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Deterioration of back country trails is a major issue for trail builders, managers and users. Trail deterioration can be caused through overuse, by use of unintended purposes; or by improper construction techniques or maintenance. To adequately maintain a trail system, managers need to understand both the physical properties of soils and underlying geomorphology, as well as the impacts that various types of uses will have on the trail. The impacts can vary depending on the geological properties at the trail site. We seek to provide trail managers with essential data regarding the influence that both the trail substrate and users can have on a trail bed. To achieve this, we studied a section of trail on the new Nine Mile Trail system just north of Elmsdale, N. S. At this site we analyzed the soil moisture and soil temperature, as well as examined the annual precipitation trends. We also conducted a controlled test consisting of 100 passes by mountain bike and 100 passes by hiker with the impact of these two activities on trail compaction and roughness recorded. The average compaction of trail cross-section was 2.2mm, with a greater impact where the trail had higher than average soil moisture (as much as 1 cm on wet transects to as little as 0.1 cm on dry transects). Both hiking and mountain biking showed a similar amount of compaction after the runs. However we also compared the impact on the roughness of the trail as measured by sinuosity (the width of the transect along the micro-topography over the straight line width). For roughness the variations were quite small, on the whole mountain biking showed a slightly higher rutting tendency than the hiking, with sinuosity ratios of ~1.034 for biking compared to a ratio of ~1.031 for hiking. However both of these are smaller then the baseline average of 1.037. These results show that a large number of factors can influence trail degradation. While our findings are specific to this trail, the methods used for determining both the natural effects and the user-influenced trail degradation can be applied to any trail location.

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Pages: 145
Supervisor: Lawrence Plug