Every Tuesday morning, a cadre of seasoned hikers gathers in Inverness to find out where the day will take them.
“We never know where we’re going until we meet,” said Inverness resident Emmanuel Serrière. He’s organized the self-styled “Tuesday Irregulars” for the past 12 years, though the group has been around for nearly half a century.
On a recent outing, the Irregulars set off on Muddy Hollow Trail, a curving footpath tucked away deep in the Point Reyes National Seashore’s Phillip Burton Wilderness. They intended to complete a variation of a loop they had hiked in the past, only to find the trail completely overgrown, hugged by waist-high grass and thistle. All the group could do was complain to themselves.
Muddy Hollow is not the only trail swallowed by thick vegetation right now. The National Park Service has been slow to clear many trails in the seashore as it adapts to more sensitive maintenance practices in wilderness areas. Trail crews are trading in most mechanized equipment in favor of manual tools, like scythes.
“We are now working towards a more traditional approach to trail maintenance within wilderness as an opportunity to find less impactful methods of working,” said Richard Moorer, a spokesman for the seashore. “Modern motorized equipment had been used and may continue to be used when more traditional methods are not capable of meeting the mission.”
Around 50 percent of the seashore falls under the protection of the Wilderness Act, which governs how federal agencies steward the land. The law’s chief aim is to preserve the area’s wilderness character by sparing it from modern human impacts. In practice, the act broadly prohibits the use of motorized equipment and most forms of mechanical transport. But certain exceptions can be made for administrative purposes, such as in the case of severe storms or resource management concerns.
“Previously, we would mow and bring chainsaws into wilderness, and that was something that shouldn’t be done,” said Anela Kopshever, a park ranger. “So, we’re kind of changing our ethos and going back to non-mechanized equipment to help manage our trails, which can be really difficult because we have about 150 miles of them and just a small trail crew to do the maintenance.”
Until this summer, crew members relied on motorized equipment to keep vegetation at bay and clear fallen trees, even in the Phillip Burton Wilderness. Though crosscut saws and other manual tools have also been used to maintain trails for decades, they’re far less efficient than the whirling maw of a brush mower. Taming a greedy verge of grass takes much longer with a handheld scythe.
The sprawling network of trails that weave through the seashore is managed in three-year cycles that allow the park service to address needs in different areas. This means that not every stretch of singletrack is cleared annually. Trail crews are led by two permanent staff members and are supplemented by a corps of seasonal employees, who arrive in early June to combat vegetation that has accumulated from February through May. Their work is guided by factors such as precipitation, trail surface conditions, staff availability and funding.
“We’re always prioritizing,” said Anne Altman, the deputy superintendent of the park. “Even today, we were talking about whether we should reallocate our resources a little bit to get some folks on some of the non-wilderness trails, because we think we could move a little faster on some of those.”
Ms. Kopshever acknowledged that the park service had received numerous reports from visitors concerned with the poor trail conditions in the wilderness area, but she underscored that crews are slowly getting to areas that are especially overgrown. Sections of many popular trails that climb out of Bear Valley are difficult to access right now, including Coastal Trail, Baldy Trail and Glen Trail. Further north, Drake’s View and Bucklin Trails are also unmaintained.
“There are also other things that we have to work around, like bird nesting season,” Ms. Kopshever said. “There are some trails that we can’t work on until those nesting birds are gone, so it’s about managing the schedule of nature and being able to manage wilderness correctly, which is without machinery.”
Mr. Moorer added that visitors should adjust their expectations when visiting a wilderness area; they should not be the same as they are for the front country.
Bayview Trail, which runs from Muddy Hollow Road to the start of Sky Trail, is a sharp example of these different management strategies. While the section paralleling Limantour Road has been cleared with machinery because it falls outside of the wilderness area, signs of maintenance cease once the trail reenters wilderness and begins its descent to Muddy Hollow Road.
Public concerns over the park service’s new approach abound. Some residents believe the inability of trail crews to keep pace with the growth of plant life could make popular trails hazardous to hikers, who could be more likely to pick up disease-carrying ticks from overgrown trails.
Fire danger from unchecked understory growth is another concern. In April, the California Coastal Commission approved a forest restoration and fire prevention plan for neighboring Tomales Bay State Park after state park officials determined its forests to be unhealthy. Part of the plan calls for prescribed burns and mechanical treatment using heavy machinery to mitigate the risk of catastrophic wildfire.
The border that Tomales Bay State Park shares with a long stretch of Phillip Burton Wilderness raises questions about whether similar forest conditions exist in the seashore. Ms. Altman said she did not know, but that the park service was in the process of updating the seashore’s fire management plan and trying to reduce fire impacts, especially near populated areas.
For the Tuesday Irregulars, most of whom are over 60 years old, the downed trees left blocking trails hamper their access to the seashore. While out on a hike a few weeks ago, Mr. Serrière passed a gnarled tree trunk on a section of Horse Trail that had been recently hacked by an axe. Vexed by what he saw as a case of wasted time and energy, he took a picture, then turned to the group.
“I said, ‘Look at this! It’s like we’re going back to the pre-war times when people didn’t use saws,’” he said. “‘They used axes.’”
Seashore officials could not provide an estimated timeframe for when trails in the wilderness area will be cleared this year, but they did say that things should begin to move along much faster now that trail crews are fully staffed.