SPEAKER_09: Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel.com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. Squarespace is the all in one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything. Your products, content you create and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace dot com slash invisible for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars and this is a message from the U.S. Forest Service.
SPEAKER_11: Trails take a beating every year from the elements and from heavy or improper use.
SPEAKER_09: You're listening to an excerpt from an official Forest Service video made in 1995. It's called Basic Trail Maintenance, as you might expect from something filmed in the 90s. This video features acid watch denim and a narrator dressed like Laura Dern from Jurassic Park. This video also contains some practical information for Forest Service employees and other trail workers about how to build and care for hiking trails.
SPEAKER_11: A good trail is one that is easy to follow and well maintained. Each trail is designed, constructed and maintained to meet specific standards. These standards relate to the recreational experience the trail is intended to provide.
SPEAKER_09: I find this video delightful and not just because of the amazing soundtrack. It also takes the humble trail, something many of us take for granted, and deconstructs it. So over the next two episodes, we're going to do the same.
SPEAKER_11: We're going to show you some of the basics, things you can do to keep trails in good shape now and in the future. We're bringing you two episodes of short stories all about trails.
SPEAKER_09: I first read Robert Moore's book On Trails when it came out back in 2017, and I was immediately pulled in. Not just by the writing, which is lovely, by the way, but also by Robert's attention to detail. He has this amazing way of drilling down into some of the smallest, most elemental questions about trails, including possibly the most fundamental question of all. What even is a trail?
SPEAKER_01: It's hard to define, actually. I spend a lot of time thinking about that. This is author Robert Moore.
SPEAKER_09: And I think that the key aspect of a trail is that a trail is a line that evolves.
SPEAKER_01: It's something that we follow where each time you walk, you're leaving a slight bit of yourself behind, and the next person who comes picks up on those signals that you're leaving, and they leave their own signals. And over time, it keeps changing subtly. So let's say there's a big curve in the trail. We'll take the inside of that curve and we'll shave it down and shave it down until it's a straight line. In a curious way, a trail is something that's both terrestrial and liquid. And that's what I find beautiful about them. Unlike roads, you know, or especially railways, which are so fixed, you know, they're laid down in an almost authoritarian way. A trail is very collaborative and organic.
SPEAKER_09: Something that stands out for me in Robert's writing is the focus on the non-human world. To me, there's this sense that trails are deeply human creations. Like when I think about a trail, I imagine someone bushwhacking a path through tall grass or hiking through the woods. But in fact, trail building is a tool that is nearly universal to life on Earth. On the smallest scale, I think a lot of animals are using trails as a form of externalized intelligence.
SPEAKER_01: So answer the most famous example. They leave behind these pheromone trails, which are invisible, and yet these very simple signaling mechanisms, you know, just laying down a little bit more or a little bit less pheromone, creates these incredibly intelligent solutions to finding food, finding, you know, one another. It's quite incredible what they're able to do with just the very, very simple mechanism of, you know, follow me, come this way, don't go that way.
SPEAKER_09: One of the most fascinating parts of On Trails is about a single-celled organism called slime mold. Robert writes about an experiment where scientists in Japan and England created a map of the most densely populated areas of Tokyo, with each key point marked by a cluster of food. Then they brought in the slime mold. What happened next is that, incredibly, the slime mold built a network of trails between the points that almost exactly mirrored Tokyo's actual railway system, a system which, by the way, is one of the most efficient in the world. The findings point to a shared logic of efficiency that has informed cross-species trail building for millennia. If you think about how we were building trails before the advent of hiking trails, what was happening was we were collaborating with animals.
SPEAKER_01: When humans were walking across the landscape, we were following the trails that were laid out by deer or bison. In Africa, oftentimes they follow elephant trails. Those were well known to be the best routes across a landscape. They found the shallowest ford across a river or the shallowest pass across the mountains. All of these animals were collaborating. You'll still see it today. I go trail running every weekend and will often see a black bear ambling down the trail. That's because that's the path of least resistance. We're all working together on the landscape to create a really vast map of trails that covers the whole continent. As Robert tells it, this desire for the path of least resistance is what unites the human and non-human world in our trail building.
SPEAKER_09: But it's also where human trails set themselves apart. Where animal trails almost always find the most efficient route between resources, our own trails are determined by another set of rules entirely. The modern hiking trail is the most illogical thing you can imagine.
SPEAKER_01: But from a sheer efficiency standpoint, we go up to the highest mountains, we follow these really tortuous paths that no animal or really most indigenous societies would have followed. And the reason why is because we're following our own cultural values. We're looking for a beautiful vista. We're looking to challenge ourselves against this rough wilderness. We're doing things that a sheer efficiency equation would never predict. In other words, our modern hiking trails are built following a logic that is uniquely, inefficiently human.
SPEAKER_09: It's a task that brings along with it a whole grab bag of considerations about what makes a trail not only functional, but pleasurable for the people who are going to be using it. This brings us to our second trail story from 99PI producer, Kurt Kohlstedt. Hey Kurt, so usually you're the train guy, but today you're all about trails. What kind of trail story do you have for me?
SPEAKER_06: Well Roman, when I was a kid, my dad, who was a professor of geophysics, used to take field trips of grad students to the Black Hills of South Dakota each year. And he'd take me along some years too. We'd hike up and down these trails, zigging and zagging our way through the trees. And I remember feeling at the time like these paths looked natural, like we were treading where animals had walked for millennia. But that childhood guess of mine, that these were ancient pathways, was way off the mark. Because those Black Hills trails, and pretty much every other trail you've ever walked on, is anything but natural. Okay, explain what you mean by that. I mean that across the nation, tens of thousands of miles of trails, managed by state and federal governments, including everything from local trails to high-profile hikes like the Appalachian Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail, they're all engineered, built, and heavily designed to maintain a sort of naturalistic illusion, creating a quote, wilderness experience for visitors. Right, right, like they just kind of happened. Yeah, exactly. Like maybe some wild animal just happened to be tramping back and forth and create this narrow trail between say a parking lot and this lake near the parking lot that visitors want to visit. Yeah, it's really fortuitous for us that, you know, that animals anticipated our parking needs.
SPEAKER_09: Very much so. So how does this all work? Like how do you create these naturalistic trails? I mean I picture there are these sort of interns, you know, hiding in the forest, they scatter some stones, they put leaves on paths so that we know where we're going. I mean it sounds silly, but that's much closer to the truth than you might imagine.
SPEAKER_06: In fact, the job of making sure that trails feel natural falls to a whole bunch of people. You've got National Park Service employees, biologists, psychologists, botanists, planners, designers. And then of course you do have the on-the-ground trail workers who execute this vision. Okay, so what exactly are folks doing to create the illusion of a naturalistic trail?
SPEAKER_06: Well, it all starts at the beginning when they're clearing the trail. And I first learned about how extensive a project this could be from a fan of the show who wrote in named Kelly Kate Warren. And she introduced me to her boss, a program director at the U.S. Forest Service named Mike McFadden. And between them, I started to learn about some really fun trail building techniques with interesting names like the Velvet Hammer.
SPEAKER_09: Okay, so what is the technique of the Velvet Hammer?
SPEAKER_06: Well, the idea is that trail workers are going to make an impact. That's inevitable. And that's the hammer part. But they can be deliberate and careful about reducing the visibility of that impact. And that's the velvet part. And what does this look like in practice?
SPEAKER_09: So, for example, Mike McFadden told me that one method involves using colored flags.
SPEAKER_06: When establishing a new trail, he and his crew would deploy a line of yellow flags to mark the path of that trail that they're working on. But they'll also put down red flags next to bushes or shrubs they want to preserve and make sure to work around. So take a sapling, for instance, that workers want to preserve. They might use a string to bend it out of the way and then later cut that string, letting it bounce back into place. And then other times they'll uproot and replant entire shrubs if, you know, avoiding them or bending them is just too tricky. And when it comes to trails, we're talking about, in some cases, dozens of workers all camping for weeks on the site. So trail workers also have to mitigate the impact of their own presence. McFadden has another hack for leaving no trace in these situations, which he calls the reverse dog departure. Okay, what is that? You know, when a dog is going to lay down, they often circle the spot, looking and sniffing around before curling up. This is like that, but in reverse. Crews are supposed to circle their campsite as they pack up and leave, making sure no wrappers or other artifacts are left behind. And they take this pretty far. The final step, as he explained it to me, was that you get up and the place where you're sitting, you basically kick dirt over your own butt print so that even that becomes invisible in your wake. So I'm starting to get an idea of the scope and scale here, which I don't think I really fully pictured, even if I had grown to accept that these trails were not natural and took some effort to make.
SPEAKER_09: I had no idea how much they were disturbing to create them and then how much they had to remediate after the fact. Yeah, it's really remarkable.
SPEAKER_06: And McFadden gave me the example of a two foot wide trail requiring up to a 20 foot wide impact corridor, which is a lot to mitigate. And so keeping existing features helps maintain the illusion of this thing being older and not being clear cut. And other little detail work helps, too, like turning over rocks so that they're weathered side face up or moving fallen logs near the pathways, that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, how common is it for, you know, a trail to get this kind of no stone unturned treatment? Well, as you might imagine, it's the most heavily used trails that get the treatment like this, right?
SPEAKER_06: The smaller trails get less because, you know, the bigger the trail, the more popular trail is, the more this kind of effort is required to go in and offset all of that impact being made by all of those hikers and to keep that trail feeling much more untouched by humans than it really is. We have talked about this. Like, I know that wilderness isn't natural as such. It's a kind of human construct.
SPEAKER_09: But still, this level of staging, you know, like 20 feet wide swath to create a two foot wide trail. I mean, that's that means you're hiding 90 percent of your impact on the forest when you make a trail. Yeah, it's super impressive. And the whole endeavor reminds me a lot of theatrical set design.
SPEAKER_06: You know, the careful staging of this backdrop, all for the benefit of an audience. And this audience doesn't end up seeing most of the behind the scenes work that goes into the show. If they're doing the job right, these creators effectively erase signs of their own creative efforts to maintain this illusion for you. But, you know, feeling natural is only like one aspect of a trail.
SPEAKER_09: I mean, fundamentally, what you need to have a trail work is for the trail to bring you from point A to point B. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06: How do they make that work? A lot of trail design actually goes into subtly communicating how to get from point A to point B and also how not to get to point C. So part of what it means for a trail to work is that it diverts people away from hazards like precarious cliffs or places they're not supposed to go, like private property, while also bringing hikers where they want to go to scenic overlooks and waterfalls, that sort of thing. Because if the trail doesn't take them to the hose, you can bet that people will trample through the forest and get there anyway.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, totally. So the big picture is for a trail to be successful, avoids the bad and dangerous places, and also takes you to good places so that you can take pictures for Instagram and that sort of thing. So yeah, avoid the bad, take you to the good, and do it all with a set difficulty level that is specific to each trail.
SPEAKER_06: Huh. So that might involve steeper slopes, but it can sometimes even involve rolling rocks or logs onto a trail to keep up its difficulty quotient. Okay, so you're saying that if something has a known difficulty rating, they will purposely put hazards in the way to make that trail difficulty consistent.
SPEAKER_09: That's correct. And it really kind of blew my mind. This was like the last rabbit hole I fell down with this project. I was like, no way.
SPEAKER_06: It's just, you know, you could spend a lifetime on this stuff. Yeah. Well, I'll remember that next time I'm like sweating and panting as I haul myself up a boulder because...
SPEAKER_09: Somebody did this to you. Somebody did this to me. It wasn't nature. It was just... That's right. Somebody in the wilderness.
SPEAKER_09: This is awesome, Kurt. Thank you so much. I'm going to have so much fun decoding and sort of like looking for the visual language of trails next time I walk on them. Awesome.
SPEAKER_09: Our next story comes to us from 99PI listener Joelle McNichol, who sent us a voice memo from her local hiking trail in the craggy north of England.
SPEAKER_10: Hi there, this is Joelle. I'm listening from Calderdale in Yorkshire in the north of England. Big fan of the show. Thought I'd record you this while I'm out on my dog walk, which is where I normally listen to the show. So I just thought while I'm out on this walk, I would record a short one about the very woods that I'm walking through. It's a beautiful valley. It's got very steep sides with moors on the top and great deep hillsides with great big craggy rocks. And the whole valley is studded with these tall round chimneys, many of which just pop up in the middle of the woods halfway up a hillside. All of them are remnants of the industrial past of the valley when it was full of cotton mills. And crisscrossing this wood is an incredible number of footpaths which represent so much labour and work. There's great stone steps cut right into the hillside. And it just seemed kind of senseless because there's so many of these paths really close together. Like there's one point where six paths meet in one place, like a sort of junction, like a sort of, you know, great big motorway junction of footpaths in the middle of the woods. So I was like, why on earth was all this effort put in to make these footpaths? And I've since found out and it's a really interesting story. So in 1862, most of the mill workers were refusing to work. They were refusing to work in factories because they didn't want to use the cotton that was being imported from the slave plantations in America. There was huge support for the abolition of slavery in this area. There were a lot of co-operative businesses. There was a lot of Quakers. It was such a big industry here, such a big market for American cotton that it helps contribute to the end of the Civil War. So you had this sort of, you know, quite a long patch of time where the workers were refusing to work in the mills. And so some of the philanthropic employers found other things for those workers to do. And one of the things that they did was to employ them to build all of these paths. So, yeah, this is sort of a surprising history of these crazy paths in my woods. Anyway, it just struck me as a 99PI type of mini story. And I thought I would record it for you as I walk. And, yeah, hope you found it interesting. All right. Bye. Thank you.
SPEAKER_09: Cumbria is a region of England on the West Coast, bordering Scotland to the north. It contains the Lake District National Park and lots and lots of mountains, or fells, as they're known locally. It's also where I grew up before I moved to Toronto.
SPEAKER_04: Test reporter Jay Coburn. On a shelf at my parents' house in Cumbria are these seven faded books. Honestly, they look a bit like something out of Lord of the Rings. If you open them up, you won't find any typesetting, just handwritten texts, along with meticulously detailed pen and ink drawings of the scenery and various paths up the local mountains.
SPEAKER_09: This set of seven books make up a pictorial guide to the Lakeland Fells by Alfred Wainwright. The books were published between 1953 and 1966 and have become a staple for many Cumbrians, as well as for tourists to the area. Even today, GPS is useful, but a book doesn't need a battery, and there's nothing quite like a carefully drawn illustration. These books have become so popular that the 214 Lake District peaks in their pages are actually known as Wainwrights.
SPEAKER_04: Wainwright ale is served in pubs, including one in the tourist town Keswick. The pub is called, you guessed it, the Wainwright. For decades now, hikers in the Lake District have been finding their way through the Fells of Cumbria, mainly by following one grumpy old dude's writings up a hill.
SPEAKER_02: When we talk about England being a little green island, it really is much greener than most places. Oh god, yeah. Land of mists and mellow fruitfulness. This is a different, less grumpy old dude, Russ Coburn, aka my dad. All my Wainwright knowledge is from him.
SPEAKER_02: There are very few signposts once you're up the Fells, and indeed, most fell-walkers, if you were to ask them, would be against that. They would say, no, that's still the point. The point is adventure. The point is finding your way and navigating.
SPEAKER_04: When I was back home in December, I cajoled him through a rickety gate into a field full of sheep and mud to follow Wainwright's directions up one of the smaller hills known as Sale Fell.
SPEAKER_02: Wainwright described it as the cornerstone of the North Western Fells, because it sits at the end of, the western end of Bassons Wake Lake, where the River Dore went to returns more. I'm not sure I'd realized how different hiking is in the UK to North America before I moved to Toronto, Canada, where I live now.
SPEAKER_04: In North America, hiking often feels a bit like organized fun. You drive to a parking lot with a nice laminated map, some toilets, and a well-maintained path.
SPEAKER_09: Everything is color-coded with explicit signage and markers. You get the idea. But back home in Cumbria, you pick a fell from a Wainwright guide and you get some scrappy directions to a muddy path behind a barn, winding its way through bracken and farmland.
SPEAKER_04: And you hike the way Wainwright hiked with no trailheads, just some chicken scratch in an old book. If I open up Book 6, The North Western Fells, and turn to Sale Fell – there are no page numbers, by the way – there are sketches of the Wythep Valley, with sheep silhouetted in the foreground. Here's a passage about the local deer, which praises the Forestry Commission for tolerating them, and a little jab at the hunters who don't. And here's a drawing of the ruins of a church, to use as a landmark for directions.
SPEAKER_02: They give you pictures, and it helps you to set in your mind the sort of topography of where you're going. And you know, you'll be walking up and thinking, oh yeah, he said there's this tree here, or there's this waterfall here, and it sort of brings it all into a sort of context. Because they are very, very detailed.
SPEAKER_04: These books are printed on rugged paper, with wide margins so you can scribble notes. They're designed to be taken hiking up muddy hills in Cumbrian weather. People come to the Lake District and complain that it was cloudy and it rained.
SPEAKER_02: But rather, it points out the fact that that's why it's called the Lake District, because it rains.
SPEAKER_09: The Wainwright guides are the way they are in every way, because of who Alfred Wainwright was. The way he wrote was typical of his personality, solitary and curmudgeonly. His writing is blunt, often opinionated, but very appreciative of the fell's stark beauty.
SPEAKER_04: Let me read you what he wrote about another peak, called Ling Fell. Gloomy and sulky, even on the sunniest of days. Its lack of visual appeal, however, belies its nature. For the easy slopes and commodious top are extremely pleasant to wander upon. As you might expect from someone who spent his life wandering hills alone, he was more than a bit introverted.
SPEAKER_04: He described himself as antisocial and that he'd rather be alone. He wouldn't even say hello to other solo walkers on the fells.
SPEAKER_09: Right now you're probably picturing a grey-haired man with a flat cap, pipe, glasses and mutton chops. This is entirely accurate.
SPEAKER_04: His obsession with the Lake District began when he was 23 and he saved up five pounds to go walking for a week, as he says here on the long-running BBC radio show, Desert Island Discs. I just couldn't believe that such beauty could exist. It made the whole world of difference to me. That did change my life. I decided then that this is a place I wanted to live.
SPEAKER_04: By all accounts, he was an unusual man. He preferred silence to music and he survived on a diet almost entirely made up of fish and chips. He hated the idea of travelling abroad and never once boarded a plane or boat. No ambition to travel abroad. I couldn't face the customs and the new currency and the foreign language and the foreign food and the passport.
SPEAKER_03: Wainwright didn't even want to publish his work at first. And when he did, he got a friend to help because he couldn't face finding a publisher himself.
SPEAKER_09: Despite all that, he hand-wrote and illustrated seven intricate volumes in 13 years. Wainwright was not someone who enjoyed the fame he found. He had moved to Kendall in the South Lakes and got a job at the town hall.
SPEAKER_04: He got a salary from that, but he wasn't rich and all his book royalties went to animal charities. From there, Alfred Wainwright kept up his solitary hiking as millions of copies of his guides made their way into circulation onto rural English shelves and into muddy backpacks, torn, worn and rain-soaked in many fell-walkers jacket pockets.
SPEAKER_09: Despite his wish to remain solitary, you can still find Wainwright in his guides. When you read his books, the roots often start in the middle of a village or town because that's where the bus stop or train station was. Wainwright took public transport everywhere.
SPEAKER_04: I suspect he also didn't like the idea of spoiling the peace and quiet with the roar of a car. Now there are even some hikers dedicated to doing all 214 fells how Wainwright did them, using only public transport. Collecting the peaks or Wainwright bagging is a common practice in Cumbria, and you can find Facebook groups and Instagram accounts where walkers document their progress.
SPEAKER_04: Wainwright died in 1991, and these walks are one way he's remembered, but they're far from the only way.
SPEAKER_09: In the village of Buttermere, nestled between the peaks of Grassmoor and Haystacks, is a low stone church. Inside it is a plaque. It reads,
SPEAKER_04: Pause and remember Alfred Wainwright, fellwalker, guidebook author, and illustrator who loved this valley. Lift your eyes to Haystacks, his favorite place.
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SPEAKER_07: Well, Roman, a couple years ago, I was visiting my grandma in Montreal, and that's where my hiking story comes in. So is grandma a big hiker? She's 92 years old, so no, it's not about her. She's very active for a 92-year-old, but this is a story about me attempting to hike. So I'm not much of a hiker, but I was hoping to get into it, and I had this free morning in Montreal, so I decided to hike up Mount Royale. So Mount Royale, it's this mountain in the middle of the city. It has this summit with a beautiful view. It kind of oversees everything. And there's also a park in the mountain that was designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Yes, the designer of Central Park, yeah. The designer of Central Park, that's right. I highly recommend it if you're ever in Montreal. Check it out. And I had done this walk at Mount Royale actually a lot of times when I was a kid, so there was some nostalgia for me, but I couldn't really remember how to get onto the trail. So I type in Mount Royale Summit on my phone, and my phone directs me to this entrance, and at the entrance there's this big wooden staircase. And that was kind of surprising. Like, I had no memory of this big wooden staircase. So it's a mystery staircase. It is a true mystery staircase. So I start climbing up. I'm like, okay, you know, probably the staircase will drop me off at the trail at some point. So I'm going up a flight of stairs and there's a landing. And then you go up another flight of stairs and there's another landing. And then another flight of stairs and there's another landing. And after a couple of minutes, I'm starting to wonder if there's ever going to be a way off the staircase, because so far there hasn't been an exit. And there's no sign suggesting that you're going to get off it at some point. So after about five minutes, like I like to think I'm in pretty good shape, but I'm not used to climbing that many stairs. So I'm starting to sweat a little, you know, it's a really hot day and I'm just climbing and climbing. And at some point I decide, okay, maybe I should just start recording myself, like for my loved ones, I guess, if I never get off the staircase.
SPEAKER_07: And about 10 minutes into the walk, I see no end in sight. So Roman, at some point, I'm starting to wonder if I'm ever going to get off the staircase.
SPEAKER_09: Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Well, I assume you made it off at some point.
SPEAKER_07: No, I'm calling you from the staircase. I've been recording there for the past several years. No, I kept going. I kept going. I kept going. I get up to the top of the staircase. And at this point I'm sweating and I'm wondering, like, what happened? So I take out my phone and I pull up a map of Mount Royale and everything becomes clear really quickly. Because on the map on one side, there is this nice, gentle looking trail, the Olmsted Trail. That's the one that I remember from being a kid. But instead I went the other way and it took me up the staircase, which is evidently what I ended up taking. Now, I could have avoided this if I had spent more than like 10 seconds looking at my phone and just going, okay, I'll go this way. So I'm embarrassed, but the phone did tell me to go that way. And do you know why your phone sent you up this sort of second route?
SPEAKER_09: Well, the trail takes quite a while, takes over an hour. And the staircase, it takes about 20 minutes from the street.
SPEAKER_07: So my guess is my phone looked at these options and it was like, okay, this is the fastest way up. So it just sent me the fast way up. Now, look, ultimately this was not a bad thing for me. You know, I got some exercise, things turned out fine, but I'm not the only person who has made this mistake of relying on my phone when I was hiking. And it's actually been a much bigger problem for other people. There's been a number of stories of people using Google Maps specifically or folks that are using apps that are more geared, I would say, to car navigation.
SPEAKER_07: So this is Wesley Trimble, and he used to work as the creative director for the American Hiking Society. We hear stories all the time of like people saying, I want to go to the top of such and such mountain.
SPEAKER_08: And it just basically says, all right, like here's the point A to point B, which can put people into some great harm because the shortest route is almost never the best route.
SPEAKER_07: So that's how you end up with something like taking a never ending staircase or there are so many cases that are just so much worse. So there is a story from a couple of years ago in Scotland where Google Maps was creating this path for hikers on Ben Nevis. That's this 4500 foot mountain. And it was creating this path that it went off trail. It was telling hikers to climb over this kind of very steep, rocky terrain and mountaineering Scotland had to get involved. And they called the trail potentially fatal. So Google ended up changing it. There's just so many stories of hikers getting lost or taking these weird routes because the mapping software is telling them where to go. So if you're hiking, especially if you're in a new place, using the built in map on your phone is probably not a good idea because they're just not designed for that.
SPEAKER_09: So what should people do instead? Well, there are all these mapping apps that you can download that are actually designed for hiking.
SPEAKER_07: So maybe you've heard of all trails. That's the most popular version of that. Yeah. But Wesley told me there are problems with some of those apps as well. Some apps use user generated data.
SPEAKER_08: In that case, the trail information is only as good as the person who put it there. One of the problems with crowdsourcing an app like this is that a lot of more experienced hikers will go on and they will often put in something called rogue trails.
SPEAKER_07: So these are animal trails or DIY trails or basically something that is not maintained by an official person. So nobody's going in and making sure that these are safe. And either these are kind of dangerous for inexperienced hikers or sometimes nature comes in and will disrupt trails like that. So is there any way to make sure that you have an accurate map when you're hiking?
SPEAKER_09: Well, the best thing to do, according to Wesley, according to the American Hiking Society, even if you're using one of those trail apps, have a backup.
SPEAKER_07: So get a paper map and a compass and learn how to use them. So on the official website for the American Hiking Society, it says in bold letters, take a map and a compass, even on short day hikes. Don't tempt fate.
SPEAKER_09: That's amazing. So have you taken to this? Like, do you bring a map and a compass with you when you go on your hikes around Montreal? Since the staircase incident? No, I have not gone outdoors since then.
SPEAKER_07: You've learned your lesson. I've learned my lesson. I mean, this is a situation where I want to get into hiking, but Roman, I think I'm old enough now I have to accept who I am, which is somebody who stays home and makes podcasts.
SPEAKER_09: Sounds good. To the benefit of us all. Well, thank you so much, Chris. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_07: Thanks, Roman.
SPEAKER_11: Well, now you know some of the basics. Once you actually construct or maintain a trail, you will never look at one the same way again.
SPEAKER_09: This is the end of part one of our trail special. Part two is coming next week. See you then. Joe Rosenberg and me, Roman Morris, the 99% visible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the Stitcher and Sirius XM podcast family now headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99 P.I. org. Run Instagram, Reddit and TikTok, too. You can find links to other Stitcher shows I love, as well as every past episode of 99 P.I. and 99 P.I. Dot org.
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