Why We Are
The impact of recreational outdoor use, while far more benign than hydraulic mining or clearcut logging, is still just that – impact. The numbers of people coming to this area for recreational escape have been steadily rising for the past two decades, and given current population trends, it’s unlikely that those numbers will dwindle anytime soon. The trails that people use - be it for hiking, horseback riding, or mountain biking - inevitably suffer increased wear under greater numbers of footprints, hooves, and tire tracks. Some of these trails are a hundred and fifty years old, and were built in a time when terms like "sustainable grade" did not exist (a time when the concept of recreational use didn’t exist either, for that matter). Heavy use of these trails without some sort of restoration and without any mitigation of that impact ends up becoming an issue for the surrounding ecosystem, especially in terms of erosion and watershed contamination.