Week of July 12, 2026 – July 18, 2026
by David DuBois, Director of Stewardship
Trails are wonderful. They can get you from one place to another without getting lost, fighting through dense brush, or getting covered in ticks. But there is one thing that every hiking trail fears above all others, the thing most likely to destroy that beautiful form of conveyance that has helped humanity get around for millennia: water.
A trail’s first purpose is to move people from point A to point B, and any geometry student can tell you that the shortest path between 2 points is a straight line. It only takes a quick glance at a map to see that most trails do not follow straight lines, but rather wind around meandering too and fro. This is for the simple reason that straight lines are rarely the easiest path between two places and even more seldom the best.
Straight lines will take various slopes across a landscape, bouncing between gaining elevation and losing it, or worst of all going straight up. When a trail goes straight up a slope it suddenly becomes the easiest path not just for hikers to go up, but water to come down. This water will inevitably flow downhill taking soil and rocks with it. This leads to telltale signs of erosion; rocks coming to the surface, roots sticking out, and the trail being ‘cupped in’ where hikers and water have dragged it down. Over time a trail that goes straight up will become steeper and less stable, and the soil under the trail will wash down, creating a worsening hiking experience. Stairs can sometimes help, but they will never fix the root cause of water flowing down the same path that you would like to hike.
To fix this problem a trail should follow 2 critical rules: the ½ rule and the 10% rule. The ½ rule says that a well designed trail should never climb more than ½ the steepness of the terrain it is crossing. In a site with only a little slope the trail should climb very gradually. In a site with a significant slope the trail can climb more steeply, but never more than half of the slope it is climbing. Going straight up is simply out of the question! The 10% rule says that a trail should not climb any steeper than 1 feet for every 10 feet in length. These two rules prevent a trail from getting too steep for people to comfortably use, and prevent water from building up the speed needed to seriously damage the trail. Trails that follow these rules have the added benefit of blending into the terrain they cross, neither ignoring it or conquering it, but flowing harmoniously across the contours.
I am writing this not just to talk about how trails should or ought to be, but also to explain why we sometimes have to move trails to new places. We just completed moving a section of the Valley Trail, our steepest trail here at Baltimore Woods, out of the bottom of a gully. The old trail was badly eroding, and climbed steeper than is comfortable to walk. The erosion on the trail tread (which also flowed into our waterways), deteriorating stairs, and endless vegetation encroachment made the trail feel uncomfortable and opposing its surroundings. To fix it we moved it to a place where water can be easily shed higher up on the slope, giving new views of the Baltimore Woods landscape while reducing erosion at the bottom of the ravine.
I hope that you like the changes we have made, and appreciate the new look of an old trail. If you’ve been discouraged by the steepness of the Valley Trail in the past it may be worth giving this new route a try. Most of all I hope you don’t notice the new trail at all, because disappearing into the surroundings is the best thing a trail can do. This trail reroute would not have been possible without Emma Harvey who figured out the layout and planning, Land Steward Jared Sammon who did the work no one else would, the A-Team who finished the details, and the work crew from Baxter who did the tremendous amount of work cutting the new trail in this April.