ASPEN | Hiking with David Hamilton affords one a different type of view.
Along with the scenic vista of Independence Pass, Aspen and Mount Hayden, the executive director of Roaring Fork Outdoor Volunteers paused on the Sunnyside Trail to check how a water bar was functioning. The seldom-noticed manmade feature helps divert rainwater and snowmelt off to the side, preserving the main trail.
The mini-diversion in this case involved the digging of a trench in the middle of the trail and wedging in rocks a bit larger than that of a man’s fist. He hoped the stones were already in the area.
“We always try to use what’s native,” said Hamilton, who helped design, at the behest of Starwood homeowners, the realignment of Sunnyside in the late 1990s.
That helps to maintain the character of a given trail, and using native aspects of an area “is naturally part of the deal,” he said. “It’s part of our ascetic.”
Hamilton was less happy with a short section where a couple of stumps were visible, as those should have been removed by the trail crew hired for the realignment.
In its previous state, the trail passed through a Starwood homeowner’s front yard, and the HOA paid in the neighborhood of $30,000 for the design and construction of the current path, he said.
That is one of countless stories about our cherished hiking trails. Hamilton and others spoke recently about how the upper valley’s trail system came to be, the maintenance involved and the importance of volunteers who lend a hand in that.
Asked if it’s hard for him to not observe such features and simply enjoy the hiking experience when he’s not working, Hamilton said he’s gotten better at it in recent years. Hikes away from the valley help.
“I’ve learned to try to enjoy the trail, and my friends appreciate that I’m not always critiquing it,” he said. Still, “you never do look at trails the same way once you start working on them.”
A TRAIL’S ORIGINS
If you’ve ever been on Sunnyside at 2 p.m. in the summer, there’s little question about how it got its name.
“In the afternoon that thing bakes,” said Dale Will, executive director of the Pitkin County Open Space and Trails Department. His office oversees approximately 80 miles of trails.
The Rim Trail in Snowmass Village is likewise aptly named, as it traverses the ridge separating the town from the tony Wildcat subdivision.
The building of such trails is a bit murkier, except for one fact: Many have been around for decades. Tony Vagneur, a local author and lifelong valley resident, rode Aspen-area trails on horseback as a kid in the 1960s. Sunnyside was there at that time, he said.
“I suspect it originated as a cattle trail,” Vagneur said.
He also opined that the Ute Trail is so named because of the namesake spring that nourished the Native Americans and white settlers, the latter of whom built the original town site proximate to the watering hole. The county’s Will said he believes the trail name stems from the Utes’ use of it.
In the archives of the Aspen Historical Society rests “The New Aspen Area Trail Guide,” a manual for “hikers, backpackers, ski tourers and horseback riders.” It was written and published in 1975 by Michael O’Shea, with photographs by him, Michael Kennedy and Allen Whitaker, and it, too, proves that many area trails have been around for some time.
The guide contains descriptions of 13 trails, including the Rio Grande, then just under 2 miles long (it’s now 33 miles or so in length); Aspen Mountain (“all travellers will probably want to take some of the many incidental paths that branch off of the main road and lead to a mine shaft, or perhaps to nowhere in particular. Keep in mind, however, that the tunnels and shafts are extremely dangerous, especially for unwary children and pets.”); American Lake; Cathedral Lake; Lostman Trail; and the Aspen to Crested Butte trails.
In December 1974, members of the Pitkin County Parks Association, headed by the late, colorful Aspenite KNCB Moore, gathered for the annual meeting at the Magic Pan restaurant. With a budget of just under $7,000, members discussed, among other things, the need to accommodate the nascent sport of mountain biking on local trails.
Mountain biking’s popularity since then has led to scores of new trails in the upper valley, not all of them built legally. Last summer, three men were fined for building an illegal trail between the Aspen Business Center and the Brush Creek parking lot on Highway 82.
That, too, is not a new practice. The Aspen Times in 1992 reported that nature filmmaker Marty Stouffer, architect and prolific trail builder Fritz Benedict, and Fred Cheney, all tired of delays, started building their own trail from Aspen to Difficult Campground.
“We called our little group ABLE, Aspen Bike Lovers East,” Stouffer told Mary Eshbaugh Hayes, who wrote that it was “a grassroots project, a statement against bureaucracy.”
After numerous meetings with governmental entities, the last straw was the state highway department’s repainting of Highway 82 in a way that eradicated the existing bike path east of town.
“So Fritz and I said, ‘Let’s just do it. Let’s build our own trail away from the highway,’” Stouffer told the Times. “We took our shovels and went to work. They (presumably the highway department) yelled at us several times. But we played dumb and kept on working.”
THE ESCALATION OF COOPERATION
Nowadays, the mountain biking community is considered a critical member of the coalition that maintains the local trails. The county’s Will ticked off as major contributors to trail maintenance and development: Roaring Fork Outdoor Volunteers, Roaring Fork Mountain Bike Association, Aspen Cycling Club, Aspen Valley Land Trust, Roaring Fork Conservancy, Eagle County’s open space program, and the Roaring Fork Transportation Authority. The transit agency manages the longest section of the Rio Grande, which Will called the heart of the valley’s trail system.
But how, exactly, does one go about building a trail? There are no official courses or certifications to be a trail designer, said Hamilton, who had no expertise when he first volunteered on a project above Boulder in the late 1980s. But standards and design criteria have cropped up — not to mention federal environmental reviews for certain extensions and new trails on U.S. Forest Service land.
Hamilton has since become a “wizard” on trail design, Will said.
The vocabulary includes the tread (where a hiker, cyclist or horseback rider actually utilizes the trail), flag lines, and a preliminary cut through vegetation that leaves the corridor, along with, in places, a back-slope against the hillside.
“You don’t want people being jabbed in the head” by branches, Hamilton said. “They’re out there to enjoy their hike or ride.”
Drainage is another large consideration in trail building, as water, if not controlled properly, can quickly erode a path.
Hamilton said he’s learned from his own experiences and those of others. In laying out a trail design, the questions include: What do I want to go around and what do I want to take people to? How will the path hold up to erosion and other natural forces?
“If you’re building something that is to last forever, theoretically, let’s build it the way it should be built,” he said.
The effort involves leadership. RFOV hosts leadership trainings twice a year, and it has developed a manual that is used by other outdoor volunteer groups in Colorado. When a project involves a contingent of, say, 50 volunteers, it is divided into multiple groups, each with a crew leader.
“We say, ‘OK, crew four, you’re going out to stake 6 to do X. Here are the tools you need to do that,’” Hamilton said. “It’s all very controlled, people know where they’re going, we know what kind of work is being done, and we have the right kind of tools for the job and the right skill set for the job.”
As the majority of RFOV projects involve paths used by different parties, the typical goal is multifold: a trail that’s sustainable and doesn’t need much maintenance over the years; and the balancing of needs between hikers, mountain bikers and equestrians.
But there is also a simple, overarching fact: There is no one but us to do this.
“These are our lands,” Hamilton said, half-jokingly beginning to sing “This Land is Our Land.” ”We are a democracy (and) in a democracy people need to get involved with different things. There’s a sense of ownership . and all kinds of great values that come out of what we do. If you come out and build a trail or plant a wetlands, every time you go by there, you go, ‘Oh, I did that.’ And that’s powerful.”