Mountainsteward.net

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.

1. Five Years of the Partnership to Restore Franconia Ridge
2. What We Did Right in the Franconia Ridge Loop Restoration
3. What We Could Have Done Better: Lessons from the Franconia Ridge Loop Restoration
4. White Mountain Trails — How Did We Get Here? (below)
5. Rethinking the White Mountain Trail Management System (to come)

In the previous articles, I reflected on what we accomplished through the Franconia Ridge Loop Restoration, what we did well, and where I believe we fell short. For some readers, that 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 any critique 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, constrained 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. Because trails are not simply lines across a landscape. They are products of history.

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. The question sounds simple: What is a trail supposed for?

Two extraordinary figures provide contrasting answers: J. Rayner Edmands and Warren W. Hart.

Edmands, an engineer by training and an early AMC leader, was one of the most meticulous trail builders in White Mountain history. He believed that trails should generally climb gradually, winding across slopes rather than heading directly uphill. He carefully graded tread and, above treeline, rearranged rocks to create stable walking surfaces and meticulously positioned cairns to define routes. The Randolph Path, northern Gulfside Trail and Edmands Path still preserve his influence.

His reasons were not exactly ours. Edmands wasn’t considering climate resilience or sustainable trail design in the modern sense. Nevertheless, there is something remarkably contemporary about his approach: follow the contours, moderate the grade, create a stable tread, and design the route rather than simply clearing a path toward the summit.

Not everyone approved. To some contemporaries, Edmands’s 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 embodied another tradition. 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 sought dramatic terrain. His trails climbed steep ridges, slides and ravines. Difficulty wasn’t a defect. It was part of the experience.

The contrast represents more than two trail-building techniques. It represents two ideas about the relationship between hikers and mountains. Edmands used trail design to moderate the obstacles imposed by terrain. Hart regarded encountering those obstacles as part of why you went there.

Both traditions have value. I love many of the steep, rugged trails that emerged from this period, and I would certainly not advocate rebuilding Six Husbands as a gently graded side-hill trail. But 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. The trail itself becomes a kind of test.

Somewhere along the way, I think we blurred an important distinction:

A trail that is intentionally challenging is not necessarily the same thing as a trail that is physically sustainable.

A steep, rough trail can persist for generations when relatively few people use it. Put tens of thousands of hikers on that alignment and the equation changes. 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 a rugged trail can become a highly efficient erosion system.

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 two things.

We inherited a nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physical trail network, often steep, rocky and direct, built when recreational use was dramatically lower.

But we also 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 maintain 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 successful historically and still become mismatched with changing conditions.

The cooperative system developed when trail construction was relatively inexpensive, recreational use was lower, volunteer maintenance could address much of the routine workload, and deterioration often occurred slowly enough for periodic intervention. Even when the first great postwar surge exposed problems, innovations such as the backcountry caretaker system were primarily responses to particular sites and types of use. Today’s challenge is broader.

The 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 constrained. 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 another large construction grant every few decades. 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.

We have reached another of those moments.

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?

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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.

September 18–21 and September 25–27, 2026
Kenna Brochu

On Friday, September 18, Summit Steward Demi Terry and I met Nat Scrimshaw, trail caretaker Ken Costa, and several other volunteers at the Crawford Connector for a trail workday focused on cleaning drainage. The group started at the Mizpah Cutoff. Half of the team worked uphill from the cutoff, while the other half hiked to the Webster Cliff Trail intersection and worked down the Crawford Path. The day was very successful: together, we tackled this entire section of trail. We worked from around 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Afterward, the volunteer group headed back down the Crawford Path, while Demi and I went up the Mizpah Cutoff to begin our hitch at the Nauman Tentsite.

On Saturday, September 19, we planned to head to the large intersection with the Edmands Path to tackle several projects on our radar. It was a beautiful fall day, with bluebird skies and warm sun. On our way, we came upon an area between Mount Eisenhower and Mount Pierce that was extremely braided and trampled. We decided to spend some time there building up scree walls and adding brush to the exposed social trails. After completing this project, we continued toward the Edmands Path. Along the way, we noticed some large pieces of brush and carried them to the intersection to use on social trails. Once we got there, Demi focused on closing off social trails, while I pruned back trees that were long overdue for attention. We headed back to the tentsite around 4:00 p.m. and arrived around 5:30 p.m. Both Mizpah Spring Hut and the Nauman Tentsite were full that night.

On Sunday, September 20, the forecast was less favorable. It was very cold, with rain expected around 11:00 a.m. and possible sleet. Demi and I decided to work on projects around Mount Pierce so we could stay close to the tentsite in case we needed to head down. I worked on rebuilding a cairn near the summit outlook, while Demi focused on building scree walls in heavily eroded areas beyond it. Around 11:30 a.m., the rain started. We were quickly soaked, and the wind chill was increasing, so we decided conditions weren’t safe and headed down to the hut. We spent the rest of the day talking to hikers there and bonding with the fall crew.

On Monday, September 21, it was a pretty cold morning, around 37 degrees. Although chilly, it was forecast to clear up by late morning. I went back up Mount Pierce to finish the cairn rebuild I had started the previous day, while Demi continued along the Crawford Path beyond Mount Pierce to keep building crib walls. Around 1:00 p.m., we met back on Mount Pierce and headed down to the tentsite to pack out.

September 25–27, 2026

With a nor’easter forecast to move through New England, this weekend’s plans were a bit scrambled, but thankfully we were able to maintain some coverage on Franconia Ridge. The original plan was for Summit Steward Demi Terry to day hike the entire Franconia Ridge Loop on Friday. I was then going to return to basecamp on Sunday, September 27, for a midweek hitch with Demi to avoid the adverse weather.

After reconsidering the plan as the storm shifted, Demi and Nat decided it would be best for Demi to do a short hitch on the ridge. Unfortunately, I commute an hour and a half to basecamp and wasn’t able to make it back in time to join her.

On Friday, September 25, Demi hiked up to Franconia Ridge to begin her hitch. After arriving at the Greenleaf Tent Platform and setting up camp, she worked her way up to the summit of Mount Lafayette. She focused on small projects and scree wall maintenance, as well as stewarding at the summit.

On Saturday, September 26, Demi headed back up to the ridge. The forecast looked pretty bleak, but it ended up being a beautiful, bluebird day. Demi described a chilly wind but very warm sun. She continued working on a variety of maintenance projects to finish out the season. She placed a large piece of brush in an area of concern on the upper Greenleaf Trail. She reset a large step on the descent from Mount Lafayette that had come loose, with soil eroding around it. She also rebuilt the cairn on the summit of Mount Lincoln, which had fallen sometime in the previous two weeks. As she moved along the ridge, she made smaller repairs to scree walls and cairns wherever they were needed.

Around 4:30 p.m., Demi arrived back at Greenleaf Hut. She noted that the weather changed drastically about 30 minutes later. The winds became extremely strong, and the rain came down hard. She spent the rest of the afternoon directing people down the mountain and advising others not to continue hiking up. That night, the Hut Croo graciously let her sleep in the attic to avoid the conditions.

On Sunday, September 27, the storm was still strong, so Demi packed up and headed down the Old Bridle Path in the morning.

Kenna Brochu

This weekend Summit Steward Demi Terry had the weekend off, so I traversed the ridge solo and was in for an unexpected weekend.

On Saturday, September 12th, we were predicting a less populated ridge following the holiday weekend the previous week, but this was not the case. Due to the annual Flags on the 48 event, the ridge was insanely busy, with most people congregating on the summits of Mount Lincoln and Mount Lafayette.

In the morning, I focused on finishing the string fencing project I have been working on for the past few weeks on the north and south sides of Mount Lincoln. This week, I focused on completing the fencing ascending Mount Lincoln from the south, but ran out of string around lunchtime. My plan was to continue the work the following day.

When I ran out of string, I headed to the summit of Mount Lincoln to eat lunch and planned on stewarding there for the rest of the day. I was met with a large and ever-growing crowd of people. I sat at the summit from 12:30–3:30 p.m. and was never greeted with fewer than 50 people. The event brought crowds of people and also restricted the available space on the summit because of the flag installation.

Every few minutes, I was asking people to step back to the correct side of the scree wall, remain on the trail, and respect the alpine vegetation, while also explaining my position and the importance of protecting the alpine zone. Although the numbers for this Saturday were relatively average for this summer season (1,265), this was an extremely overwhelming day because of the concentration of people on the summits.

After my time at Mount Lincoln, I ventured over to Mount Lafayette to meet up with AMC Volunteer Alpine Steward Lindsey Bost. Lindsey, too, was overwhelmed by the crowds gathered for the event. She had a particularly intense encounter with an extremely intoxicated hiker at the summit of Lafayette, who interrupted her during a summit talk and caused a large scene. After discussing the situation with him privately, she could smell alcohol on him and hear empty cans clanging in his backpack. This kind of behavior is not only disheartening to see on Franconia Ridge, but extremely dangerous given the nature of the trail and the descent down the Old Bridle Path that this man was evidently going to have to endure.

In addition to the difficult crowds and intoxicated hiker, we also had a hiker suffer a sprained ankle on the Upper Greenleaf Trail, resulting in a Lakes Region Search and Rescue team litter carry-out. Unfortunately, both Lindsey and I were still stewarding the summits when this occurred, but I heard from other hikers that the injured hiker was able to self-rescue as far as Greenleaf Hut, where the SAR team met her.

An additional search and rescue was performed by the Greenleaf Hut Croo that same night after a hiker mistakenly wandered down a water bar while descending the Upper Greenleaf Trail. This hiker was unfortunately unprepared and unfamiliar with the backcountry and needed assistance from the Hut Croo. Thankfully, he was only around 50 feet away from the main trail, and the Hut Croo was able to locate him simply by calling his name.

Overall, Saturday brought intense and overwhelming crowds. Every weekend we see more and more people traversing the ridge who are unprepared and unfamiliar with the nature of the backcountry and the environment they are traversing.

Sunday, September 13th, and Monday, September 14th, brought a mix of cold temperatures, high winds, and rain. This put me in a position where I wasn’t comfortable traversing above treeline by myself. Instead, I remained around the hut as a resource for hikers. I turned multiple groups away on Sunday who were unprepared for the conditions. On Monday, I focused on pruning and removing branches along the Upper Greenleaf Trail that were infringing on the path.

Nathaniel Scrimshaw

This is the third in a four-part series reflecting on the accomplishments of the Franconia Ridge Loop Restoration, what we could have done better, and where we go from here.

In the previous article, I discussed some of the things we got right in the Franconia Ridge Loop Restoration: trail realignment, reverse-grade drainage, carefully designed step clusters, foundation steps, full-bench construction, proper tread preparation, and trail widths appropriate for very high levels of use.

Together, these represented an important advance toward a new standard for sustainable trail construction in the White Mountains.

But we did not apply that standard consistently. Understanding why is important, not to diminish what has been accomplished, but because the lessons from this project should inform how we plan the next generation of major trail projects.

An Ambitious Goal Without a Complete Plan

We should begin by acknowledging that the original goal of the project, to “redesign the Franconia Ridge Loop from start to finish,” proved overly ambitious given the available funding and the actual condition and use level of the trail.

As mentioned in the first article in this series, five years later, substantial work remains even on the two major approach trails, Old Bridle Path and Falling Waters Trail. Only a relatively small amount of work has been completed on the upper Greenleaf Trail in the alpine zone. And no congressionally funded restoration work was undertaken on perhaps the most ecologically sensitive portion of the entire Loop: the Franconia Ridge Trail between Mount Lafayette and Little Haystack.

Part of the problem was built into the project from the beginning.

The  $1.125 million in Congressionally Directed Funding was not the result of a detailed assessment of every section of the Loop followed by engineering and trail-design estimates of what it would cost to rebuild it. Rather, it represented the level of funding that could be secured through the congressional appropriations process.

That is understandable. Nothing comparable had previously been attempted on this scale in the White Mountains, and more than a million dollars sounded like an enormous investment in a single trail system.

And it was an enormous investment. It just wasn’t enough to accomplish the stated goal.

The Missing Variable: Use

One reason the cost was underestimated was that we had not fully incorporated the extraordinary volume of use on the Franconia Ridge Loop into our understanding of what reconstruction would require.

Today the Loop receives approximately 45,000–50,000 visitors between May and October. That changes almost everything about trail design.

A technique that might perform adequately on a trail receiving a few thousand hikers annually can deteriorate rapidly when thousands of boots pass over it in a matter of weeks. A narrow tread that works perfectly well elsewhere can result in hikers continually stepping around one another. Organic soil that might gradually compact and harden on a lightly traveled trail can quickly erode and expose roots and rocks.. A drainage feature requiring regular cleaning becomes a significant liability if the maintenance system cannot reliably provide that cleaning.

Add increasingly intense rain events, and the engineering challenge becomes greater still.

This had a cascading effect on the project. As it became apparent that the available money would not rebuild the entire Loop to the standards we had envisioned, choices had to be made about how far the money could stretch.

There was another structural problem as well. The congressional funding applied to the portions of the Loop on federal land, leaving significant sections of the Old Bridle Path and Falling Waters Trail within Franconia Notch State Park outside the federally funded project.

WTN Americas was ultimately able to secure private funding, later supplemented by a New Hampshire Recreational Trails Program grant, to begin filling that gap. But ideally the Loop would have been conceived, assessed, designed and funded from the beginning as one trail system crossing two jurisdictions.

We Established Standards, Then Lost the Mechanism for Maintaining Them

There was an important effort at the beginning of the project to address precisely these questions.

The Partnership to Restore the Franconia Ridge Loop formed a trail standards working group during the first year. That group brought people together to establish many of the design and construction principles discussed in the previous article.

That was exactly the right idea.

Unfortunately, the working group stopped meeting.

Without a continuing mechanism for reviewing design, comparing work among different crews, documenting what was being learned, and adjusting standards as the project progressed, some of those standards were applied inconsistently.

Four examples stand out.

Trail Width

One was tread width.

Early in the project, we recognized that a trail carrying tens of thousands of hikers must be wide enough to accommodate actual visitor behavior, including people passing one another without continually stepping off the constructed surface.

As costs increased, however, reducing tread width offered an obvious way to make limited funding cover more trail.

In some places, I believe this went too far.

There are reconstructed sections where the tread is narrow enough that hikers meeting one another are likely to step outside it. At Franconia Ridge levels of use, thousands of seemingly insignificant passing movements can eventually widen the trail anyway, except that the widening occurs through trampling and erosion rather than intentional construction.

This illustrates one of the central lessons of the project: Reducing the dimensions of a trail does not necessarily reduce its ecological footprint.

Sometimes spending more to construct a wider, durable tread is precisely what allows us to keep people within a smaller overall corridor.

Foundation Steps

Foundation steps were another standard applied inconsistently.

As discussed in the previous article, a properly placed foundation stone at the base of a stair cluster protects the staircase from being undermined as water and foot traffic remove soil below it.

For some crews, this represented a different approach from their previous stonework practices. It also requires another substantial piece of stone and additional labor. Under the pressure of time and budgets, that additional work can seem expendable.

It isn’t.

Where a staircase is undermined from below, the effective height of the bottom step increases and the stability of the staircase above can eventually be compromised.

We are also discovering something we did not fully anticipate. In some locations, foundation stones that were originally flush with the tread, or even slightly buried, are now protruding two to four inches after only a few years as surrounding tread material erodes.

If that continues, a foundation stone intended to protect a staircase can eventually become a step itself, but a step with no foundation stone beneath it.

That tells us something important. Even some of our improved construction techniques need to be monitored over time and modified in response to what actually happens on a trail receiving this intensity of use.

Waterbars Versus Reverse Grade Drainage

We also did not consistently make the transition from traditional waterbars to drainage created through trail alignment and grade reversals.

Some newly reconstructed sections still rely on waterbars. Several are already beginning to collect sediment and debris.

The problem is not that waterbars never work. They do. The problem is that their effectiveness depends upon maintenance.

And this exposes a larger contradiction in White Mountain trail management: we continue to build drainage structures that depend upon a level of routine maintenance we often do not have the capacity to provide.

Where terrain allows, reverse grades and appropriately shaped tread offer a fundamentally different approach. Instead of asking someone to repeatedly restore the drainage, we build drainage into the geometry of the trail itself.

That distinction becomes increasingly important as rainfall becomes more intense and maintenance needs increase.

What Lies Beneath the Tread

Perhaps the issue that concerns me most as the federally funded phase of the project concludes is tread preparation.

In some sections we underestimated the depth of the organic soil beneath the existing trail.

On a lightly used trail, it may sometimes be possible to allow a new tread to evolve gradually. Organic material compacts or erodes, rocks and roots emerge, and crews return periodically to improve the surface as the trail hardens.

Franconia Ridge doesn’t provide that luxury.

Thousands of hikers can pass over a newly reconstructed section in a matter of weeks. If unsuitable organic material remains beneath the tread, deterioration that might take years elsewhere can happen in months.

During these final weeks of the project, there is understandable pressure to finish as much trail as possible. In some places, that has meant leaving more organic material in the tread than I believe is desirable.

With careful monitoring and rapid intervention as problems emerge, it may be possible to progressively harden these sections. But that requires professional trail crews to return when problems first appear, rather than years later after deterioration has become severe.

In that sense, we are conducting an unplanned experiment in adaptive trail management.

The experiment may work.

But only if somebody is there to observe the results and has the resources to respond.

And What About All Those Steps?

There is an even larger design question worth asking.

As I described in the previous article, one of our White Mountain compromises has been to alternate lower-grade side-hill trail with relatively short clusters of stone steps. This allows us to gain elevation within constrained terrain while avoiding a continuously steep trail.

I continue to believe this can be an effective approach.

But a trail designer looking at the Franconia Ridge project from outside the White Mountains might reasonably ask:

Are we still building too many steps?

Stone staircases are expensive to construct. Hikers sometimes bypass them. They concentrate elevation gain into short distances. And unless drainage is carefully incorporated into their design, water can accelerate down them and erode the tread below.

The question should not be whether steps are good or bad. It should be whether we have found the right balance between steps, climbing turns, longer contour alignments, grade reversals and other ways of gaining elevation.

Above Treeline Is a Different Trail Problem

There was another fundamental issue that the original project planning did not adequately address: the Franconia Ridge Loop is not one trail environment.

Much of what we have discussed so far applies primarily to trails below treeline. There we can realign trails across forested slopes, excavate full-bench tread, mine mineral soil, build cribbing, construct grade reversals and, where appropriate, move the trail substantially away from its historic alignment.

Above treeline, we enter a fundamentally different ecological and management context.

On the Franconia Ridge Trail between Mount Lafayette and Little Haystack, the trail passes directly through a small and exceptionally vulnerable alpine ecosystem. Soil is thin, vegetation grows slowly, opportunities for realignment are limited, and even relatively small amounts of trampling can expand the disturbed corridor.

At the same time, this is where visitor behavior becomes particularly important.

Traditional scree walls have long been used to define the trail corridor above treeline, but at Franconia Ridge levels of use they are often inadequate by themselves. People step over them, walk around other hikers, leave the tread at viewpoints, and create parallel paths around high steps and other pinch points.

The appropriate response therefore cannot simply be more stonework.

Alpine trail management needs to combine physical trail design with active management of visitor movement. That can include appropriately wide and clearly defined tread, elimination or reconstruction of high steps and pinch points, strategically located pull-outs and passing areas, cairns and other route-definition techniques, temporary string fencing, interpretive signage, restoration of unnecessary parallel tread, and the visible presence of Summit Stewards who can both educate visitors and respond to emerging problems.

In other words, above treeline the distinction between trail construction and trail stewardship begins to disappear.

A trail crew can rebuild a section of tread. But whether hikers remain on that tread depends upon its width, the height and placement of its steps, where people naturally stop and pass, how clearly the route is defined, what visitors understand about the vegetation around them, and whether somebody is present to observe how the system is actually functioning.

The congressionally funded project never substantially reached the Franconia Ridge Trail beyond Mount Lafayette.

In retrospect, that may have been fortunate.

Simply extending the below-treeline construction model across the ridge would not have been enough. The alpine section requires its own assessment, design standards, visitor-flow analysis and management plan before major reconstruction begins.

WTN Americas Summit Stewards have already undertaken substantial trail tending and restoration work on Franconia Ridge, giving us an opportunity to experiment with some of these approaches on the ground. Building on that experience, the Alpine Stewardship Center has proposed a new model of integrated alpine trail management in which Summit Stewards are trained not only in visitor education and ecological stewardship, but also in increasingly advanced trail work. Stewardship, monitoring, trail reconstruction and adaptive management become parts of the same job rather than separate activities carried out by different programs.

That may point toward something larger than a solution for Franconia Ridge.

It may provide a model for how we manage heavily visited alpine trails throughout the White Mountains.

The Larger Lesson

None of these shortcomings negate the accomplishments of the Partnership to Restore the Franconia Ridge Loop.

Quite the opposite. We now know much more than we did five years ago.

But perhaps the most important lesson is that the next project of this scale should begin differently.

Before announcing that we will rebuild a trail from start to finish, we should conduct a detailed trail log and condition assessment. We should document visitor volumes and behavior. We should identify the different ecological and management environments through which the trail passes rather than assume that one design approach applies everywhere. We should divide the trail into management and construction units, identify the appropriate treatment for each, establish construction standards, estimate costs from those designs, and then determine the funding and timeframe required.

And the standards group should not disappear once construction begins.

It should become a standing design and technical review team that walks completed work, compares approaches among crews, monitors failures and successes, and updates standards throughout the life of the project.

Most importantly, we should stop thinking of a major trail restoration as something that is finished when the construction grant ends.

A trail carrying 45,000–50,000 visitors through steep mountain terrain, including an extraordinarily sensitive alpine ecosystem, requires continuing professional attention: monitoring, maintenance, reconstruction, ecological stewardship, visitor management and adaptation.

And that brings us to a conclusion I did not fully appreciate when the Franconia Ridge project began five years ago.

The challenge facing Franconia Ridge is not simply that we have deteriorated trails that need to be rebuilt.

We have a trail management system that needs to be rebuilt as well.

For much of the last century, the White Mountains have depended upon an extraordinary patchwork of federal and state agencies, nonprofit organizations, professional trail crews, seasonal programs, trail adopters and volunteers. That system has accomplished remarkable things. But it was largely created for another era of recreational use, another level of funding, and another climate.

Franconia Ridge is showing us the limits of that system.

It is also showing us pieces of what might replace it: trails designed for actual visitor volumes; professional construction integrated with volunteer work; permanent technical review and monitoring; Summit Stewards who combine visitor management with trail tending; and adaptive management that responds to what happens on the ground rather than waiting decades for the next major reconstruction project.

That is a much larger subject than the Franconia Ridge Loop Restoration.

Next in this series: The White Mountains Trail Management Crisis, and What Comes Next.

The Partnership to Restore the Franconia Ridge Loop did more than rebuild deteriorated sections of trail. At its best, it demonstrated a different approach to designing and constructing trails for the conditions we now face in the White Mountains.

Many of our steep legacy trails were laid out more than a century ago, when use was dramatically lower and our understanding of sustainable trail design was very different. Today, the Franconia Ridge Loop receives 45,000–50,000 visitors between May and October, while increasingly intense rain events put additional stress on trails already carrying extraordinary levels of foot traffic.

Repairing these trails in place is no longer enough. Many White Mountain trails need to be fundamentally redesigned to reflect the realities of terrain, geology, ecology, and steadily increasing visitation. At the same time, trail design must recognize the diverse ways people move through the landscape today, whether hiking, trail running, mountain biking, or using mobility devices such as wheel chairs. Sustainable trails must be resilient not only to natural forces, but also to the evolving ways people experience the outdoors.

Here are some of the things I believe the Franconia Ridge Loop project got right.

Trail Realignment

Many of the White Mountains’ steep legacy trails follow, or come close to following, the fall line, the direction of steepest descent down a slope. Unfortunately, that is also the direction water wants to travel.

At relatively low levels of use, these trails can persist for a very long time. As I discussed in my essay Trails and Time, however, at moderate and especially high levels of use, the combination of water and thousands of boots accelerates erosion. The result is familiar throughout the White Mountains: trails that gradually become deeply eroded channels filled with exposed rocks and roots, with sediment carried downslope toward streams and rivers.

The most important solution is often not to keep repairing the old trail, but to change its alignment.

By moving a trail onto the side slope and allowing it to climb more gradually across the contour, we can dramatically reduce the distance that water travels down the tread and create opportunities for water to leave the trail naturally. A properly designed side-hill trail is consequently less susceptible to erosion and requires less intensive maintenance.

That sounds simple. In practice, on the steep, rocky terrain of Franconia Notch, it is anything but.

Reverse-Grade Drainage

Realignment by itself does not solve the drainage problem. Even a side-hill trail has a grade, and water will follow that grade downhill unless we give it somewhere to go.

Traditionally, White Mountain trails have relied heavily on waterbars: stone or wooden structures placed across the trail to intercept water and divert it from the tread. Properly constructed and maintained, they can work. The problem is that waterbars collect sediment and debris and therefore require frequent cleaning.

That creates an enormous maintenance burden. A steep legacy trail can require scores or even hundreds of drainage structures, some needing attention multiple times during a season. With increasingly intense rain events, keeping every drainage structure functioning becomes extraordinarily difficult. We should not blame trail adopters and trail crews when that system begins to fail. We should ask whether we can design trails that require less intervention in the first place.

One of the most important techniques used in the Franconia Ridge project is therefore reverse-grade drainage.

Instead of continuously climbing, the trail briefly levels and descends before beginning to climb again. This creates a natural low point where water can leave the trail. Combined with an appropriately outsloped tread, water drains from the trail largely through its shape, rather than depending upon a structure that must continually be cleaned.

The best drainage structure, in other words, can be the trail itself.

Using Steps Without Building a Staircase Up the Mountain

There is a complication.

An ideal side-hill trail with frequent grade reversals can require a great deal of horizontal distance to gain elevation. In the convoluted, rocky terrain of the White Mountains, we simply do not always have that space.

Many modern professional trail builders therefore regard stone steps as something to use judiciously rather than as the first solution to a steep slope. But avoiding steps entirely can require very long realignments, while simply building a staircase straight uphill recreates many of the drainage problems we are trying to solve.

The Franconia Ridge project has demonstrated an important compromise.

Rather than constructing long, continuously steep staircases, we can use small clusters of stone steps to gain elevation relatively quickly, followed by longer sections of trail at a much lower grade, often around 10–12 percentwhere the terrain permits. A reverse grade can be incorporated at the top of a step cluster before the trail resumes climbing.

These combinations can often be incorporated into a climbing turn, allowing the trail to gain substantial elevation while maintaining sustainable grades and drainage over most of its length.

Professional trail builder Peter Jensen has refined this approach over many years, and it has been used extensively in the Franconia Ridge Loop restoration.

The result is not a trail without steps. It is a trail in which steps, grade and drainage work together.

Steps Designed for Human Beings

Stone steps have been part of the White Mountain trail-building toolbox for decades. What has not always received enough attention is their rise and run: how high hikers must step and how much usable surface each step provides.

The White Mountains are famous for what are sometimes called “power steps” or “Paul Bunyan steps.” I confess that as a young trail builder, I helped build them. There was almost an assumption that hikers should have to make an extra effort to get up the mountain.

But hikers and trail runners respond to the trail in front of them. Faced with an awkwardly high step and an easier route around it, many people will unconsciously choose the easier route. Multiply that decision by tens of thousands of hikers and the result is widening, braiding and erosion alongside the constructed trail.

On the Franconia Ridge project, we have increasingly aimed for stone steps with a comfortable rise of no more than about 7–8 inches and, where the available stone allows, a run of roughly 14–16 inches.

That isn’t merely about making hiking easier.

A trail people naturally want to walk on is also a trail they are more likely to stay on.

Foundation Steps

Good stone stair construction begins at the bottom.

A secure foundation step at the foot of a stair cluster is essential. Without it, erosion can undermine the bottom of the staircase and destabilize everything above it.

This matters particularly because steep trail sections concentrate and accelerate water. The principle is straightforward: the steeper the grade, the faster water can flow; the faster it flows, the greater its erosive power.

We can see the consequences on older sections of both the Old Bridle Path and Falling Waters Trail. Some stone steps have been undercut by more than a foot. That represents an extraordinary amount of lost soil, but it also changes the effective height of the step. A once-manageable stone step gradually becomes another “Paul Bunyan step,” encouraging hikers to find a route around it.

A well-founded staircase, combined with drainage that keeps water from accelerating through it, is therefore fundamental to durable stonework.

Full-Bench Construction, Cribbing and Tread Preparation

A sustainable side-hill trail also requires a proper bench cut.

Rather than placing tread material on the surface of a slope, the trail is cut into the hillside to create a stable walking surface. Wherever terrain permits, a full-bench trail, with the entire tread excavated into undisturbed mineral soil, provides the strongest foundation.

On a lightly used trail, a relatively modest tread may gradually become established through use. That is not adequate for a trail carrying tens of thousands of hikers each year.

The organic surface layer must be removed and the tread prepared with suitable mineral soil and crushed aggregate where necessary. On our Old Bridle Path work, we sometimes literally mine the material, digging small pits nearby to find appropriate mineral soil and aggregate.

Skipping this step may produce a trail that looks finished when the crew leaves, but heavy traffic will quickly compact and displace organic material, exposing roots and rocks. Placing heavier mineral material directly over an unsuitable organic layer doesn’t solve the problem either. The underlying organic material eventually mixes upward into the tread, creating a soft, muddy and unstable surface.

Where the hillside is too steep to support the desired tread width through benching alone, stone cribbing can retain the outside edge, allowing the space behind it to be filled with suitable mineral material and creating a durable, stable tread.

Much of the quality of a trail, in other words, lies beneath hikers’ feet where they will never see it.

A Trail Width That Reflects Actual Use

One of the most visible changes on reconstructed sections of the Franconia Ridge Loop is that the trail is sometimes wider than the trail it replaced.

At first, that can seem counterintuitive. Isn’t the goal to make the trail’s footprint as narrow as possible?

Not necessarily.

On a trail carrying 45,000–50,000 visitors a year, people regularly meet and pass one another. If the constructed tread is too narrow for that behavior, hikers step onto its edges and into adjacent vegetation. The effective trail becomes wider regardless of what width appears on the construction plan.

Forest Service trail standards allow considerable variation in tread width depending upon trail class, designed use, terrain and management objectives. On portions of the Franconia Ridge Loop, we have used tread widths of up to approximately 60 inches, particularly where accommodating two-way traffic helps keep hikers on the constructed surface.

That leads to an important principle for heavily traveled trails:

Sometimes a somewhat wider constructed trail creates a smaller overall area of disturbance.

The trail should be designed not simply for an abstract standard, but for the way tens of thousands of people actually use it.

Toward a New White Mountains Standard

These are not all of the sustainable design and construction techniques used in the Partnership to Restore the Franconia Ridge Loop. But together they represent something larger than a collection of trail-building details.

They represent a change in philosophy.

Rather than repeatedly repairing a century-old trail in place, we can design the trail around water. We can use alignment and grade to shed water before it gains erosive force. We can use stone steps strategically rather than simply building straight uphill. We can construct steps that people naturally want to use. We can build a durable foundation beneath the tread. And we can make the trail wide enough to accommodate the number of people who actually hike it.

Perhaps most importantly, the project has demonstrated that heavily used White Mountain trails require a different standard of design and construction than trails receiving a few thousand visitors a year.

The Partnership to Restore the Franconia Ridge Loop has made an enormous contribution toward establishing that standard.

But if this is the standard we now know how to build, another question follows:

Did we apply it consistently across the Franconia Ridge Loop, and what have we learned about how to do better?

That will be the subject of the third and final article in this series: What We Could Have Done Better in the Franconia Ridge Loop Project.

Kenna Brochu

This weekend, Summit Stewards Kenna Brochu and Demi Terry and Summit Steward Intern Sarah Heller traversed up to Franconia Ridge for Labor Day Weekend. This weekend we anticipated a large population of hikers, so we were eager to get up to the ridge and start working.

On Friday, September 4th, we were surprised by the lack of hikers spending the night at Greenleaf Hut. The hut was only around half full, which was very unexpected. Nonetheless, we met up with AMC Alpine Steward Pete Lane, who was stationed at Greenleaf Hut, and discussed our stewarding plan for the busy Saturday.

On Saturday, September 5th, the weather was less than ideal. It was a very cold and gloomy morning in the clouds, but we knew that the conditions weren’t going to stop hikers from traversing the ridge. Sarah and I traversed over to Little Haystack to spend the day stewarding. On the way, we stopped at each summit for around 30–45 minutes and talked to multiple different groups of hikers about their plans. We arrived at Little Haystack around 12:30pm and remained stationed there until around 3:30pm. Although busy, the flow of traffic was relatively mild, and the summit never felt overwhelmingly busy like it can on a typical Saturday.

On this day, Demi hung back and continued building up scree walls along the south side of Lincoln in hopes of keeping hikers on trail during this busy weekend.

At the end of the day, Sarah and I met Demi at the summit of Mount Lafayette and stayed there for around an hour. We like to end our day stewarding on Mount Lafayette in hopes of guiding hikers to the right trail when following the Franconia Ridge Loop. We have noticed an increase in hikers continuing on the Appalachian Trail towards North Lafayette instead of turning left down the Upper Greenleaf Trail. We believe that additional signage or reworking the current sign would help guide people in the right direction.

On the descent down the Upper Greenleaf Trail, the rain began to pick up. Thankfully, we noticed most hikers coming to the ridge were very prepared with rain gear and layers.

On Sunday, September 6th, the plan was to head to the south side of Mount Lincoln to continue to work on the rock project from the previous week. Sarah and Demi continued working on the project while I installed more string fencing on the north side of Mount Lincoln. Although we have worked tirelessly this season to perfect the scree walls in this region, unfortunately these efforts have not been successful in keeping hikers on trail. While installing string fencing, multiple hikers were curious about the project and appreciated the efforts of maintaining the trail.

Unfortunately, Demi and Sarah had to stop working on the rock project relatively early due to the amount of traffic on the ridge that day. Instead, Sarah decided to steward on Mount Lincoln, while Demi traversed back to Mount Lafayette to steward there. The digital trail counter was malfunctioning this weekend, so we unfortunately will not have an exact count of hikers traveling the ridge on Sunday, but I can confidently say that this is one of the busiest days I have seen this season.

After finishing the string fencing installation, I joined Sarah at the summit of Mount Lincoln and talked to various hikers for around an hour.

On our traverse back to the hut, I noticed a hiker in distress on the south side of Mount Lafayette, around 100 feet from the summit. She was in her late 20s and had been abandoned by the group she was hiking with. She stated that she was in no intense pain but felt like she had breached her physical limits. When I met her, she had already notified Search and Rescue that she needed assistance. Fortunately, Pete wasn’t far behind and was able to contact Fish and Game to make a plan. Pete, Demi, and I hiked with her over the summit and down the Upper Greenleaf Trail to Greenleaf Hut. We were under the impression that some of her group was waiting for her at the hut, where we would drop her off with them. Unfortunately, her friends began the traverse without her, down the Old Bridle Path. So, we got in contact with her friends and asked them to stop hiking so we could meet them and allow the group to finish the traverse together.

It was around 7:00pm when Demi and I started hiking the woman down the Old Bridle Path. Fortunately, the hut had two headlamps they were willing to donate to the group. At around 8:30pm, we found her friends waiting, roughly a mile and a half down the trail. We reminded them that it is never a good idea to split up in the backcountry and situations like these can become extremely dangerous extremely fast. After talking for a bit, they started their hike back down the trail, while we started traversing back to the tent platform. We got back to the hut around 9:15pm.

On Monday, September 7th, we were all feeling pretty exhausted from the long day on the ridge and decided to just traverse up to Mount Lafayette. Demi and Sarah started working on extending the walls leading to North Lafayette in hopes of reducing the confusion at the fork. I worked on rebuilding cairn tops leading to the summit of Mount Lafayette. This day was also extremely busy, with a full crowd on the summit as early as 10:30am. At around 1:00pm, we began our trek back down Upper Greenleaf to begin our pack out.

On Tuesday, September 1, groups gathered in Franconia Notch to celebrate five years of the Partnership to Restore Franconia Ridge, marking the conclusion of trail work supported by Congressionally Directed Funding secured by U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen and led by the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC).

Senator Shaheen joined White Mountain National Forest Supervisor Derek Ibarguen and AMC President and CEO Nicole Zussman, along with leadership and staff from the US Forest Service and AMC. Also attending were members of several of the crews that have worked on the Franconia Ridge Loop over the past five years, including the NorthWoods Stewardship Center, Student Conservation Association, Vermont Youth Conservation Corps, and AMC volunteer and professional trail crews.

Representatives of WTN Americas/Pan American Trails were also invited and attended. Although our work was not supported by the Congressionally Directed Funding, it has become an important part of the larger effort to restore the Loop.

The congressional funding did not cover the portions of the Old Bridle Path and Falling Waters Trail located on Franconia Notch State Park lands. WTN Americas/Pan American Trails secured private funding to extend the restoration effort into these sections. Our professional crews, Peter S. Jensen & Associates LLC and the Trail Fixing Collective LLC, have worked extensively on the Old Bridle Path and continue that work today. This year, private support is being supplemented by a New Hampshire Recreational Trails Program grant.

Altogether, WTN Americas/Pan American Trails has brought over $600,000 in additional funding to the Franconia Ridge Loop effort, representing more than one-third of the investment in the entire project. And our work will continue beyond the conclusion of the congressionally funded project. In 2027, we plan to move restoration work to the Franconia Notch State Park section of Falling Waters Trail.

The Work Still Ahead

As we celebrate what has been accomplished, this five-year milestone also provides an opportunity to take stock.

The original vision was ambitious: to “redesign the Franconia Ridge Loop from start to finish.” Five years later, despite an extraordinary investment of money, labor, expertise, and volunteer effort, that work is not complete.

Substantial work remains even on the two approach trails, Old Bridle Path and Falling Waters Trail. Only a relatively small amount of work has been completed on the upper Greenleaf Trail in the alpine zone. And no congressionally funded restoration work was undertaken on perhaps the most ecologically sensitive section of the entire Loop: the Franconia Ridge Trail between Mount Lafayette and Little Haystack.

WTN Americas/Pan American Trails Summit Stewards have undertaken substantial trail tending and restoration work along this alpine section, but without support from the Congressionally Directed Funding and therefore outside the formal restoration project.

In other words, after five years and a tremendous investment, we have learned something important about the scale of the challenge:

If our goal is to truly restore and sustainably manage the Franconia Ridge Loop, the work has only begun.

That does not diminish what this partnership has accomplished. Quite the opposite.

The project represents a major advance in promoting a new standard for trail design and construction in the White Mountains. It has demonstrated what becomes possible when significant resources, skilled professional crews, public agencies, nonprofit organizations, and volunteers are brought together around a shared project.

It has also given us lessons that should inform how projects are planned and designed; how priorities are established across an entire trail system; how professional and volunteer crews can best complement one another; and how trail reconstruction can be integrated with the ongoing stewardship required after the construction crews leave.

Our Old Bridle Path volunteer workdays, organized in partnership with AMC, offer one example. In my experience, they represent one of the most effective integrations of volunteer labor into a professional trail construction project I have seen. Volunteers are not simply doing work adjacent to the professional project. Their work is planned so that it directly advances and complements what the professional crews are building.

However, the work does not end when a grant ends. Nor does rebuilding the physical trail, by itself, solve the challenges facing Franconia Ridge. Summit stewardship, routine trail tending, ecological restoration, visitor management, monitoring, and continued reconstruction all have to become parts of a sustained effort.

So, as this five-year chapter comes to a close, where do we go from here?

Next week we will, we will consider: Franconia Ridge Loop restoration beyond 2026.

One of the questions we have been asking over the last several years: When does a busy trail become a crowded trail?

The trail counter on Franconia Ridge provides part of the answer. It records the number of visitors passing a point on the ridge and, importantly, the direction they are traveling. Looking at the data by hour reveals a remarkably consistent daily rhythm. Visitor traffic builds rapidly through the morning, generally peaks between 11:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m., and then declines through the afternoon.

But not all days are alike. Saturdays operate in an entirely different realm from most weekdays. During the summer we recorded several Saturdays with more than 1,000 visitors. On August 15 the trail experienced a record 1,441 visitors in a single day—a record number. This last Saturday, August 22, we also exceeded 1000, with 1133. Our observations suggest that under these very high-use conditions, off-trail behavior also increases sharply.

The new counter WTN Americas/Pan American Trails placed on the ridge this summer can provide data at 15-minute intervals, allowing us to look inside those busy hours. What we find is that visitors do not necessarily move across the ridge in a steady stream. They often arrive in small waves or pulses within a larger single wave , not unlike the traffic patterns that develop on a highway during periods of congestion.

On August 15, for example, one 15-minute period contained 73 visitors and another contained 75. More importantly, the pressure was sustained. For nearly five hours, every consecutive 15-minute interval contained at least 35 visitors, and for four hours the count remained at or above 40 per interval.

Volume, Intensity, Persistence, Encounters, and Passing

This suggests that crowding has several dimensions. Daily volume tells us how many people are using the trail. Intensity tells us how concentrated that use becomes over short periods. Persistence tells us how long those conditions continue.

Intensity can occur without high volume; persistence generally cannot. A large group, or simply the happenstance of several groups arriving at the same time, can create a short burst of intense use on an otherwise quiet day. But for high-intensity conditions to persist over hours, there must be enough visitors in the system to continually replenish the flow.

Because the counter records direction of travel, we can also distinguish visitors traveling north from those traveling south. When visitors traveling in opposite directions meet, we call these encounters. Two 15-minute periods containing 60 visitors therefore may represent very different conditions. If nearly everyone is traveling in one direction, there will be relatively few opportunities for head-on encounters. If 30 are traveling north and 30 south, the potential for encounters is much greater.

There is another kind of interaction: passing. Visitors traveling in the same direction move at different speeds, so faster visitors overtake slower ones.

Both encounters and passing matter because trail conditions help determine what happens when visitors interact. On a wide, relatively smooth section of trail, two visitors may pass without difficulty. At a narrow section, high step, rugged scramble, pinch point, or location where the trail boundary is unclear, the same interaction may require someone to stop, wait, squeeze past, or step off the established tread.

It becomes more complicated when we consider different types of visitors. In 2025, International Trails Fellow Rod Goés observed differences in interactions involving hikers and runners. When hikers approach one another from opposite directions, one or both may move off the tread to get by. When a hiker sees a runner approaching from the opposite direction, however, the hiker may stop and step aside, often onto a durable surface. A runner overtaking a hiker from behind presents a different situation: the hiker may not know the runner is approaching, leaving the runner to move around the hiker, sometimes in a broad arc beyond the established tread.

This gives us a more nuanced way of thinking about the relationship between visitor use and trail impacts:

visitor flow → encounters & passing → interaction with visitor type & trail conditions → behavioral response

The Importance of a Trail Audit

The White Mountain Environmental Field School’s trail audit adds another part of the information needed to understand this process. In 2026, students and stewards mapped many of the physical conditions associated with off-trail movement, including high steps, narrow tread, pinch points, rugged surfaces, and poorly defined trail boundaries. They also identified locations where off-trail use is already occurring.

Bringing these observations together with the counter data may allow us to test a more interesting hypothesis. Off-trail behavior may not simply increase steadily as the number of visitors increases. Instead, there may be points at which repeated encounters and passing at particular locations begin to produce surges in off-trail movement.

One visitor steps aside to let another pass. A second person follows the same line. As traffic continues, what began as an individual response can become an informal passing lane or alternate route. In this way, a combination of visitor flow, human behavior, and trail design may produce impacts that cannot be explained by visitor numbers alone.

Modeling Visitor Behavior

How can we put all these pieces together? One promising tool is an agent-based model, or ABM. The idea is simpler than the name suggests. Instead of treating 1,000 visitors as a single number, a computer model represents them as individual visitors moving along a simplified version of the trail. Some travel north, others south. They move at different speeds, encounter and pass one another, and eventually respond to features such as narrow tread, high steps, or pinch points. The model can use the actual waves of northbound and southbound visitors recorded by our trail counter rather than assuming that visitors arrive at a constant rate.

We can then ask whether relatively simple rules governing individual behavior produce the larger patterns we observe on the ridge. Do off-trail movements begin to cluster at particular locations as traffic increases? Do short pulses of visitors matter differently from sustained congestion? What happens when opposing streams of visitors meet at a pinch point? And could widening a short section of tread, providing a passing area, clarifying a trail boundary, or changing a high step reduce the predicted off-trail surge?

An ABM would not tell us exactly what every visitor will do, nor would it replace observations on the ground. Instead, it provides a kind of virtual trail laboratory where counter data, trail conditions, and field observations can be brought together and different explanations tested. If the model can reproduce patterns we actually observe on Franconia Ridge, we can then use it to explore how relatively small changes in trail design or management might change those patterns.

Ultimately, the question is not simply “How many visitors are too many?” A more useful question may be:

Under what combinations of visitor flow, encounters, passing, visitor types, and trail conditions does off-trail behavior begin to increase?

Answering that question could help us move beyond broad ideas of trail “carrying capacity” toward something much more practical: understanding how heavily used alpine trails function under pressure, identifying where problems are most likely to develop, and designing targeted interventions that accommodate visitors while better protecting the alpine landscape.

Summit Steward Demi Terry and Summit Steward Intern Sarah Heller ranged a little farther than usual this past weekend, with four days of stewardship taking them from Franconia Ridge to Mount Moosilauke and the Crawford Path, with a stop along the way at the Dartmouth Trails Partners Dinner.

On Friday, August 21, Sarah stewarded the entire Franconia Ridge Loop, ascending Falling Waters Trail and spending the day talking with hikers along the route. She also connected with AMC Alpine Steward Kristi Kienholz based at Greenleaf Hut. After several exceptionally busy summer weekends on the ridge, Sarah reported a comparatively quiet day. However, the trail counter recorded another 1133 the following day, Saturday August 22. 

A Day on Moosilauke

On Saturday, Sarah and Demi shifted their attention westward, climbing Mount Moosilauke to spend the day working alongside Dartmouth Alpine Steward Duda Gonçalves Freitas.

The three stewards repainted trail signs and talked with hikers throughout the day. In contrast to Franconia Ridge the day before, Moosilauke was bustling, giving Sarah and Demi an opportunity to see stewardship on another of the White Mountains’ heavily visited alpine summits.

That evening, Sarah and Demi attended the Dartmouth Trails Partners Dinner, where they met and exchanged ideas with people representing different corners of the White Mountains trail community. Beyond simply being a social gathering, the dinner provided an opportunity to learn about other projects underway across the region and strengthen connections among the organizations and volunteers caring for the White Mountains trail system.

Back to Work on the Crawford Path

On Sunday, the stewards turned east again, ascending the Edmands Path to begin a two-day hitch on the Crawford Path.

Much of Sunday’s work focused on the large disturbed area near Mount Franklin that we have come to call “the beach.” This broad area of exposed ground has been a recurring focus of our Crawford Path stewardship this summer.

Sarah and Demi also replaced sections of black string fencing with the more visible and durable white string fencingrecently introduced on Franconia Ridge. On their return toward Nauman Tentsite, they maintained scree walls along the route.

Monday took them north toward Mount Eisenhower, restoring fallen cairns along the way. One of their principal objectives was to begin rebuilding the cairn on Eisenhower’s summit. But when they arrived, they discovered something unexpected: someone had already rebuilt it.

The mystery remains as to who did the work. Demi reported that the cairn appeared to be well constructed, suggesting that it may have been rebuilt by a volunteer or caretaker..

The day also provided another reminder of how many people and organizations contribute to caring for these mountains. Sarah and Demi encountered numerous AMC volunteers along the route, as well as AMC’s Craig Heinselman.

Over four days, the stewards moved through three different alpine stewardship landscapes: interacting with visitors on Franconia Ridge, working alongside a Dartmouth steward on Moosilauke, and carrying out restoration and maintenance on the Crawford Path. It was an unusually wide-ranging weekend, but one that illustrates an increasingly important part of the Alpine Stewardship Center’s work: connecting stewardship across trails, mountains, and organizations throughout the White Mountains and Northeast.