Last fall on a walk home from work I chatted for a few moments with a fellow who'd just finished building their house. Their property is along the edge of the Farnum Hill recreational area and land put into public-use by the Poverty Lane Orchard folks. We talked about wild animal spottings and he mentioned a vague trailhead at the edge of his property. Said he'd followed it to a hill crest up above the apple orchards.
Last Friday we woke to a beautifully warm morning and just had to walk in to work. Half way in, while passing the guy's property, I remembered the trailhead and decided to give it a shot. Vague is a good word for it, I couldn't spot a thing, but a little further down the road we took what appeared to be a trail...for the first thirty feet. Should have taken it as a sign but instead we bushwhacked onward, crossed a little stream, and eventually met up with an old access road trail.
Up the hill we ran across a lone shed with trees silently closing in. Behind the shed, another hundred feet or so, was fencing surrounding the orchard. The trail was still distinct and it headed uphill so away we went...
Born and raised in Nebraska I have zero experience with forestry, but what I've decrypted since moving East is that every so often a landowner has a team come in and harvest wood. Skidders, lumberjacks, logging trucks, or maybe one of the newer all-in-one lumber harvesters move in before the spring thaw (or late fall) and go to town.
The results are an abomination, no two ways about it. The first time you see the mess and chaos from their passing all you can think of is vandalism. I think it boils down to efficiency: getting the lumber that is sale-able and getting out of there. The trimmings, the pine, and anything else just doesn't matter.
It's a real bummer when it happens to a favorite hiking or mt biking spot. But a few years pass and decay takes over, things smooth out, another couple of years and all that is really left are the faint road-like swaths used by the skidders that in turn are used by the hikers and mt bikers. The trails fan out from an access point like the branches of a tree, each branch heading outward and usually uphill until it meets up with another road or peters out.
That's what happened to our great new trail. We either picked the wrong branch or there just wasn't a good one. Zeke and I are fairly used to getting ourselves lost by now so we puttered around, ever westward (and upward), until we hit another trail. About twenty minutes of flailing and scraping up of fish-belly white legs. Gotta love spring.
On the part of the trail that was good I kept thinking "Why don't I ever bring the GPS?" and for the rest of the bushwhacking I was secretly glad that I hadn't. Nothing like carefully recording a failed trail. There hasn't been much call for a guide to "trails NOT to take." Much better to have the camera since even a bad trail has its moments.
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