Kahtoola Microspikes...When to change them out on the trail?

[TCD]

Well I guess this thread is lockable...it's gone from a reasonable equipment discussion, to beating each other up over LNT, to beating each other up over typing skill.

 

[David Metsky]

Moderator Note
OK folks, cut it out. Let's stay focused on the subject at hand. No comments on grammar and hiking history.

 

[DSettahr]

Im just honest and realistic, the mountains and their trails are there for us to use

It's not this simple, for several reasons.

First of all, hikers are, by nature, a lazy bunch. Any person who has been involved professionally in the construction and maintenance of trails will tell you this. It's funny too, because we pride ourselves on participating in what is supposed to be an activity that requires a lot of endurance and strength. Yet we always take the path of least resistance whenever possible. We cut off corners. We walk around muddy spots rather than stride right through them. We walk around bog bridges rather than step up on to them. We take shortcuts around stone stair cases because we don't want to have to step up or down the steps. All of these "path of least resistance" actions are usually also on the "path of greatest impact."

In fact, proper trail maintenance is just as much about hiker psychology as it is about hardening the trail to minimize impact. One common tactic is to place rocks in places where people might create shortcuts off the trail. Next time you see a stone stair case while hiking, look at it closely. Assuming it was constructed properly, the stones to either side of the steps aren't just there to keep the steps in place... these "armoring" stones are usually placed at weird and awkward angles so that trying to walk beside the staircase ends up being harder than walking on the staircase itself. No matter how hard trail crews work to construct "idiot-proof" trails though, hikers are still going to find new "paths of least resistance" that end up increasing the impact.

And the fact is, hiking trails aren't constructed to handle all of the impact that they could receive, and with good reason. The only way to build a hiking trail that minimizes the physical impacts of hiking would be to have an asphalt paved trail with guard rails and signs every 10 feet warning hikers not to leave the trail. The problem with this, of course, is that it has an aesthetic impact; that is, an impact that isn't measured in physical terms, but in terms of it's detraction from the philosophical sense of wilderness that we all have.

This was a huge issue back in the 60's, when backcountry resources in a lot of places were becoming so degraded that recreation resource managers in many of our parks and public forests decided that drastic courses of action were necessary. More often than not, these courses of action severely limited what backcountry users were allowed to do. This, of course, lead to an uproar in the hiking community, who felt (and probably quite rightly so) that their rights were being infringed upon. Many in the hiking community realized and agreed that something needed to be done, though- the damage being done to pristine wilderness areas was getting so bad that it was hard for anyone to ignore any longer.

This is pretty much how concepts like Leave-No-Trace (LNT) came into being. Some forward thinking members of the hiking community, combined with some forward thinking resource managers, realized that if the hiking community could police and educate themselves so as to limit their impact on their own, then the rules and regulations of backcountry areas, and the ways in which the resources of those areas were managed, could be relaxed and made less restrictive.

Which brings us back to the trails. Our trails never ended up getting paved and guard railed, or worse, closed to the public completely, because an agreement was forged between the hiking community and resource managers (in spirit if never officially). The managers wouldn't turn our trails into hardened highways that conflicted with the philosophical spirit of wilderness, as long as the hiking community stepped up to the plate, accepted at least some responsibility for their actions, and policed themselves so as to limit their impact. (Some agencies, like the National Park Service and Baxter State Park apparently never got the memo about this agreement, though. )

All this means, of course, that as hikers, we actually do have an obligation to limit our impact, even if we are sticking to areas like trails that are hardened to withstand such use (and abuse!). One of the tenets of wilderness management is that mangers should use the "minimum necessary tools to achieve management goals." One of the main determinations for where this "minimum" level lies is how much the hiking community that uses the managed area is willing to actively take part in protecting the resources. It is our responsibility to, by following minimum impact philosophies like LNT, prove to resource managers that we understand that part of the burden for protecting our recreation resources is on our shoulders, and act appropriately.

EDIT: I started writing my post before David posted. Perhaps the LNT posts could be split into a new thread so as to preserve the subject matter of each of the two subjects?

 

[DSettahr]

You speak only for yourself.

I disagree.

I don't speak only for myself when I refer to the "lazyness" of hikers. I don't at all mean it in a derogatory manner in any way; I am fully aware that for most, the choice to "take the path of least resistance" is not a conscious one. But it is still the choice that is made by the majority of the hiking community, without any of them even realizing it.

It's just one part of a larger concept that is often used by recreation resource managers to try to predict exactly how visitors will behave in the backcountry that is called the "stress-coping model." The basic idea behind the model is that visits to the backcountry are actually extremely stressful for many people- and they'll employ a wide variety of techniques to try to "cope" with that stress. Unfortunately, many of those techniques to cope result in increased levels of impact.

To link it back to the microspikes issue, you can view it like this: A user wearing microspikes comes upon a part of the trail free of snow. The idea of taking their spikes off, and then putting them back on a few minutes later, is inconvenient and causes stress... so they cope by choosing to leave the microspikes on. As a result, their impact is heightened because of the spikes digging into the ground.

I'm not just making this up, or pulling it out of my rear-end. There has been a lot of research into the idea of stress and coping in recreational and leisure activities. A search on google scholar for published scholarly journal articles and papers on the subject yields more than 58,000 results.

For the past few billion years, mountains have been rising up, and mountains have been wearing down, and I suspect that process will continue for eons to come. Just one bulldozer creating a parking lot for one Wal-Mart alters the earth far more than all the hikers wear & tear in North America.

Let's keep things in perspective.

I would bet money that the impact that has been created by hikers all across North America, when added up, is far greater than a single Walmart Parking Lot.

Take the Adirondacks, for example. There are more than 2,000 miles of trails in the Adirondack Park. Lets assume that each trail has an average width of 3 feet (the typical impacted area of the trail). I'd say that's a pretty reasonable assumption. Simple math tells us that Adirondack trails therefore cover at least 727 acres of land- that's 727 acres of potential soil compaction and erosion. For reference, the footprint of a walmart parking lot is usually "at well over 18 acres" (source), roughly 2.5% of that total. And that's just the Adirondacks! If we conservatively estimate the length of the PCT and the AT at 2,000 miles each, our total rises to 2,181 acres, more than 120 times the size of our single 18 acre parking lot. And we're just getting started- there's still thousands and thousands of miles of trails to consider, and then we can start adding the impacted area of campsites too!

(Of course, we can argue semantics- does a square foot of trail have the same impact as a square foot of parking lot? Probably not. Some really neat things are being done with newly constructed parking lots to minimize their impact too, though: Permeable asphalt that allows water to flow through the pavement, drainage catch basins that use artificial wetlands to treat 20% of the runoff [by treating the first 20% of the runoff from a rainfall event, you can treat 80% of the pollution!], etc. It's really interesting stuff. )

One of the greatest threats to wilderness and recreation resources is often the people who love and fight to protect them, simply because they use them. Many people unfortunately falsely believe that because they love something, they can do no harm to it. As I stated before, this was a serious issue back in the 60's, when it became apparent that people were "loving the woods to death," and something needed to be done.

Just because, when "put into perspective," our impact as hikers seems insignificant when compared with other impacts we have on this planet, doesn't mean that it really is insignificant, nor does it free us from taking responsibility for that impact. You wouldn't argue that because so many recyclable cans and plastic bottles end up in our landfills, that it doesn't matter if you don't recycle just that one can (at least, you shouldn't be arguing that! ). Every little bit helps.

And finally, one of the values we place upon our wild areas is that they are supposed to have a minimum of impact by humans. One of the things that makes wilderness "wild" is that we choose to ignore the "bigger picture," and insist upon as wild a state as possible!

EDIT: Looks like Kevin deleted his post while I was typing my response...

 

[DSettahr]

Also, I am fully aware that this is me right now: It's a topic that I feel very passionately about though, and also feel that I have a lot that I'd like to share with others.

 

[Peakbagr]

Now that we've thoroughly aired the subject of when to change out Microspikes....