Some of the best trails run along failed transportation routes. Today you can bike or hike along abandoned canal towpaths, logging roads, railroads, or road roads. My favorites are the rail trails. They’re usually wide, smooth, and only as steep as the steepest grade a freight train could handle. I’m sure some mountain bikers and Tour de Francers think rail trails are bunny slopes for babies, but I love them.
I also love the great transfer of property from exploitative, extractive, polluting industries to public lands. It’s like beating swords into ploughshares, only for recreation.
Lots of parks have interpretive signs that show the history of the trails and the land around them. Each one tells a specific story, but the general message is: Logging and mining companies bought the land for a pittance, brought in workers who had little power because they were Black or recent immigrants, paid them and their children miserable wages to chop down every tree and dig out all the coal, and then left a wasteland of erosion, mudslides, polluted rivers, and poverty. The old photos on these signs are horrifying—bare slopes, skinny kids, derailed trains, workers’ shacks, clouds of smoke. The land became worthless, so the Forest Service acquired it, let the forests grow back, reintroduced otters or red-cockaded woodpeckers, and now it’s lovely.
I bet many of you also read signs and markers along trails and roads. I visit West Virginia every year, where every tourist town has a cafe, hair-dresser, bar, or ice cream stand called “Almost Heaven.” And it is! But it wasn’t. The town of Davis, now surrounded by parks and forests, used to be nicknamed “Stumptown.” Historical markers across the state remind us about all the mining disasters. Miners were crushed by collapses, poisoned by gas, or blown apart by explosions. Many of the victims died when they rushed into a mine to save others. Those who didn’t die on the job died later of black lung. Massey Energy killed 29 people in 2010 and its villainous CEO has had the nerve to run for political office several times since then.
Anyway, not everybody agrees, but the wind farms along West Virginia mountain ranges are beautiful.
Hiking or biking along former logging roads and once polluted rivers is a great reminder that humans can devastate ecosystems, and that we can bring them back, or almost back, with proper environmental protections, conservation plans, government oversight, and popular support. We’ll need to remember this when we have a chance to build back the Environmental Protection Agency and all the national monuments and wilderness areas that are being devastated right now.
Upriver from Washington, DC, you can walk along former canal paths where mules towed boats past the Potomac River’s rapids and waterfalls. The company that built the canals went bankrupt and lost out to the railroads, which lost out to the highways. Maybe someday they’ll be bike paths, too.
Some of my other favorites: The Western Maryland Rail Trail (watch out for deer). The Great Allegheny Passage goes from Pittsburgh to Cumberland, Maryland. The Cuyahoga Valley National Park rails trails in Ohio run along a river once so polluted that it burned. Now it’s lovely.
A rail trail from Baltimore to York, Pennsylvania runs through Maryland’s Gunpowder Falls State Park. It’s named for the gunpowder factory that used to operate there. Can you guess what happened to it?
It blew up.
Interpretive signs along that trail show former fancy hotels (burned), towns (flooded), and bank buildings made out of stone. The banks are some of the only historic buildings still standing, and people have converted some of them into quirky homes.
The trails also endure; people have been going from here to there and back again along these routes for centuries, sometimes for business but now, for now, for pleasure.
