This article appears in the 2024 Summer Long Trail News, written by GMC Communications Manager Chloe Miller with contributions from Volunteer and Education Coordinator Lorne Currier.
“STOP WITH THE STICKS!!!!” read an impassioned email from a hiker, sent to the Green Mountain Club and the Vermont Department of Forests Parks and Recreation in late 2022. The sender had noticed and objected to large and, by any definition, ugly, piles of organic matter lining the Burrows Trail.
However, those apparently disorderly piles are key piece of trail infrastructure. Called brush-ins, they define trails, keep hikers on them, and protect the surrounding environment.
Planning and building trails is an exercise in human behavior management as much as engineering and construction. Trails and landscapes are damaged by two main forces: water and human footsteps. Water rushes down the path of least resistance, which is often a trail, threatening erosion and washouts that we prevent or manage with durable stone staircases and drains. Human footsteps cause erosion, too. But humans are less predictable than water, and will often create “social trails” that defy a trail builder’s intent and vision.
Addressing Social Trails
Social trails are unplanned paths worn by repeated footsteps. Typically, hikers look at a constructed trail and see a steep step or another unattractive feature, like a puddle or severely eroded section. They walk beside the trail, where the going is more pleasant. When enough people do the same thing, the social trail begins to look like a proper path, and the problem worsens.
Trail crews address social trails in two ways.
One, they fix the official trail to make it more desirable. On the Burrows Trail, this includes installing dozens of stone steps to bridge the gaps between severely eroded steep steps. Two, they make the social trail less attractive. This is where a big brush-in comes in.
Using Brush-Ins
These piles of organic matter — downed trees, rotted logs, sticks, and leaves and duff from the forest floor — are meant to obscure the social trail, eventually decay, and foster revegetation so the social trail disappears.
“These things should be big, heavy, ugly and hard to move. They should make the undesirable tread you’re trying to close off the last place that a hiker would want to walk. They should force people to walk where you want them to walk, which is the proper trail. This should be bigger than you expect. Three or four branches won’t do the trick.” —Definition of a Brush-In from GMC’s Volunteer Trail Adopter Training Manual
Brush-ins accomplish three things to improve the health of a trail environment.
First and foremost, they deter traffic from an undesirable area, like a social trail.
Second, they encourage revegetation of a barren area. Hundreds of hikers on a social trail kill vegetation, causing soil erosion. After just a season or two a new brush-in becomes much less conspicuous as it settles under snow and autumn leaves, and starts to decay. In a few more years the social trail merges with the forest.
Finally, brush-ins slow down erosion. Water rushing down the bare soil of a social trail removes that soil. Brush-ins slow and filter flowing water, and divert it gently onto the surrounding forest floor. Properly placed, they also can help preserve major structures like stone staircases, by forming erosion-proof barriers.
While not appropriate everywhere, on heavily used routes like the Burrows or Sterling Pond trails, brush-ins help keep hikers on trails, and eventually improve the appearance of trails as well as the surrounding landscape.
So the next time you hike a popular trail, see if you can spot a brush-in. Even better, try to spot the traces of an old, almost invisible brush-in. You’ll soon appreciate the purpose of those piles of sticks!
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