Natural Paths and Walkways

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Trails from the Wood Pile

Like me every spring, I bet you have a heap of splinters, chips, knots, and bark on the woodshed floor. This scrap doesn't burn well in the wood stove, or under the maple-syrup pan, but it will dry to tinder over a hot summer and pose a fire hazard. I clean it up to the last crumb, shovel it into a big garden cart, and haul it to where a long-lived mulch or pathway is needed most. It makes a fine people-path on flat land—but fits better back on bridle trails in the woods.

A decade ago when my daughter Martha was a preteen, she had a blue-eyed strawberry roan named Doc. I had great fun cutting them a network of riding paths through the pines.

Pine needles make a great bridle path on level ground in the deep woods. But for an all-weather path over wet meadow, bark is better. The large and lumpy chunks float, dry easily, and help keep wet mud from packing up into horse hooves and from splattering up on the horse's belly, the rider's jeans and boots, and into the rigging.

Needles are slippery when dry, so I used cordwood to fashion people-stairs to give purchase up short hills or horse-stairs up gentle rises in the woods. I hauled in quarter splits of pine (that lasts longer than hardwood—and is lighter in weight to boot), sunk at a slight back-slanting angle into the forest loam.. . one flat side facing up and the other facing forward and held in place with vertical pine stakes sunk at each side of the front face. Wood splits make good stair treads that will last three to five years and then sweetly molder away into the soil.

I distrust marshy spots as well as slow streams with bottoms covered with leaves. Sharp rocks can be freeze-lifted out of the soil to project up unseen beneath the mud, and they can cut a horse's hoof pad or pierce any footware but a steel-shank logger's boot.

I set scrap lengths of PT lumber lengthwise in the stream bed—a few inches apart over a 4-foot-wide crossing to permit water flow-through. Over them I laid willow or young maple saplings placed crosswise, in the along-trail direction, weaving limbs into a snarl. On top went larger trees cut to 4' lengths on the spot. I removed all limbs but those on the best-limbed side Those limbs were trimmed to a foot in length and pushed down through the willow bed and into the muck as I set in the logs cross-pathwise. If there was a perceptible flow to the waterway, I placed the top course of logs so the crotch of the limbs angled upstream and the limbs anchored the logs against the flow. This is a miniature corduroy road—the traditional way pioneers build roads across swamps and marshes.

Hard-Surfaced Pathways

If your house design, neighborhood, or simple preference requires paths topped with a hard surface, you'll find plenty of books and videos purporting to show how to use a garden hose to describe fair curves, warning you to avoid tree roots and buried utility lines and all, and how to lay flat rock, slates, flagstone, concrete, brick, or preformed concrete pavers. Just don't rely completely on anything published much before 1990. For proof if you need it, look at the drives and walks of homes around you. The best looking are nothing but compacted soil, perhaps with a crushed rock surface. Unless it dates back to the early 40s or later, most any hard-surfaced path or drive much over a decade old has been replaced or is falling apart.

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