To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower.
WILLIAM BLAKE
MOUNT FUJI, JAPAN’S graceful symbol of purity and spirituality, has become a mess from top to bottom. One quarter of a million people ascend the sacred peak during summer months, and they leave a preposterous volume of trash behind. Authorities have installed automatic can crushers along the trampled path. The great peak bears despondent testimony to the detrimental effects of tourism run rampant.
Here in our backyard we witnessed a similar desecration of (we’ll concede) a considerably lesser mountain shrine, New Hampshire’s beautiful Franconia Ridge. We don’t get nearly a quarter of a million people here, but we get plenty enough to create an environmental impact that might be called, in technical terms, wicked awesome. Probably awesome and definitely wicked.
By 1977 the Franconia Ridge was in very bad shape as a result of heavy and indiscriminate hiking traffic. The struggle to find ways to save and restore the alpine vegetation on that ridge makes an interesting case study in humanity’s efforts to undo its own mischief, to make amends to an abused and uncommonly picturesque crease on the earth’s surface.
The Franconia Ridge is a narrow, elongated uplift running for almost 10 miles over such peaks as Osseo, Flume, Liberty, Little Haystack, Lincoln, Lafayette, and North Lafayette. For about 2 miles, from just south of Little Haystack to just north of North Lafayette, the ridge soars above treeline, with steep drops on both sides, spectacular rock formations, breathtaking vistas, and a lush display alpine vegetation—rich swells of diapensia, fields of Labrador tea and of alpine cranberry, splashes of vivid mountain avens, with the ubiquitous mountain sandwort enlivening the lovely scene everywhere. The Franconia Ridge Trail had existed since the early nineteenth century with very informal markings, only a few cairns in scattered array.
By the 1970s, with the increasing traffic of that decade, the ridge was being loved to death. Between Lafayette and Little Haystack especially, vegetation had been kicked away in wide swaths, as hikers wandered indiscriminately over the ridge. On the shoulder just below Lafayette’s summit, a strip as much as 100 feet across was brown where it had once been green. On a subsidiary hump between Lafayette and Lincoln—known to Franconia Ridge insiders as Truman (though whether so named by Democrats to honor or Republicans to insult is not known, it being just a little hump)—a rabbit warren of different paths etched scars in the vegetation. Just south of the top of Lincoln, another wide belt of flora had been lost to hikers covering a yards-wide path instead of a single footway.
As the authors Bruce and Doreen Bolnick have expressed, “Sometimes ‘leaving nothing but footsteps’ is leaving too much.”
“Your feet’s too big.”
ADA BENSON AND FRED FISHER (TITLE OF A POPULAR 1936 SONG MADE FAMOUS BY THOMAS “FATS” WALLER)
BEGINNING IN 1977, officials of the White Mountain National Forest (WMNF) and the Trail Crew of the Appalachian Mountain Club took decisive action to do something about this crisis. Following directions indicated by WMNF, the AMC Trail Crew marked out a 3-foot-wide trail corridor all the way from Little Haystack to Lafayette. This was the first place where extensive use was made of “scree walls,” low borders of rock on each side of the trail, normally about 1 foot high.
This was a radical innovation. Controversy ensued: A few hikers were highly critical of the artificial “Chinese Wall” that had suddenly been imposed on the previously unmanaged landscape. Those critics charged that the mountain experience was inexcusably degraded by the “sidewalk” look. If you’ve read the first edition of this book, you’ll recall we welcomed that original trail work about the way Rome welcomed Attila the Hun. We were about equally effective in stopping it. Well, we and most other critics acknowledged that the environmental havoc could not have gone ignored much longer, but the wild character of that magnificent ridge seemed to have been violated.
The problem is the classic one of preservation versus use. Can we save alpine flowers and also save the spirit of wildness that they symbolize? What is at stake on the Franconia Ridge is a microcosm of the challenge for backcountry management everywhere. How can we preserve the physical resource and the wild mountain experience at the same time?
Within three years—in 1980—the AMC launched its Adopt-a-Trail program. The authors were signed up right away to maintain the Franconia Ridge. From the role of critics, we were suddenly handed the responsibility of “doing something” ourselves. Our bluff was called.
When the second edition came out in 1992, we had been working on that trail for 13 summers. It is not like most trail maintenance assignments, where you clear water bars and blowdown each spring and fall and get back maybe once or twice during the summer to clip brush, freshen paint blazes, or deal with some special problems. Our ridge trail needs constant attention. For 13 years we made an effort to get up there at least once every three weeks between May and October, occasionally more often. One of us has climbed that ridge (as of July 4, 1992) 229 times since 1980, usually with the other of us, and sometimes with friends who generously help in the fascinating and demanding work.
It has been 13 years of education for us. We have much yet to learn. We set out to try what could be done to keep hikers on one trail for 1.7 miles between Little Haystack and Lafayette, while, if possible, minimizing the artificial visual blight of one long scree wall corridor. We have learned that this mission is a surprisingly complex and subtle one, that answers do not come easily or quickly, but must be earned by long observation, hard thinking about the problem, and consultation with anyone and everyone who might have ideas, including many passing hikers themselves.
Gradually, painfully, with much trial and much error, as well as much observation of hikers and discussion with friends, at least a dozen strategies have evolved and been implemented on the Franconia Ridge.
Step 1: Scree Walls
Scree walls remain the first step to traffic control in alpine areas. But where the scree comes from is of no little note. When trail builders first began constructing scree wall, they seized any rock lying around in the tundra and eagerly pried it up for use in their wall. Then alpine ecologists emitted a cry of dismay: Often individual rocks form a key part of the microhabitat that alpine plants require to maintain their precarious hold on life above treeline. So now wall builders are asked to select rock with care: much better to bring them up from jumbles of rocks or other more desolate places. Those tundra rocks that shelter a minigrove of diapensia or mountain cranberry—leave them in place.
When we began work on the Franconia Ridge, one of the first things we noticed was that, for all the sharp visual impact of those long walls, they were not doing the job of keeping hikers on one trail. Doubtless they helped. But we quickly noticed that hikers were leaving the trail much too often all along the ridge.
Whatever you may read elsewhere about scree walls being “effective in protecting alpine habitat from hiker trampling,” we can report unequivocally, based on our years of careful observation, that on the Franconia Ridge at least, scree walls alone were not solving the problem. Hikers were not staying within the walls enough to allow the impacted flora to recover. Observed vegetative recovery is due to the cumulative effect of a broad range of other strategies. As long as scree walls were the sole reliance, significantly large and numerous areas of continuing unacceptable impact were apparent.
What was wrong? If the scree walls were not working, what could be done to make them more effective? How could the hiking traffic be encouraged to stay on the designated trail, short of building 3-foot-high fences or arresting violators on sight—both totally unacceptable for maintaining the mountain experience on that magnificent ridge?
Step 2: Cairns
The traditional marking for above-treeline trails, cairns, had been sadly neglected on the Franconia Ridge. Except for the first half mile north of Little Haystack, there were virtually none left. Many had been dismantled to obtain rock for the scree walls. Some that were left were as much as 10 or 20 feet outside the scree walls and thus were counterproductive.
So, we began building cairns, trying to be careful about where we got rock. We started at the places where most people often left the trail. Soon, we found there is much more to proper cairning than just throwing a few rocks together at intervals. To be effective, a cairn must catch the hiker’s eye at just the right moment, so as to direct his or her steps onto the trail. This means care for the visual background against which the cairn will be seen. Ideally it should stand out on the skyline at the critical moment you want it seen—sky, not more rocks, behind it. At the least, it definitely should not blend into a background of similarly colored rocks. It must be clearly on the trail, so as not to pull people off it. Yet if it is too much in the line of traffic, it will be knocked down as hikers stumble against it. Exact placement of cairns requires far more thought than we had first realized.
Step 3: Paint
Paint blazes help channel traffic. But too liberal smearing of paint is a visual blot on natural scenery. Still, where other steps are not working, a strategically placed blaze or arrow can make a difference in steering traffic.
Step 4: Water Bar “Bridges”
We began to notice a lot of contributing problems that could be dealt with individually. Wherever there is a water bar, the ditch tends to look like the trail, and people may turn into the ditch and out on to the vegetation we’re trying to protect. So, all along the ridge, wherever there are drainage ditches, we find long rocks that can be placed across the water bar at the edge of the trail, as a bridge. This breaks up the trail-like look of the ditch. Building bridges over water bars implies a commitment to tending them regularly: they tend to catch rubble and fill in, so one must clear under bridges often.
If the bridge has too flat a surface on top, it may look like an inviting stepping-stone. If too many hikers stomp on it, they may dislodge it. Also, they may use it as a stepping-stone that carries them in the wrong direction, off the trail. Therefore, it has to be made unfit for stepping on. The remedy is to gather a few smaller, random-shaped rocks and pebbles and scatter them over the surface of the bridge rock. Someone has called these smaller stones our “barbed wire.”
Step 5: Removing Loose Rock
We noticed that people don’t like to tread on loose rock and do like to step on smooth surfaces. So we make a point of not letting three weeks go by without walking the trail and chucking each loose rock out of it and onto the area immediately adjacent to the trail. This is an exceedingly important step. During the course of a week or two there will be an inevitable accumulation of loose rock casually kicked into the trail. It must be removed, or people may start going off the trail to avoid it.
Step 6: Reducing High Steps
Hikers do not like high steps. They’ll go out of their way—and out of the trail onto the tundra—to avoid stepping up more than about 6 to 9 inches in one step. The 1977–78 trail work included many rock steps that exceeded that height, and each such step became a place where people were getting off trail. One remedy is to provide an intermediate step alongside each high one.
Step 7: Shoring Up Eroding Banks
One consequence of the worn trail bed is that wind and wind-driven rain now scour the exposed turf on the side of the trail. This appears as an undercutting of the turf and vegetation alongside the trail in many places. The remedy we’ve tried for this problem is to embed rocks into the turf where it is undercut. The hope is that such rocks will prevent further wind or water erosion and provide a point of stability for the gradual restoration of soil and turf in and around the rocks.
Step 8: Sufficiently Wide Paths
If the idea is to keep folks on trail, it is vital that the trail be wide enough for passing. If too narrow, it forces hikers out onto the vegetation just to get by each other. Slowly we work at widening the track at critical points, a little bit each year.
Step 9: “Room at the Top”
On the major summits, there is no way hikers will stay within a 3-foot-wide track. When 50 or 80 people congregate on the top of Lafayette or Lincoln or Little Haystack—numbers that we often count on popular weekends with good weather—nothing will stop them from fanning out to sit down and have lunch or see the view.
This happens not only on summits; we have gradually observed that wherever there is a short rise in the ridge, hikers display a strong tendency to wander a bit. Where the ridge dips, they’ll stay on trail, but where it climbs to a new height, they simply won’t stay within a 3-foot corridor in many instances. Perhaps they seek a rest after coming uphill, perhaps they stop to look at the view, perhaps they wait for slower friends—whatever the reason, the tops of rises are vulnerable points. Others have also found this to be true. In her landmark study of hiker patterns on Mount Mansfield and Camel’s Hump, Vermont’s Kathleen Reilly found that most visitors left the trail at high points where they thought a good view was obtainable.
So on both summits and intermediate rises we try to preserve the credibility of the scree walls by pushing them back and allowing hikers “room at the top.” Yes, this sacrifices some vegetation, but that’s happening anyway, because hikers won’t abide by unrealistic constraints at such points. Our theory is that it is better to concede the space they require, and then work hard to save the vegetation beyond that point. When in doubt, we consult with the White Mountain National Forest rangers and abide by their instructions as to how wide an area to concede and where to draw the line.
Step 10: Scrub Obstacles
On Truman we found that nothing we did could stop a certain minority from leaving the trail to wander. A shortage of loose rock on that summit precluded higher scree walls or more prominent cairns. Yet the ugly blight of trampled vegetation was unacceptable. What to do?
Again we consulted with forest personnel and requested permission to go down into the krummholz and cut scattered dead trees, bring them up, and line the trail at critical points where people seemed to be leaving it. A gnarly, twisty, prickly, thorny piece of dead scrub is a spectacularly repellent obstacle to leaving the trail. Backcountry Ranger Roger Collins not only secured permission for this measure but personally helped us cut and drag up the dead scrub. It turned out to be a very effective deterrent to wandering hikers and went a long way toward solving that persistent problem on Truman.
Several precautions on the use of dead scrub: We exercise great care not to remove too many dead trees from the same place, because we don’t want to give the wind a chance to punish the adjacent scrub too severely and open a wide belt of killed vegetation. Nor do we want to open up an inviting tent site! Also, it is important to secure the dead scrub in place effectively, remembering that terrific winds will do their best to rearrange the furniture. And, most important, cutting trees, dead or alive, should absolutely never be undertaken without the permission of the backcountry manager responsible for that area.
The scrub tactic has had a completely unforeseen side effect of fairly important significance. After two or three years we noticed that the native vegetation leaps back much faster around the base of the shrub than elsewhere. Apparently the scrub provides protection from the wind, a catch basin for seed and organic matter, and a condensation point for moisture. These and perhaps other factors greatly accelerate the regrowth of vegetation. Because that’s what the whole battle’s about—restoring the vegetation—this is major good news.
Step 11: Yogi’s Maxim
Dr. Lawrence Peter Berra, that eminent scholar of baseball and innovative linguistics, once stated: “You can observe a lot just by watching.” This maxim applies to alpine trail work. We spend many hours unobtrusively watching our fellow hikers and trying to understand why they leave the trail at point X or stay or stay on at point Y. Human behavior is without question the most obscure subject in the field of knowledge, and we feel there’s much yet to understand about human alpine-areas behavior. But close observation has been of great value in learning how to apply many of the preceding tactics.
Here is one interesting observation: Go south from the summit of Lafayette and you find scree walls, cairns, and a wide range of other measures to keep people on trail, but only imperfect success and wide areas of blighted vegetation as yet unrecovered. Go north from Lafayette and you find hardly any scree or other measures, except a positively regal line of stately cairns, fashioned by the trail adopters, Barbara and Charles Kukla. But despite the relative dearth of scree walls, dead scrub, or other tactics, a single narrow hiker’s track threads through lush beds of vegetation most of the way. Why the difference? You tell us. But here’s one theory.
Consider the extremely heavy use by day hikers south of Lafayette and the virtual monopoly of overnight campers north of that summit. Day hikers have light packs or none, feel free to skip around, and include many inexperienced folk who are simply unaware that there is any problem up there. If you turn north from Lafayette, you’re probably on an overnight trip, carry a large pack, and thus have business to attend to (getting that pack from here to there). Further, chances are you’ve heard about the environmental concerns up there. It is an interesting contrast.
Step 12: Help!
Alpine zone management is a relatively new art. There are no real experts yet. Some have learned a lot in the past few years, and we make every effort to learn from them. If they’re willing to walk the Franconia Ridge with us, we go over all the problems we’ve identified and ask counsel on solutions. A lot of officials of the White Mountain National Forest have been extraordinarily helpful, as was Edwin H. Ketchledge, the preeminent alpine ecologist of the Adirondacks, and Brian T. Fitzgerald, when he was a leader of the Green Mountain Club of Vermont, not to mention the West End Trail Tenders, a group of energetic and creative AMC volunteers who maintain adjacent trails in the Franconia area. Many other experienced hikers or even passing day-trippers come up with good ideas, shrewd observations, or innovative suggestions. We mine ideas wherever we can find them. Readers of this book: Do you have any suggestions for us?
Help can also take a more direct physical form. Probably a score or more of our friends have spent a day or two on the ridge with us, building a cairn here, repairing a water bar there, placing scrub, picking up loose rubble, or watching the passing parade to see how a particular problem might be addressed. And not only friends: Sometimes if we’re working on a particular problem, passing hikers will drop their packs and join in. Surely another score of people we’d never met before and may never see again contributed significant labor to the work of the Franconia Ridge during the 1980s.
These are just a dozen measures we can think of; doubtless we’re forgetting a dozen more. Perhaps others who have worked on other alpine zones could name two dozen more.
We wish we could report that the purely physical obstacles and inducements to keeping people on trail solved the problem. They didn’t. They’re a good starting point, an essential step. But something more is needed, or people will still get out and wander over fragile vegetation to an unacceptable degree. That additional need is the subject of the next saga.
Soap and education are not as sudden as a massacre, but they are more deadly in the long run.
MARK TWAIN
IN THE LONG, quiet battle to preserve the alpine areas, these physical obstacles we’ve described are not completely effective, and we suspect they never could be. Even the best-placed array of screes, cairns, scrub, blazes, and other techniques is not sufficient. People still wander.
In the long run, education is the key to humans treating the alpine zone less destructively. You have to reach people’s minds, not just their feet. What we need in the minute alpine zones of the northeastern United States is but an application in microcosm of a global principle found in a study, “Conserving Biological Diversity” by John C. Ryan, for the World Watch Institute’s report, State of the World, 1992:
Over the past decade, many park managers have come to realize that the survival of protected areas depends ultimately on the support of local people, rather than on fences, fines, and even armed force.
Education above the trees may take several forms. In escalating order of effectiveness, consider: signs; media messages; direct in-person contact on the site; and involvement.
Educational Signs
When we started work on the Franconia Ridge, no one was telling hikers what the problem was and why they should keep on trail. So we borrowed an idea from Vermont’s Green Mountain Club and the Adirondacks: educational signs, placed right at treeline. (Treeline rather than the trailhead starting point: People seem to forget the message after a couple of hours of hiking uphill.)
We had a lot to learn about signs. The first ones we asked the Appalachian Mountain Club to make for us came out (1) written in small print; (2) full of jargon; and (3) negative: “thou shalt not” leave the trail. We put those signs up, and kept putting them up over and over, because they kept getting torn down by people who apparently resented them.
Then we heard something from a real sharp New York State ranger, C. Peter Fish. According to Ranger Fish’s story, the Adirondack rule once was: You can camp anywhere except where their is a NO CAMPING sign. This rule was poorly obeyed and violators rarely caught, because the signs kept disappearing. So they changed the rule to say: no camping anywhere except where there was a CAMPING ALLOWED sign, or words to that effect. Those signs were never taken. Moral: Keep the message positive.
So we wrote our own sign and got the national forest’s approval for the wording. Hand-lettered, the message was positive:
ALPINE ZONE
THE VEGETATION HERE ABOVE TREELINE
IS BEAUTIFUL—BUT FRAGILE. PLEASE
STAY ON TRAIL OR ON THE ROCKS. HELP
PRESERVE THE ALPINE ZONE. THANK YOU.
We feel the most important words are please and thank you. These signs not only were never taken down but never had a touch of graffiti on them. The weather proved less respectful, however, and took its toll on our hand-lettered efforts. Eventually the forest staff replaced ours with more permanent signs, but kept the same positive message.
More recently the national forest staff has created a trailside sign for more general use wherever trails emerge from below treeline to any alpine area in the White Mountain National Forest. These signs also use the purely positive approach:
WELCOME TO THE
ALPINE ZONE
ENJOY THE FRAGILE BEAUTY.
BE A CARING STEWARD.
STAY ON THE TRAIL OR WALK ON BARE ROCKS.
CAMP ONLY BELOW TIMBERLINE.
COOK ON A STOVE.
HELP PRESERVE THE DELICATE BALANCE OF THE ALPINE ZONE.
IT’S A TOUGH PLACE TO GROW.
In our view that’s a first-rate message to be sending to everyone who enters the alpine zone. Note that it doesn’t say: “NO CAMPING above timberline,” but “CAMP only below timberline.” It doesn’t say “NO FIRES,” it says “COOK on a stove.” Note that it invites each hiker to “HELP preserve” the alpine area. In almost every way this sign is a splendid example of good communication. (We would have added “thank you” at the end.) These signs, be it further noted, are placed at treeline, just before the hiker steps out on the alpine area. Experience seems to show, though more could be learned on this point, that hikers will respond better to a sign seen right there on the spot, as opposed to one way down at the roadside, which neither registers meaningfully down there nor stays with their consciousness well enough through the hours of ascent.
A variation of this theme is used out West in Mount Rainier National Park. There the problem is the fragile alpine meadows, so easily damaged when visitors wander indiscriminately. So the folks at Mount Rainier have come up with a variety of educational approaches. The one that grabs our fancy is a little lapel button that reads DON’T BE A MEADOW STOMPER. They report that it has a salutary educational effect—and adds that important step of personal involvement when visitors themselves put on a button. Hearing about this program, some northeastern groups are copying Rainier’s idea, but adapting the message appropriately (since we have not meadows but tundra) to read: DON’T BE A TUNDRA TRAMPLER.
Media Messages
Through broader media, much has been done in recent years to educate the hiking public on environmental concerns. Backcountry managers like the White Mountain National Forest staff, clubs like the AMC, magazines like Backpacker, responsible outfitters like REI, EMS, and L. L. Bean, all have helped to raise public awareness of the fragility of the mountain beauty we all enjoy.
An excellent positive example is a National Geographic Society book on the Appalachian Trail, Mountain Adventure. A stunning photo of hikers on the Franconia Ridge (part of the AT) has a short but clear caption ending: “The trudging party carefully keeps on the stony path, protecting alpine tundra from an eroding stream of footsteps.” Messages like that, in such widely read places, help a lot.
The converse also holds true: Media messages that trumpet the wrong thing have a dreadful adverse effect. Recently Sierra Designs ran splashy color advertisements with a photo showing one of their fancy tents spread out right on a patch of alpine vegetation, with three climbers standing around crunching vegetation too, with the caption:
Tested on Mt. Washington.
One of Sierra Designs’ testing labs is the summit of Mt. Washington, location of the highest recorded wind speeds on earth. Here, where conditions are at their worst, we found the ideal spot to test our tents for wind durability, tent pole strength, guy point placement and aerodynamics.
At a time when camping above treeline on Mount Washington has been prohibited since the early 1970s, what a message to be sending out! The authors of that ad, the climbers who posed, and the photographer who snapped the picture ought to be strung up on a high tree well below treeline. And the highest limbs should be reserved for (1) the marketing manager who conceived the idea and (2) the land manager who approved the use of that patch of tundra for such an inexcusably destructive purpose.
Education Person-to-Person
Effective education means much more than a sign or two, or a lot of good press. In the ideal case it means direct, person-to-person, low-key educational encounters.
The superior effectiveness of direct interpersonal education was recognized early in Vermont. That state’s Green Mountains have but two small alpine areas, a very small one on Camel’s Hump and a longer exposed ridge on Vermont’s highest peak, Mount Mansfield. State officials and the Green Mountain Club were quick to perceive the growing problem of hiker impact during the 1960s. By 1969 state official Rodney Barber had designated a ranger to have full-time responsibility for patrolling the alpine zone on Mansfield. This was a radical, path-breaking move, and one pregnant for the future of alpine-area management. During the early 1970s GMC joined forces with the state to put together a small force of “ranger-naturalists”—note the polyglot terminology—to be on top of both Mansfield and Camel’s Hump almost all the daylight hours during the hiking season.
The ranger-naturalists provide “low-key on-site educational encounters with the hiking public.” Their job is to meet just about every hiking party as it reaches the alpine area, fall into casual, nonthreatening, friendly conversation, and make sure the message is understood: This alpine vegetation is beautiful, but fragile. Please walk on the trail or on rocks. Help preserve this unique alpine community so future generations can enjoy it too.
A key point is that they see their role as educators, not policemen. Former GMC leader Ken Boyd described ranger-naturalists as “public relations people, historians, environmentalists, guides, and a friend to all hikers.”
The effectiveness of Vermont’s ranger-naturalist program has been unmatched among northeastern alpine areas. A University of Vermont expert summed up the results thus:
Since the inception of this program, the condition of the alpine tundra has improved noticeably. Scars from campfires and camping have healed. Areas that were trampled and barren of vegetation have again become covered with plants. The ranger-naturalists report that most visitors they approach are eager to cooperate and are appreciative of the effort to politely alert them about the fragileness of the area and the reasons for the regulations.
Today Mount Mansfield’s magnificent summit ridge requires fewer physical obstacles than most alpine areas because the ranger-naturalist is a far more effective inducement to good hiker behavior. The carrot works ever so much better than the stick.
During a comprehensive statewide recreational planning process in 1988, a state task group examined eight categories of “natural areas” in Vermont. Seven of the eight were found to be significantly impacted and to require at least three pages each of recommendations for protective action. Alpine areas alone required but a single page and no recommendations, because, the task group noted:
An ongoing 18-year program of tundra surveillance by summer ranger-naturalists has been effective in controlling visitor impacts and halting loss of tundra in this way.
The statement also credited “interpretive signs and literature” with playing a useful educational role.
In the Adirondacks, managers have paid Vermont’s program the sincerest form of flattery: They’ve imitated it. Beginning in the summer of 1990, a “Summit Steward” program was launched through the cooperation of the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK), The Nature Conservancy, and the state. This program puts young people on the tops of the Adirondacks’ most vulnerable summits to meet hikers and talk with them. These stewards, like their counterparts in Vermont, meet with very constructive reactions from the hiking public. “I found everyone very willing to oblige once they were made aware of the problem,” reported one of the first year’s Summit Stewards.
Ranger–naturalists or alpine steward programs in the White Mountains seem, for managers, to be less of a priority than they are for the clubs and public agencies in the Green Mountains or in the Adirondacks. The exception being two lovely little adjacent peaks in the Sandwich Range called Mounts Welch and Dickey. Rising to little more than 2,500 feet, they have no true alpine area. However, both peaks exhibit extensive open ledges, with islands of fragile vegetation between. The problem of hiker impact on these islands of vegetation bears a lot of similarity to the problems of alpine areas.
Under the leadership of the Sandwich Range Conservation Association and its dynamic young executive director, Nat Scrimshaw, a modest attempt to emulate the ranger-naturalist idea was launched in 1990. The SRCA found the funds for a small trail crew, then hired one more person than was needed for that crew. Each day, taking turns, one member of that crew went up Welch and Dickey to function as as ranger-naturalist, engaging in low-key educational encounters with passing hikers. Today, the Rey Center carries on Nat Scrimshaw’s work.
You can learn something from any venture, whether completely successful or not. SRCA found that their program had limited effectiveness. The problem seemed to be one of focus on the part of the participating individuals. It seems universally true that young people who work fulltime on trail restoration and maintenance develop a perfectly splendid esprit de corps and sense of accomplishment through hard work, comradeship, and often literally blood, sweat, and tears—or at least mud, sweat, and uproarious good fellowship. This is the positive side. It seems to be almost a law of life, however, that these positive characteristics become associated with a certain alienation from the hiking public. The trail crew perceives the passing hikers as generally inexperienced in mountain ways and often as ignorantly contributing to trail erosion problems. It is next to impossible for a trail crew to develop its own strong camaraderie and also a friendly respect for other hikers.
Now, a ranger-naturalist simply cannot be effective unless he or she starts from a position of genuine respect and empathy toward other hikers. If there is contempt, it will show. If there is positive enthusiasm for shared values, that will show too—and produce true education. In the Sandwich Range it didn’t work for someone to work fulltime for four days in the hard, sweaty, muddy, richly satisfying work of trail repair, and then take one day off to meet the public in the right spirit.
No matter: What SRCA learned is information that it and all other areas can profit from. One of the important developments of the late 1980s that continues today has been that managers of alpine areas are exchanging information, learning from each other, and adapting programs from one range and applying them with new touches to other areas.
In the summer of 1991 SRCA hired one person specifically for full-time responsibility on the open ledges of Welch and Dickey. They hit it lucky on their choice: an offbeat, nontraditional, extremely observant and shrewd ecologist-teacher by the name of Dick Fortin. Since then, Welch Mountain’s little quasialpine areas have become a hotbed of interesting experimental approaches to on-site education and public involvement. Every alpine area in the Northeast will profit from what’s being learned on Welch Mountain through the innovative approaches of Scrimshaw, Fortin, the SRCA, and, at present, the Rey Center.
Elsewhere in the White Mountains, the approach for years has relied primarily on physical obstacles for keeping people on trail. Though that has changed to include some degree of an alpine steward presence, funds are minimal for direct educational encounters of the kind that work so well in Vermont and the Adirondacks. In part these managers hypothesize that educational programs are too vulnerable to budget cuts and hence transitory, while passive approaches like scree walls are permanent. We disagree on both counts: As we have found on the Franconia Ridge, scree walls are definitely not permanent unless well maintained by constant repair; meanwhile, educational efforts in the Green Mountains have been continuously funded since the 1970s (on lower budgets than those available in the Whites)—and, once set in motion, who knows where the influence of effective education stops, as converted hikers become ongoing evangelists with other hikers, and the message spreads.
The Appalachian Mountain Club runs a “Hut Naturalist” program, under which volunteer naturalists agree to stay overnight at a hut, and in exchange for free meals and lodging they give a walk and talk for others guests after dinner. For our Franconia Ridge work, we often stay at nearby Greenleaf Hut and give such a talk. This is flying under false colors to a degree, since we are not really competent naturalists, but we can tell folks a bit about the ridge, and it gives us a chance to bring up the environmental problems in a strong way. Other hut naturalists give similar talks, and most mention environmental concerns. The Greenleaf crews have been supportive and stress this environmental message in their numerous contacts with the hiking public, including passing day hikers. In 1990 AMC posted a handsome educational sign in the hut, and this is kept up to date.
This is all on the plus side, but the hut audience is only a small fraction of the total hiking population. How to reach the bulk of the hikers on the Franconia Ridge? We try to work on the trail on weekends, and passing hikers often ask us what we’re doing. They asked us—so they get a full answer. This is also a small fraction of the total, though if we talk with 30 passing hikers each summer, over 10 years that amounts to possibly 300 ridge hikers, and perhaps some of them pass on the message. They always seem receptive, interested, and quick to share the concern for that wonderful environment.
But in the long run, we think these hit-and-miss educational efforts are ineffective compared with the constant presence of Vermont’s ranger-naturalists, New York’s Summit Stewards, and the Sandwich Range’s version of direct on-site education.
Involvement
Even more lasting in its influence on people’s thinking is direct personal involvement. We can give you a few examples that have occurred to us over the years on the Franconia Ridge. Each turned into a work-involved encounter with people: people whose lives, however briefly, touched ours and who made an important contribution, no matter how small, to a unique alpine place; people who, because of the work they contributed, will see this place and every other alpine zone a little differently ever after. We remember:
A Boy Scout troop (Troop 12 from Hollis, New Hampshire) that helped us build a crucial cairn near the summit of Lafayette. We gave a talk after dinner at Greenleaf Hut one night. After our talk the scout leader from Troop 12 came and asked us if his scouts could do anything to help on the morrow. Well, we said, there’s one place we know where we have to build a brand-new cairn, a good-sized one. We’re going to need a lot of big flat rocks, and they aren’t too close by. Sure, they could help! This energetic boy-power enthusiastically spread out and collected numerous big rocks from far and yon. Then it turned out that the three or four adult leaders were all engineers from Boston research organizations. These engineers had a wonderful lot of fun erecting a huge monolith of cairn. They became so absorbed with getting each rock perfectly stable that we finally just could sit back and watch. We told them we’d forever after refer to that as the Troop 12 cairn, and we still do. We also told them that generations of hikers, groping their way off Lafayette in dense fog, would be eternally thankful to see that Troop 12 cairn loom out of the mist.
Often other hut guests at Greenleaf will ask us what exactly it is we do up there. The next day on the ridge, some of them work along with us for a while, then continue on their way. But as they go along, we’ll see them bend over to remove a loose rock from the treadway, or clear a water bar, or restore a cairn. Then we know they got the message too.
Every summer members of the Greenleaf crew will spend part or all of a day with us. We know several who have adopted trails of their own now. We never cease to be highly impressed with the quality of the young people who sign on to work at the AMC huts. The same goes for the GMC ranger-naturalists and shelter caretaker, and the ADK Summit Stewards. These young people have shining ideals and a real sense of values from which we could all learn. We are very grateful for their enthusiasm and their solid support.
Several times an AT through-hiker has thrown off his or her heavy pack and helped us rebuild a section of scree wall or shore up an eroded bank. They tell us they like to give something back to the trail that’s given them so much. And then they go on their way toward Katahdin or Springer. Our experience is that no single group is so appreciative of trail work, so willing to help, as the AT through-hikers. You can spot them a mile off, with their shabby, trail-worn look and their staffs. Sometimes you can smell them a mile off. But they know how much work goes into keeping up the trail.
Sometimes we’ve seen a hiker or two sitting out on the tundra where they shouldn’t be. We go out and strike up that tactful conversation which ranger-naturalists have doubtless initiated on other mountaintops. Then when we come back to the trail, here at the scree wall are four or five others waiting for us with questions: Which did you say was the really rare plant? What’s the one with the big yellow flower? What do you do to protect them? How often do you come up here? So a little classroom situation suddenly takes shape, and we almost want to thank that fellow who strayed out on the tundra and got us started in the first place. When everyone leaves, we see them bending over to replace misplaced rocks on the scree wall or on a cairn. They’re involved.
Most of these are one-shot assists, of course. But some come to stay. Several of our hiking friends saw what we were doing and how rewarding the work was, so they decided to get a piece of the action. So they adopted adjacent trail sections, and we all get together twice in the spring and once in the fall to work on whatever most needs work. The rest of the year we work as individuals. We call ourselves the West End Trail Tenders. We say that the acronym stands for the kind of weather we’re usually working in.
Those innovative folk in the Sandwich Range, who we were telling you about a couple of pages back, have found a neat way of involving people. They found they had a critical shortage of rock to make scree walls for their islands of vegetation on Mount Welch. They also observed an abundant surplus of rocks lower down the mountain. Putting two and two together, they began lugging rocks up, a couple at a time. Soon finding this slow work, they assembled little piles of rock along the trail and placed a sign inviting hikers to join in bringing the needed rock, with a brief explanation of the intended purpose. Now passing hikers carry lots of rock up—and you can be sure that anyone who has added significant weight to his uphill load is going to pay close attention to the message. That’s involvement.
Everyone a Steward
The point of all this involvement is not so much the physical work that gets done, though surely that’s a splendid contribution in its own right. The main point is the educational value for those who become involved. Involvement guarantees a better understanding and deeper commitment. Furthermore, every one of those involved individuals becomes a Typhoid Mary, spreading the virus of alpine stewardship to all their hiking friends from then on. Who knows how far the waves roll?
Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind, and do more essential service to his country, than the whole race of politicians put together.
JONATHAN SWIFT, GULLIVER’S TRAVELS
WITH EDUCATION AND adequate physical measures for keeping hikers on trail, impacted alpine areas begin to recover. Some tundra plants grow back vigorously given just half a chance. The spunky little mountain sandwort—the unsinkable Molly Brown of the alpine world—is ready to colonize anyplace anytime: bags packed and ready to move in as soon as you hand it the key.
However, much of the tundra vegetative community is a lot more shy, a lot slower to recover even after the threat of hiker trampling has been removed. This painfully slow recovery is a very good reason to try to prevent hiker impact before it happens. But it is also a reason to consider whether there is anything we can do to give the natural recovery process a boost.
Reseeding on Adirondacks’ Summits
Direct action to accelerate natural recovery was undertaken in the late 1960s by a remarkably far-sighted, creative, and aggressive Adirondacks forester, the late Edwin H. Ketchledge. From his position as professor at a state university, and working closely with both the responsible public agency and leading area hiking clubs, Dr. Ketchledge worked out a program for treating impacted alpine areas with lime, fertilizer, and lower-elevation grasses. The objective is for the grasses to take hold for about two or three years, after which they die, being totally unsuited to long-term survival in such a harsh environment. During those brief couple of years, however, they provide a strong cover, shelter from the wind, a trap for precipitation droplets, and more fertile soil so that the alpine species will come back more vigorously. In the ideal situation, as the low-elevation grasses die back, a much, much stronger resurgence of summit vegetation will be observed.
Beginning with a variety of experiments on the summit of Mount Dix, Dr. Ketchledge and his professional associates worked out the formula that seemed to produce best results, a mix of Kentucky bluegrass and red fescue, together with lime and fertilizer. After the initial Dix experiment, Dr. Ketchledge moved his efforts to such trampled summits as Algonquin, Wright, and the highest of all, Marcy. Reseeding was accompanied by delineation of one track for hikers, stepping-stones through wet or mucky areas, physical obstacles designed to discourage getting off the trail, and educational signs. The energetic personpower of the 46ers, those indefatigable peakbaggers described in chapter 12, was enlisted to help carry up, over the years, hundreds of pounds of grass seed, lime, and fertilizer; prepare the trail; and reseed impacted areas. In the 20 years between 1971 and 1991, Dr. Ketchledge estimated that 700 people were involved at one time or another. There is less need for the reseeding today, in large part due to the expert educational work carried out by the Adirondack summit stewards.
Dr. Ketchledge’s vision and dedication, however, had significant success in accelerating restoration of the Adirondacks’ alpine summits. Walk the summit ridge of Algonquin, Boundary, and Iroquois and see what it looks like now. Ketchledge had a slide show, which he gave anytime more than three people assembled at a water cooler (this man was, by instinct, equally measured, one-third scientist, one-third gardener, and one-third circus-tent evangelist), and which showed the before and after pictures for a number of tundra plots. It was a heartening thing to see the extraordinary recovery of some of those reseeded areas. In the words of Dr. Ketchledge at that Alpine Managers Gathering we described in chapter 15, such positive action sends “a message of hope” to the alpine zone.
Reseeding on the Franconia Ridge
In the spring of 1988 some officials from the White Mountain National Forest heard a lecture in which Dr. Ketchledge described his results in the Adirondacks. A no-nonsense, let’s-do-it district forest ranger elected to launch a similar effort in the White Mountains. He and his staff chose the Franconia Ridge as a place to try. For four or five summers, a team of forest officials and AMC trail adopters (us) planted small annual crops of Kentucky bluegrass and red fescue on that high wild ridge. Sounds odd, doesn’t it? But it seems to work: Within two or three years, areas previously denuded seem to show much faster recovery with the artificial reseeding than without. Initially the introduced grasses spring up, bright green with youthful enthusiasm. But the weather-wracked alpine ridge is no place for valley folk like them. Within a couple of years they’re gone. As the bluegrass and fescue wither and disappear, however, a vigorous growth of mountain sandwort, moss, and other native species moves in to take up permanent residence. Lasting revegetation by the natives is achieved much more quickly than if left to natural processes unaided.
It is important to note this is not an effort to interfere with the long-run pattern of vegetation in alpine areas. Alpine ecologists deem it essential not to try to change nature’s patterns, or introduce exotic species. In this case, the “introduced” species does not last: It soon dies and is gone forever. All that happens is that the local alpine species then returns more quickly and effectively.
We should acknowledge that a small circle of professional botanists, mainly in New Hampshire, steadfastly resist the idea of reseeding. Their concern is that introduced grasses will take permanent hold and choke out the natives, especially threatened and endangered species. The late Dr. Ketchledge and others have addressed their concerns and reported no instances of these recovery programs resulting in such mischief. On some summits, notably New York’s Whiteface, where human interference has taken such massive steps as road and building construction, Kentucky bluegrass has been known to become a quasi-permanent resident. Late in the 1990s, three or four spears of Kentucky bluegrass were spotted on the Franconia Ridge and the Forest Service called the program off at the insistence of the botanists. We were sorry about that. One way to put it is this: No, we should not interfere with the normal community of alpine species, but as hikers we have already interfered, by trampling all over that vegetation. Does that not give us a moral obligation to do what we can now to restore the original community?
Toward the Regreening of the Ridge
If you give us a choice between direct reseeding, physical obstacles, and education, we’d choose . . . well, let’s see . . . all three. If you do not have the physical obstacles in place and some sort of communication with hikers, reseeding would founder. Physical obstacles are certainly necessary, if only to indicate clearly to even well-informed hikers exactly where the acceptable trail lies. In that harsh environment, some form of reseeding or equivalent approach seems to get recovery moving faster.
But in the long run, education is the key, because an alpine area will be protected best by a hiking public that perceives its unique beauty and fragility, and truly wants to walk softly and wisely in that privileged place above the clouds.
The opportunity for education was never better. Dr. Ketchledge, in pleading for state agency involvement in alpine-areas education, pointed out the unique opportunity:
The people causing the problem congregate at the site of the damage, which then becomes your classroom to instruct the recreating public in responsible summit stewardship, if only you, the teacher, appear in the classroom, there on top of Marcy and Algonquin with your students voluntarily assembled.
The goal should be to have everyone be a steward of this lovely landscape. To the maximum extent possible, we want to see every hiker who walks above treeline conscious of the special kind of environment he or she has entered, and, at some level of consciousness, heedful of where to step so as to preserve the resource for future years of hikers.
We put it in terms of future hikers. Maybe some people will want to think of it in terms of the integrity of the alpine areas irrespective of human interests: the right of the mountain to exist on its own terms, a certain respect we owe to the land independent of our selfish enjoyment of it. If something of that spirit could be embraced by those who visit alpine areas, even if only for the duration of their visit to that special world, the mountain environment would be well served.
The goal is to see alpine areas such as the Franconia Ridge green again—restored to their natural splendor of alpine vegetation save for the single track needed to accommodate human enjoyment of its great beauty.
In our view, sometimes we get overly focused on the physical environment of the alpine zone—counting flowers or waxing irate about human impact, as if hikers were the enemy. We must never forget the importance of the alpine experience to the human spirit. A young friend of ours recently began a letter to us with this nicely phrased sentiment:
I find that I can only last a week or two until I start having withdrawal symptoms to the alpine zone! I all of a sudden, somehow, someway have to get above treeline to be blown around, scramble over rocks and generally just take in the vistas (or clouds) to renew my inner self. So, Kita and I set off for a quick hike up to Glen Boulder as a storm front moved in—from sunny blue skies and trilliums to the big boulder amidst darkening skies, snowflakes, and diapensia. We even managed to see a moose and a grouse nest filled with eight eggs!
It is that kind of inspiration for the human spirit that we must protect fully as much as we protect the purely physical environment. Of course, the spiritual side cannot exist without preserving the physical. What we are saying is that it would be a hollow victory to preserve the physical at the expense of hikers’ access to that spiritual experience.
Here is the essence of today’s mountain problem. How can we reconcile heavy recreational use with preservation of a fragile natural environment? If hiking traffic can be encouraged to give the alpine vegetation a chance, we can eat our cake and still have it: We can continue to enjoy that magnificent Franconia Ridge and other glorious alpine areas, yet hand that precious privilege on to future generations preserved or even enhanced. We can show genuine respect for the mountain world.
But it won’t happen unless the hiking community understands and supports the need. And it won’t happen unless trail workers put in a lot of hours and creativity, both on physical measures and on improving the hiking public’s understanding of the problem. It will take a lot of hard work and a lot of creative communication. We won’t find a way to preserve the fragile alpine environment unless that sense of stewardship catches hold.
As Dr. Seuss’s Lorax warns, the key word is: UNLESS!