Building a Walking Trail

[Licklog]

I am planning on building a walking trail around my property to make it accessible and enjoyable. Right now it is 100% woods with a fairly steep slope with our house and drive cut in.

I am really at a loss on what process to take to create the "layout" and then what tools I will need to use to actually build the trail. I have have searched the web and found some very interesting sites but really nothing that I can apply to my situation. I am hoping your ideas will give me ideas to go forward.

TIA

 

[smitesmash]

what type of woods?, what is the age of the forest? how much undergrowth etc.

How much land do you have, and how much trails do you plan on making, and how much time are you going to have for maintenance. How many people are going to be using this? and what equiment do you have availalbe for construction and maintenance. Is there any water and other maintenance issues.

I'm doing a similar job on my property. most of my property is red alder between 2 and 6 inches DBH and nearly one every square foot. Inbetween I have salal, sword fern, salmon berry and the occational blacberry (both native and himilayan)

I plan on havein trails at least 4' and usually 6-8 feet wide. I can easily loose 2-4 feet of width due to branch encrochment per year, so clearing an 8' wide trail can still force people to walk single file sometimes.

My plan is to have paths smooth enough to be able to ride mountian bikes on.

I start by planning out where it is going to go, flagging the path at various sections. Cutting down all the trees in the path. and either pulling up the stumps or cutting them flush wiht the ground. In the case of some old bigger stumps, I simply pile up dirt over them to make a big bump out of the hill.

I then drive teh tractor over the path, ripping out whatever small stumps, and other roots, and flattening the trail. Warning. Pulling out a root ball removes dirt and creates a hole.

Then I fill in all of the holes and low sections with dirt from other places. A hole will collect water and become a mud puddle.

In the summer this will dry out and become very dusty when walked on. some sort of surface covering is needed. Grass does not grow well in the mostly full shade of my trails. I use wood chips. Last year I bought a couple truck loads of wood chips. This kept the dust down really well. This year I hope to rent (or buy I hope) a chipper and chip up a lot of the alder that I cut down making the trail.

 

[kc5dlo]

I was on a trail in a nature preserve and they had a layer of mulch on the trail. It seemed to be more comfortable to walk on than the bare spots. Im sure it wwould help prevent erosion as well.
Maybe you could get someone with one of those skid steer mounter mulchers to go thru and create your trails and convert the spoils to mulch all at once?

 

[chipsndust]

Here are some things I learned.
I cleared trails along the property lines, then "cross trails" for access.
Don't waste time/effort making trails that don't have a purpose. Make trails to places you want/need to go.
I found that if less than 8' wide, they quickly closed in with brush.
Initially made them narrow with lots of turns, found this impractical for cross country skiing, maintenance, and brush.
Take into consideration natural drainage, check the terrain in the spring or whenever it's wettest. Try to avoid trails in areas which become muddy. Try to put trails on high, dry ground to reduce maintenance.

 

[BTDT]

I took our riding mower and some loppers, started driving around perimeter of property. If branches were in the way, I cut them off with loppers and threw them to the side. I have about a 1 mile trail around the outside of our 12.5 acre property. I would continue to widen and trim until I got it the way we wanted it. Some places are single file, most is wide enough for side-by-side walking. Trail goes through trees/woods, over tank dam, beside creek, over suspension bridge, along top of levee, down levee, across pasture, back through woods, up levee, back across bridge and up to the house. We start at our porch in front yard and come back by garden in back yard.

 

[bmac]

We put in a 1/2 mile ATV trail on our heavily wooded 12 acre tract. Like Smitesmash said, I walked the property to determine the exact path I wanted the trail take and flagging trees along the way. I specifically avoided large trees, leaving anything over 6"-8" in diameter when I could. Smitesmash is much more energetic than I am, however. I hired a guy with a tree mulcher to come in to blaze the trail for me. Took him less than 4 hours to cut the entire 1/2 mile trail. The added advantage for me was there were no tree limbs / trunks / root balls to dispose of - everything was mulched. Also, there were no holes to fill. There are limitations to the size of tree that can be mulched depending on the size of the mulcher and this influenced my trail design. However, because of my intended use, I wanted a somewhat serpentine layout to help control the speed the kids could travel on their ATVs. So this worked out well for me.

Now, this technique did leave some frayed stumps behind. For ATVs, this was not a problem as they have been worn down with the traffic and have not caused any issues. For walking, some post-mulching refinement of the stumps would be nice.

If I can find my previous post, I'll add a link of the video I posted on YouTube showing the mulcher.

 

[bmac]

OK, Here's a link to the thread. The link to the mulcher video on the 2nd page did not work. So I added a new link on page 3 of that thread that does work. Or, you can just link to it directly below.

Trail Cleared (And More)

Tree Mulcher Video

 

[thingy]

Depends on what your idea of a walking trail is,,,mine is a path,,where maybe two people can walk,,,I got several miles probably of walking trails,,,some are through woods only about 4-6 ft wide,,I weed it them every couple years and clear up fallen trees and limbs,,others are through old pastures,,they are 15 ft or so wide that I cut with tractor,,,but a good deer path is a pretty good walking path once you cut some limbs out of your face,,,thingy

 

[gone2dawgs]

I bought 50 acres last year and started a trail for hiking and jogging around the perimeter. For my purposes, a Stilh brushcutter combined with my chainsaw worked very well since I had mostly thorn bushes and small trees. I can wind the trail around the larger tress and cut out an ocassionaly samplings of 3 or 4 inch diameter. Part of the trail is too sloped for my riding land mower or a tractor and has rocks on the slope so brushcutting is the only answer. For the remainder of the trail, I have used my riding lawn mower and after many mandrel replacement, I realize why they call it a riding LAWN mower. But I am afraid of rolling over the tractor.

This project it about 75% complete, almost ready to start the bridge over the small stream. Good luck, Remember making a pth it is healthy workout, not work!

 

[gone2dawgs]

One other thing....mulch makes for a good surface in the woods. Where I live, mulch is free at the county landfill if I load it myself, or $5 for a enourmous scope which weights out at 3,000 lbs of mulch in my trailer. Check out your local landfill and you may get mulch for free and do the county a favor. Also try sawmills for sawdust.