Why Becton Trails
Purpose
Our purpose: facilitate intentional trail management and stewardship.
I started Becton Trails to work with land managers, stewardship organizations, and other trailbuilders to understand issues our trail systems are experiencing, what are the root causes and what actions can be most effective at addressing them. Volunteer hours are precious and federal, state and local funding and manpower is finite, resources invested in trail system management, maintenance and stewardship need to be intentional to be effective. From teaching trail stewards skills they need to make their work more effective to helping land managers understand where resources should be invested, I clarify what actions can take our existing trail systems into the future—sustainably.
Focus
Becton Trails resolves
What trail issues require priority attention and why
What are the root causes
What mitigation is appropriate and has the most impact
When folks know why they are doing something, they have the opportunity to do it better.
When folks understand what are the biggest issues at hand, they can work towards solving them. Or they can at least assess if what they spend energy on is addressing the issues.
When folks understand what elements of a process have what effect on the outcome, they can make informed decisions as they work their way through the process.
How We Got Here
Trailbuilding, managing and stewardship on public lands has evolved over the decades,. While IMBA forged the way twenty years ago with their refreshing Trail Solutions, teaching sustainable trail design and layout is the way forward, and working with the U.S. Forest Service developing the then updated Trail Construction and Maintenance Notebook, sustainable trail principles have been slow to make their way to some of our east coast and Appalachian trails. Many of which are celebrating the century mark together with the public lands on which they were built.
While organizations such as American Trails strive to improve access to and development of resources supporting trails, limited managerial resources for any particular trail system can make education and implementation slow.
Through budget cuts and changing policy, many of our trails, while managed by local, state or federal agencies, are maintained by volunteers. Robert Fina, of Fina Trails LLC, and I have worked together for the last six years assessing and addressing common stewardship challenges. We see waterbars with drains heading uphill, trail carefully lined with logs that that inhibit tread drainage, newly built stone steps that won’t last through the next winter, and relentless effort spent on maintenance tasks that aren’t effective. All of this work took time and effort, but it’s not addressing the issues it was meant to solve. Some of what we see exacerbates the issue it was intended to solve. While it was well intentioned, those executing the work did not understand what elements were key to making the work worthwhile.
But what does it mean to be effective? What is the point of trail management, maintenance and stewardship?
How Its Going
Researchers such as Dr. Jeff Marion bring our trail issues into focus and test trail building practices for their efficacy. Researching and publishing academic papers for over twenty years, Dr. Marion and his collaborators have distilled threats to trail tread and adjacent natural resources down to soil loss, muddiness, and trail widening.
Details that go into design, layout and construction in relation to the landform’s topography have the greatest impact on a trail’s maintenance needs, and sometimes reconciling a trail’s failing features means realigning it to a more sustainable layout. However, some of our legacy trails requiring the most maintenance and stewardship resources lie tightly confined in narrow public lands or pass through sensitive ecological areas making realignment impractical, at least for the foreseeable future.
Working to mitigate soil loss, muddiness, and trail widening goes hand in hand with visitor use challenges and protecting natural resources. The name recognition of some of our legacy trails makes them a place of discovery for folks exploring trails for the first time. Managing a trail system for visitor experience goes hand in hand with mitigating soil loss, muddiness and trail widening for when the tread is failing, visitor experience and the surrounding natural resources both suffer.
What’s Next
Becton Trails addresses what are the issues, what needs to be done and how will it be done effectively.
Creating informed management plans, building trail skills and creating a culture of safety and inclusion across the trailbuilding, management and stewardship community is sustainability applied to trail system management.
Trail system managers need information to understand the state of their trails so they can focus their resources for the most sustainable impact.
Folks on the ground doing the work need dynamic trail skills based in best practices to carry out the work effectively.
The trailbulding, management and stewardship community—from the earnest volunteers to the uniformed maintenance staff to the division and regional directors—need to feel heard and valued as they do the hard work trails need. We need to attract and retain the best minds and most energetic people to take our trail systems into the decades ahead. We need volunteers to see value in what they do and feel they belong.
Job hazard analysis is a tool, not a safety program. Fostering safety culture values planning ahead, thinking things through and listening to each other. Safety culture falls apart when diversity, inclusion and equality are left behind.
Reach out to me to see what services we can bring to your trail system. Assessment, skills and safety training, field leadership, navigating trail improvements through environmental priorities and more, Becton Trails clears the way forward.