Tag: trails

The practice of determining how old a track or piece of sign is, based on its condition relative to known events — last rain, last frost, last wind, time of day. A track with sharp edges and moist soil was made recently. A track with a thin film of dust, dried edges, and a spider thread across it was not. Aging requires intimate knowledge of local weather, substrate behavior, and the small processes — drying, crumbling, insect activity, leaf fall — that erode a mark over time. The best trackers age sign not in days but in hours.

Rounded, cobble-sized rocks that litter a trail or riverbed, just large enough to turn an ankle. They wobble underfoot like they're not quite committed to the ground. Unfriendly to feet and mountain bike tires. Not conducive for rock skipping.

A highly absorbent, swelling clay formed from the weathering of volcanic ash. Bentonite can absorb several times its weight in water, expanding dramatically and becoming slippery, plastic, and nearly impervious. Wet bentonite on a trail or road is one of the most treacherous walking and driving surfaces in the West — it clings to boots in heavy, accumulating slabs and turns roads into impassable grease. Dry, it cracks into a mosaic of hard, pale flakes. The badlands of the Northern Plains and the desert hills of the Colorado Plateau are rich in it.

 A mound of stacked stones, built by human hands for any of a dozen purposes — marking a trail, commemorating the dead, indicating a summit, claiming territory, honoring a place, or simply because stacking stones is one of the oldest human impulses. Cairns range from knee-high trail markers to massive Bronze Age burial mounds. They are found on every continent where there are rocks and people.

In trail-building, logs laid side by side across a boggy path to create a stable surface — a road made of wood over ground that would otherwise swallow you. Walking on corduroy is like walking on piano keys. The logs shift and roll underfoot.

An informal trail worn into the ground by repeated foot traffic, diverging from the designed or official route because people instinctively find a more direct or comfortable way. Desire paths appear across lawns, through parks, between buildings, and along hillsides wherever the official infrastructure doesn't match how people actually move. They are the landscape's record of collective preference.

A road or trail carved into the side of a steep slope, wide enough for a vehicle or wagon, typically cut through rock or packed earth. Dugways are found throughout the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau, where access to the bench lands below the rimrock requires literally digging a way down through the cliff. Many are relics of mining or ranching operations, one lane wide, with no guardrail and a long drop on one side.

A shallow place in a river or stream where the water is low enough to cross on foot, on horseback, or by vehicle. Fords determined where roads went, where settlements grew, and where battles were fought. Before bridges, they were the points of connection between one side and the other — the seams in the landscape where travel was possible.

The pattern of an animal's movement — walk, trot, lope, gallop, bound, hop — as recorded in the spacing and arrangement of its tracks. Gait tells you what the animal was doing: a walking deer leaves evenly spaced prints in a straight line; a bounding rabbit leaves clusters of four with the hind feet landing ahead of the front. Speed, alertness, confidence, and fear all write themselves into gait. A tracker who can read gait doesn't just know what passed — they know its state of mind.

The common name for the spiny fruit of the puncturevine (Tribulus terrestris) — small, hard, wickedly sharp seed pods that can puncture bicycle tires, shoe soles, and bare feet. They carpet disturbed ground across the arid West and are universally despised. Each fruit has two or more spines positioned so that one always points upward, regardless of how the pod lands.

Japanese for "beast trail" — the paths animals wear into a landscape by instinct and repetition. Urban planners call them desire lines and the French call them chemin de l'âne, donkey paths. Every language names this phenomenon because every landscape displays it. Hikers, climbers, and other recreationalists call them use trails, which, frankly, leaves a lot to be desired.

The time elapsed since a track or sign was made — minutes, hours, or days, estimated by reading the condition of the impression. Fresh tracks have sharp edges, moist soil, and undisturbed detail. Aged tracks have crumbled edges, dried surfaces, windblown debris, and may be overlaid by other prints or crossed by insect trails. Rain, sun, wind, temperature, and substrate all affect how quickly sign degrades. Estimating lag is the most difficult and most consequential skill in tracking — it tells you whether you are following a memory or closing on something alive.

 The act of carrying a boat and gear overland between two navigable bodies of water, or around an obstacle in a river — a waterfall, a dam, an impassable rapid. Also the trail used for this carrying. Portage routes were the original highways of the North American interior, and many modern roads follow them.

A long, cross-country hike or ski tour — the French approach to mountain travel, emphasizing distance, terrain, and self-sufficiency rather than technical difficulty. In skiing, randonnée means touring on skins, climbing the mountain before descending it.

The degree to which an animal's hind foot lands in the track left by its front foot. In a direct register, the hind foot falls exactly in the front print, leaving what looks like a single track — common in cats, foxes, and deer moving at a walk. In an indirect register, the hind foot lands slightly off. An overstep means the hind foot lands ahead of the front print; an understep means it falls short. Register is one of the first things a tracker looks for — it immediately narrows the species and tells you the animal's pace.

A well-worn path through vegetation used regularly by animals — a visible route through grass, brush, or undergrowth where repeated passage has beaten down the plants, compacted the soil, and created a narrow corridor of movement. Animal runs are as deliberate as roads and often as old. They connect bedding areas to water, feeding areas to cover, and one part of a territory to another. Some runs are used by multiple species; others are exclusive. The width and height of the cleared corridor tell you what's using it.

Animal droppings examined for what they reveal — diet, health, species, time of passage, and the habits of a creature you may never see. Scat is the autobiography an animal writes without knowing it. Shape, size, color, contents, placement, and freshness each tell a different part of the story. A pile of bear scat full of manzanita berries is a paragraph about the season. A twisted, fur-filled coyote dropping on a rock at a trail junction is a sentence about territory. Owl pellets — regurgitated rather than excreted — are a related form: the compressed, undigested remains of prey, wrapped in fur and bone, dropped beneath a roost.

Any visible evidence of an animal's presence or passage — tracks, scat, rubs, scrapes, beds, feeding sign, hair, feathers, scent marks, kill sites, nests, burrows, trails, and disturbances in vegetation or soil. Sign is the general term that contains all the others. A tracker reads sign the way a reader reads text — each mark is a word, each cluster a sentence, and the landscape is the page. The skill is not in seeing any one piece of sign but in assembling the pieces into a story.

 A structure built into or over a fence or wall that allows people to pass through while keeping livestock enclosed. Stiles come in many forms — stone steps, wooden ladder steps, squeeze gates, kissing gates — and are among the most quietly civilized features of the rural English and Welsh landscape. They are invitations: the land beyond is open to you on foot, but the animals stay put.

The width between the outermost edges of an animal's left and right tracks — how wide the trail pattern is. Straddle, combined with stride, is one of the first measurements a tracker takes. A wide straddle relative to track size suggests a heavy, wide-bodied animal (badger, porcupine, bear); a narrow straddle suggests a light, narrow-bodied one (fox, deer, bobcat). Straddle is the animal's body width written on the ground.

The distance between successive prints of the same foot — the length of one complete step cycle. Stride tells you how fast the animal was moving and, combined with track size, helps narrow the species. A walking coyote has a stride of roughly 12 to 14 inches; a walking mountain lion, with its longer body and shorter legs, may have a similar stride but a very different track pattern. In a gallop, stride opens dramatically — sometimes four or five times the walking distance.

The surface on which a track is printed — mud, sand, dust, snow, wet leaves, dry leaves, duff, gravel, bare mineral soil. Substrate determines everything about what a track looks like and how long it lasts. The same animal leaves a crisp, detailed print in wet silt and an unreadable scuff in dry pine needles. Learning to track is largely learning to read substrates — knowing what each surface can and cannot record.

A sharp, reversing turn in a trail or road ascending a steep slope, zigzagging back and forth to reduce the gradient. Switchbacks trade distance for steepness — you walk farther but climb more gently. They are the engineering solution to the problem of gravity on foot, and they shape how we experience mountains: slowly, in lateral traverses, with the view changing at every turn.

The impression left by an animal's foot in soil, mud, sand, snow, or dust — a single print that records the weight, gait, speed, and intention of the creature that made it. A track is not just a shape; it is an event frozen in substrate. The depth of the toe pads, the presence or absence of claw marks, the spacing between prints, the splay of the toes, the ridge of mud pushed up at the edges — all of it is information, readable by anyone who learns the language.

In tracking, the continuous sequence of sign left by an animal moving through the landscape — not just footprints but disturbed vegetation, scuffed bark, broken spider webs, displaced stones, bent grass, and the faintest compressions in duff. A trail is the full narrative of passage, of which tracks are only the most legible sentences. Following a trail when the tracks disappear is the test of a tracker — reading disturbance rather than impression.