backcountry caretaker program. The caretaker wasn’t simply there to maintain a facility. Education, trail work, sanitation, restoration and managing visitor behavior became parts of the same job.
This was an early warning of the problem we face today.
The Twenty-First-Century Acceleration
The growth did not stop with the backpacking boom. Automobiles and highways continued to shrink the effective distance between the mountains and major population centers. Outdoor equipment became lighter and more accessible. Trail running and winter hiking expanded the seasons of use. And then digital technology changed the informational landscape.
Maps, GPS, websites, social media and eventually hiking apps dramatically reduced the knowledge once required to find and navigate a mountain trail. A visitor no longer necessarily needed a hiking club, an experienced companion, or even a guidebook to discover a route and follow it.
Then came COVID-19.
The pandemic did not create America’s interest in outdoor recreation, but it clearly accelerated it. University of New Hampshire researchers found that outdoor recreation visitation in New England National Forests increased by more than 60 percent during the summer of 2020, representing roughly two million additional visitors, most from out of state. Researchers documented associated social and ecological impacts as managers struggled with the sudden increase.
Some of that extraordinary pandemic surge subsided. But on Franconia Ridge, our own visitor counts show that very high use is not simply a 2020 anomaly. It is now part of the management environment.
We Inherited More Than the Trails
This brings us to what I think is the central historical lesson. We inherited not one thing, but three.
First, we inherited a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physical trail network, often steep, rocky and direct, built when recreational use was dramatically lower. Many of these trails are wonderful. Their routes, stonework, scrambles and peculiarities are part of the character of hiking in the White Mountains. But their original alignments were not designed for the numbers of people, or the environmental conditions, they experience today.
Second, we inherited a culture of hiking that values ruggedness and difficulty. The Hart tradition, broadly understood, became part of what distinguishes White Mountain hiking. Rocks, roots, mud, scrambles, steep climbs and “White Mountain miles” aren’t simply inconveniences. For many hikers, they are part of what makes these mountains special. Difficulty can confer authenticity: if the trail is hard, rocky and unforgiving, it somehow feels more genuinely White Mountains.
That culture is worth preserving. But it can also make us reluctant to distinguish between difficulty that contributes to the experience and difficulty that results from poor alignment, erosion or deterioration. A scramble up a dramatic rocky ridge may be precisely what we want to preserve. A deeply eroded fall-line trail doesn’t become valuable simply because it is difficult to walk.
Third, we inherited a management system whose roots lie in the same period: public agencies, nonprofit trail organizations, local clubs, professional crews and an extraordinary amount of volunteer labor working cooperatively to care for a shared recreational resource.
There is much to admire in that system. Its durability is remarkable. Organizations have cared for particular mountains and trails for more than a century. Volunteers have contributed enormous amounts of labor. Local knowledge has accumulated across generations. The Appalachian Trail turned cooperative management into one of the great experiments in public-private stewardship in the United States, and that model remains very much alive today.
But a management system can be historically successful and still become mismatched with changing conditions. The cooperative system developed when recreational use was lower, trail construction was comparatively inexpensive, volunteer maintenance could address much of the routine workload, and deterioration often occurred slowly enough for periodic intervention.
All three inheritances now interact.
We have a legacy trail network carrying levels of use for which it was never designed. We have a hiking culture that can sometimes make fundamental trail redesign difficult to contemplate. And we have a cooperative management system whose institutions, funding mechanisms and division of responsibilities evolved under very different conditions.
None of these inheritances is something I would want to discard. The question is how we carry forward what is valuable in each of them while changing what no longer works.
A Perfect Storm
We now have an inherited network of steep, rocky legacy trails carrying levels of use their builders could never have imagined. More intense rainfall places additional stress on drainage and tread. Sustainable professional trail construction has become more sophisticated and expensive. Public resources are limited. Nonprofit organizations have broader missions and competing priorities. Volunteers are sometimes being asked to maintain drainage systems and structures that require attention repeatedly throughout a season. Technology has simultaneously transformed access and visitor behavior.
The result is what I increasingly see as a perfect storm for White Mountain trails.
We cannot solve it simply by recruiting more volunteers to clean more waterbars. We cannot solve it with massive construction projects that leave trails unfinished and without maintenance programs. Nor can we rebuild nineteenth-century trail alignments one damaged section at a time without asking whether those alignments, construction standards and management arrangements still make sense.
We need to decide which historic rugged trails should remain rugged and which high-use trails require fundamentally different design standards. We need to distinguish trails that can reasonably be maintained primarily by volunteers from those requiring continuous professional management. Trail construction needs to be integrated with visitor management, ecological monitoring and stewardship. And whatever we build needs a funding and organizational system capable of maintaining it.
The Franconia Ridge Loop Restoration has helped convince me of this. Nearly $2 million can be invested in one of the most important trail systems in the White Mountains, tremendous work can be accomplished, and five years later we can still find ourselves saying: the work has only begun.
The White Mountains have reinvented their relationship with trails before. Nineteenth-century clubs created recreational trail networks where none existed. The creation of the White Mountain National Forest brought government into a landscape whose recreational infrastructure had largely been created by private organizations. The Appalachian Trail helped develop and formalize an extraordinary cooperative model linking public agencies, nonprofits and volunteers. The postwar recreation boom led to professional trail crews, caretakers and new approaches to visitor education and backcountry stewardship.
Each innovation responded to a new set of conditions.
The question for the next article is not whether we should abandon the cooperative model that has served the White Mountains for more than a century. Quite the opposite. The question is how we reinvent it again.
What would a twenty-first-century cooperative trail management system for the White Mountains actually look like?
Selected Sources and Further Reading
Waterman, Guy, and Laura Waterman. Forest and Crag: A History of Hiking, Trail Blazing, and Adventure in the Northeast Mountains. Appalachian Mountain Club Books, 1989.
The principal historical source for the development of northeastern hiking and trail building, including the contrasting trail-building philosophies of J. Rayner Edmands and Warren Hart.
Waterman, Laura, and Guy Waterman. Backwoods Ethics: Environmental Issues for Hikers and Campers. Stone Wall Press, 1979; expanded edition, Countryman Press, 1993.
Particularly relevant is the chapter “The Coming of the Lug-Soled Army,” examining how increasing numbers of backcountry users transformed the environmental consequences of recreational behavior.
Waterman, Laura, and Guy Waterman. Wilderness Ethics: Preserving the Spirit of Wildness. Countryman Press, 1993.
Extends the Watermans’ thinking from individual low-impact behavior to broader questions of wilderness, stewardship, recreation and management.
U.S. Forest Service / Weeks Act historical materials.
Historical accounts of the Weeks Act of 1911, federal land acquisition in the eastern United States, and establishment of the White Mountain National Forest in 1918.
National Park Service, Appalachian National Scenic Trail. Partners and historical materials on the Appalachian Trail.
Documents the evolution of the AT’s cooperative management system involving the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, Appalachian Trail Conservancy, state agencies and volunteer trail clubs.
U.S. Forest Service. Historical recreation-use reports.
Forest Service statistics document the postwar increase in National Forest recreation from approximately 18 million visits in 1946 to more than 100 million in 1961, illustrating the extraordinary scale of the postwar outdoor-recreation boom.
Appalachian Mountain Club. AMC Backcountry Caretaker Program Turns 50.
A useful account of the late-1960s White Mountain backpacking boom and AMC’s 1970 experiment at Liberty Springs, which evolved into the modern backcountry caretaker program.
Ferguson, Michael D., and colleagues, University of New Hampshire. Research on outdoor recreation during the COVID-19 pandemic in New England National Forests.
Documents an increase of more than 60 percent in outdoor recreation visitation during summer 2020 and examines associated social and ecological impacts.
Green Mountain Club. Discussion of the Watermans’ Backwoods Ethics/The Green Guide, Long Trail News, Summer 2017. A useful retrospective on the Watermans’ “lug-soled army” argument and their observation that increasing numbers can transform previously acceptable recreational practices into significant environmental impacts.
