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I attended the conference as a representative trails specialist for a resort I was working for in Muskoka, Ontario — the first J.W. Marriott luxury hotel in Canada. Three years before, billionaire owner, Ken Fowler, asked if I would construct trails in a one-thousand-acre reserve at the resort.

“You’re dangerous.” Fowler pointed his finger at me from across a table at our first meeting. He knew that I was an environmental activist with a bit of history.

“Yes, and you have to be accountable,” I replied. The elderly developer laughed at my pointed response. He agreed to protect at least half of the land purchased for the resort to be set aside for non-mechanized trail construction. I was to build a world-class trails system because the resort had little else to bank on as far as attractive amenities. They sent me to Reno to scope out the latest in sustainable trail-building techniques. I still had much to learn about constructing a good trail.

When I worked as a park ranger, there were no guidelines for constructing trails. You were handed a chainsaw and told to cut a trail from point A to point B, regardless of what was in between. Although I was cautious and careful enough when I did cut a new trail, there was no concern for the ecology of the landscape, nor any understanding of possible despoliation of the environment in the way of foot-trampling effects, proximity to bird nesting sites, or sensitivity of thin bedrock soils. You axe-blazed a rough pathway, in as straight a line as possible, then slashed your way through with a chainsaw. It was brutal. There was no art to it. That was almost thirty years ago.

Sustainable trail building is now considered an art and a sometimes complex engineering feat. There are more than twenty sciences involved, from understanding soil types, hydrological patterns and sensitive ecological attributes, to social and cultural elements (who walks a trail and why?) to consider. Constructing trails with a straight-line, Point A to Point B mindset adhered to an archaic, linear disposition; trails now take on a life of their own in temperament and configuration — straight lines were shunned, giving way to the evolution of the “stacked loop”… Point A now returns to Point A. It’s not so much the destination of the trail that is important, but the journey that unfolds along the way that counts. People prefer to walk in circles rather than on one-way-return trails.

It’s the same when designing water trails. Canoeists much prefer travelling in a loop if they’re on a lake trail; rivers are different since they run one way only. The more popular canoeing parks and reserves like Algonquin, Quetico/Boundary Waters, and Temagami, all have circular route blueprints. When I started designing water trails for Temagami, and later for the Province of Manitoba, I was relying on my own investigations with the aid of outdated and inaccurate trip records. Between the sixties and the eighties, it was common practice for the district forestry offices to analyze and record portage trails by aerial reconnaissance. Generally, a summer forestry student was hired to plot trails by sheer guesswork and estimation while peering out a window of an aircraft moving at 120 kilometres per hour. Locations of trails were oftentimes assumed to be where they should be (using the linear method of the shortest distance between points). The coarse, irregular topography of the Canadian Shield landscape defines where a trail can be established. Sometimes trails are located some distance from the assumed spot, having been determined by an impassable marsh or precipitous escarpment. People of the First Nations obviously knew the land better than anyone and established trails to adapt to the landscape; for me, it was necessary to think cognitively from the Aboriginal perspective and not through the eyes of a district planner. Establishing a new trail is systematic and uncomplicated — you didn’t have to worry about any historical or cultural references. You scouted the physical layout, avoided steep terrain where possible, flagged the trail, and then cut it out. It was a simple process. Locating primitive or historical trails was another matter. If there are no visual orientations then you rely on your power of intuitive understanding — a kind of sixth sense. You get the feel for where the trail once was or should be; you walk it over and over again, both ways, somewhat like trying on a new pair of shoes and walking around the store in them — if they fit, then you buy them. If the trail “fits,” then you can comfortably clear it out. Once the brush, snags, and footfalls are removed and you carry your gear over the trail, there is a sense of elation born of resurrecting a piece of cultural history (not to discount the ease in which the gear was now carried over the cleared trail).

I’ve been building trails for almost thirty years. I’m a little obsessive-compulsive about it. I’m constantly surveying the landscape while I drive along the highway, looking at places where trails could be built along lakesides, up to the apex of an escarpment, a farmer’s field. I visualize the finished trail and me riding my bicycle along it, or trekking up some bluff with a pack on my back. It’s a sickness, I know, I own and wear my neurotic habits on my sleeve. And when I walk, ski, or bike along a trail that I didn’t design and build, I scrutinize its construction in minute detail. I’m hopeless.

But trail building is addictive, and I sort out the habitual compulsion to build trails by building more trails. If I’m not building my own trail on my property, somebody else will want a trail constructed somewhere. And trails are more popular today than ever before, for whatever activity so long as it adequately provides an experience for the user; and the more trails we have, the more places there are for people to show off their outdoor gear, get some exercise, and enjoy Nature.

There is something of the sublime in trail building as an art, and like any skill it reflects the personality of the one who created it. This is true of anything built of the hand — a gratification that your labour will be enjoyed by someone else. It is one of the hardest jobs I have ever undertaken; physically, it demands a firm grasp of the realities of the earth-environment. Trails are scribed easily over mineral soil but Canada’s predominant landscape of rock can make trail work tenuous. Psychologically, it requires an ability to cope with all of the extraneous natural forces that humankind and science have tried to quell for years — weather, biting and stinging insects. Trails constructed by mechanized means (dozers, skid-steers, and excavators) are not really trails but “troads,” hand-built trails are the true footpaths that spare the environment the abuse. The Pulaskis, Italian hoes, grubbers, loppers, rakes, and shovels touch the earth lightly; tree roots are landscaped into the trail instead of being ripped apart; a salamander and its home of mossy log is gently and reverently moved to one side of the working trail; the path meanders between gargantuan pines just wide enough for people to walk between and certainly too narrow for the passing of a Komatsu bulldozer.

Public parks and their planners often design and over-build a trail to the extent that it looks contrived, unnatural and over-tended. Their rationale behind this is to placate to the apparent needs of the physically challenged, and certainly this is something of a consideration. Many of my own clients have had various degrees of physical challenges, but their opinion of super-groomed trails comment that they only help to accentuate their “disability.” They want to enjoy Nature the same as anyone else, granted there aren’t any precipitous climbs or stairs, they can manoeuvre quite well on their own along a natural pathway.

The administrations in some canoeing parks, like Algonquin in central Ontario, have taken the initiative to turn historic portage trails into veritable roads, mostly through “make-work” programs. Log-lined, wood-chipped “troads” have replaced the traditional trail, severing its conservative charm and purpose. Obtrusive signs are erected directing people where to walk, where to crap, where to put their garbage and where to pitch their tent … and this is in a wilderness park setting. But it’s what the general adventure public has come to expect when embarking on an outing — without signs we are lost.

As a ranger in Temagami, at the time there was a collective agreement amongst user-groups that signage would not be posted anywhere in the wilderness. It was conceived that any man-signs would detract from the experience. A simple change in district administration and a planner’s suggestion often becomes policy. Signs were eventually placed along ancient trailways so that modern campers could find their way … instead of having to rely on primitive instincts. Temagami district officials still have a tough time keeping their signs posted as the old, traditional paddlers keep taking them down.

One individual who has not enough to do to keep himself occupied in a worthwhile manner, has taken it upon himself to mark every portage with strings of fluorescent orange flagging tape, whether it needs it or not. Trail entrances are ringed with festoons of the tape, hanging like Tibetan prayer flags, half of which the birds retreat with for nest material, or the sun breaks it down into bits of wind-blown garbage. The trail itself is then marked every twenty metres or so with yet more tape. I’m forever removing scads of tape while on my own trips.

At a recent ceremony hosted by my Ojibway friend, Alex Mathias, Mr. Flagging Tape was there and boasting of his travels and trail marking. Of course, we got into a fray about the flagging tape of which he maintained was necessary so that the city canoeists wouldn’t lose their way. I turned to Alex and asked how his people ever found their way without the advent of flagging tape. Alex just laughed. “We just knew where to go, we didn’t need no signs,” he said. “But white man needs all the help he can get.”