On a recent glorious day, I went for a hike up the Big Rock Cave Trail, in the Sandwich Range of the White Mountains National Forest, with Jack Waldron, President of the Wonalancet Outdoor Club.
It’s one of maybe a dozen groups like theAppalachian Mountain Club and others that collectively maintain about half of the trails in the White Mountains.
The WODC maintains 50 miles of trails, mostly in forest designated as Federal Wilderness area — where special rules apply including no motorized vehicles and no power tools — to clear trails. Volunteers use hand saws and hatchets and elbow grease.
The trail, one of a network of backwoods paths that connect the mountains of the Sandwich Range of the White Mountains, was in good shape thanks in part to Waldron’s having come out recently to saw through a blow-down tree that had blocked part of the path and discouraged a group of hikers.
Waldron shoves an old log off the trail.
“When these things start falling in like that, things start getting a little dicey,” he says.
Trees fall on the trails all the time, and it doesn’t take much for a trail to seem to disappear
So, for generations the WODC has marked its trails with little blue rectangles of paint, called “blazes,” to help keep hikers on the trail and reassure them at points where the trail might take an unexpected turn.
“It almost looks doable to go straight right here,” Waldron said, pointing to what could be a trail, or might have been a trail some time ago. “But the blaze says, 'No, you’re getting lost if you go that way.'”
“That's the value, that's the language of the blazes,” he added.
But those little blazes have been a point of debate in recent years.
That's because among the many rules for wilderness areas is: no blazing.
The rule's been on the books for decades, but it's only in more recent years that officials have asked the clubs to stop blazing and to let the old marks fade away.
So now season by season, the club's blazes are slowly disappearing.
We come across a faded blaze.
“It’s barely recognizable now, and it’s lifetime is not long,” said Waldron. “So this, in a nutshell, is the issue that we’re facing
Jack thinks the blazes are important for safety, especially in the winter when trails are buried in snow but also just to reassure hikers. (The official term for blazes, in Forest Service regulations is “reassurance markers.")
By way of disclosure: I’m a member of the Wonalancet Outdoor Club. I first learned about the whole blazing debate from the club’s newsletters and meetings.
But other clubs have grappled with the issue, too.
Bob Drescher co-chairs the Trails committee for the Randolph Mountain Club, which maintains about a hundred miles of trails in the White Mountains Presidential Range.
“This whole idea of not marking trails, I don't know,” Drescher said over the phone.
As Drescher points out, more people are coming to the White Mountains than ever. The number of visitors to the National Forest has doubled in less than twenty years, and more and more of those visitors, Drescher says, aren’t particularly experienced hikers.
“Often they don’t have a map or compass and, little knowledge of the area they're in,” Drescher observes. “They don’t have a clue – that’s not meant to be negative, they just don’t. ... I think there needs to be something there to help guide them along."
To be sure, not everyone agrees: Plenty of trail enthusiasts like that wilderness trails are rugged and, well, wild. And, after all, they're supposed to be.
Dylan Alden oversees trails for the White Mountains' Sacco Rangers District, which includes the Sandwich range.
“An important thing to note is that wilderness isn’t wilderness for recreation’s sake, it’s wilderness for wilderness’ sake,” Alden told me.
She says all those rules — including on blazing — they come from the law that created wilderness areas in the first place: the Wilderness Act of 1964.
Signed by President Lyndon Johnson, the act called for areas "untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor."
And the volunteers who tend the trails, like Jack Waldron, share that vision. A new initiative called the White Mountains Trail Collective is aimed at bringing all of those groups closer together and focusing on bigger-picture issues facing the White Mountains trails.
“There are a lot of reasons for wilderness. One of them is to have a more permanent landscape where nature can evolve and we can learn from that environment,” Jack reflected on our hike.
“But the biggest reason to continue having wilderness is because nothing is going to be cut. … So that you can have a forest that is always going to be a forest,” he added.
Waldron and I hiked for three hours without passing a soul; It was just us, the trail, and the little blue blazes that dotted the way.
