[Talk-us] Caliparks re-tagging paths?

[ajt1047 at gmail.com]

On 26/03/2016 15:26, Kevin Kenny wrote:
>
> In these areas, a trail is a fairly tenuous thing. The marking may be
> just a splash of paint or an axe cut on a tree, and even that may be
> limited to once every few hundred metres.

"A splash of paint every few hundred metres?  You were lucky"*

Seriously - it depends.  Trail maintenance and trail marking varies 
hugely worldwide, and the US isn't really an outlier in how it's done 
there - I'm comparing parts of the Western US to parts of UK, Ireland, 
continental Europe, Southern Africa and Australia.  If I had to 
generalise I'd say that trails in the parts of the US that I've visited 
tend to be less well marked than some places in western continental 
Europe, but more so than places on the fringe of Britain and Ireland, 
and _considerably_ more so than e.g. Australia.

The concept of "here's a large area of public access land, but please 
only access it on these paths" is marginally more common in the US - but 
there also plenty of examples elsewhere too (bits of moorland in the UK, 
for example).

Generally however, based on my experience of having been there, the sort 
of issues that the guys looking after the trails in Marin are dealing 
with sound like exactly the sort of issues that people all around the 
world are dealing with.  To echo what Richard said, the US really isn't 
a "special case" in need of the invention of special tagging here.

Cheers,

Andy



* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k