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FOUR

CONFESSIONS OF A TRAILBUILDER

As a single footpath will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

— Henry David Thoreau

According to statistics, 90 percent of people think trails just happen. They appear inexplicably over the carapace of the Earth. It is one of those incontrovertible realities that go unnoticed, unquestioned … like the fissures in the bark of a giant white pine, the veins on a leaf, they materialize in front of us but we think little about how they got there.

The remaining 10 percent of folk have built a trail, somewhere in their lives, and know something about the disposition and temperament of trail building.

In March of 2007, I attended the Professional Trail Builders Association annual convention. Held in Reno, Nevada (of all places), it was a gathering of eclectic and somewhat eccentric trailbuilders, trail managers, park administrators, and industry representatives flogging the latest in soft-track excavators, gas-powered wheelbarrows and new-fangled hand grubbers. The main casino floor of the hosting hotel was abuzz twenty-four hours a day, non-stop with all the tawdry hoopla that inspires people to throw away their money. Upstairs in the boardroom was a gathering of the clan; bearded, suspender-jeaned trail engineers (old hippies), IMBA (International Mountain Bike Association) bicycle jockeys, and backcountry trail experts. It was an almost comical conjugation of two divergent cultures. In the least, the Reno scene inspired the convention theme, somewhat as a religious experience in the den of iniquity.