The Articles Path

A Cursory Look at Trail Maintenance	This document is from the California State Parks and Recreation. It is a short, but well done discussion about backcountry trail design & maintenance.
Backpack Fitting Guide	Thanks to the folks at Arc'Teryx. This is a fitting guide for their wonderful packs, so some of the details may not relate to your gear, but the concepts for sizing and specifying a pack are applicable to all types of packs.
Bear Manners	Getting Along in the Backcountry. An article from the Potomac Appalachian Trail Club's site. "A pine needle fell in the forest. The deer heard it. The eagle saw it. The bear smelled it."
British Columbia State Park Trail Design & Construction Standards Manual	I was sent this by an anonymous 'donor'. It is quite a book, and has some great illustrations and how-to drawings. It also goes into a great deal of depth on the planning and coordination with other agencies and with land owners. (I'm going to try to contact the authors...)
Hand Tools for Trail Work Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8	A handbook produced by the Forestry Department. This has some great illustrations and demonstrations of how hand tools are used. Their information pertaining to saws is really good. Note: These are in PDF form, so you will need Adobe's Acrobat Reader. You can get it from them or on the downloads page of this site.
In Praise of Bear Canisters	Keep the bears out of your backpacking food and help keep them wild and alive!
Maintainers' Handbook	The NY/NJ Trail Conference's 7th Edition guide book for trail maintainers. Also very good reading for trail construction folks.
Mt. Tammany Reconstruction Project	The story behind and about the project to rebuild the Mt. Tammany (Red Dot) trail in Worthington SP.
Paint Color Standards for Trail Blazing	As a trail maintainer or trail builder, you often use colored paint to produce the (typically) 2"x3" rectangle blazes. In the very busy trail complexes around our area, having a trail 'change color' part way along can be very confusing. Here are the NY/NJ Trail Conference's standards guidelines.
Pochuck Engineering Article	Everything you ever might have thought you wanted to know about the suspension bridge in the middle of the Pochuck Quagmire Appalachian Trail relocation. It may require an advanced engineering degree to fully understand it all; but it is written very well, and really is quite readable. Thank You, Tibor!
Rock Net Sling	I got tired of re-wrapping the chain around rocks I was trying to move with the Griphoist, so I spent some time in the tinkering zone.
Trail Acronyms	A list of commonly used acronyms can assist trails and greenway managers and advocated decipher the “alphabet soup” of trail development.
Trail Maintenance and Construction Tasks, Their Hazards, and Recommended Safety Gear	This chart was prepared by ATC using trail work job-hazard analyses by US. Forest Service district personnel, AT-club volunteers, ATC volunteer-crew leaders, and ATC management staff. The information provided in the chart represents a distillation of information about accidents that have occurred or that are likely to occur during different types of trail work.
Trail Maintenance Glossary	There's plenty of strange terms and names that trail workers use. Here's a collection of some of them...
Trails & Greenways Glossary	A general glossary of terms related to trails, greenways and related subjects. For trail work specific items see the 'Trail Maintenance Glossary' page. (Note that this is a very large page and may take a while to load!)
US Forest Service Drawings	An excellent collection of drawings prepared by the USFS. These are real blueprints for trail construction. I have collected them here for ease of your access. The full set and the AutoCad drawings are on here.
Why Build Trails?	Some thoughts on why you might want to spend time working in the woods...
Trail Construction Workshop November 1, 2008	View a web version of PDF slide show here.
Trail Construction Workshop April 25, 2009	View a web version of PDF slide show here.