A new article of mine, concerning techniques for on-trail route finding, is up at BPL. A subscription is required, but this one is my personal favorite of all the work I’ve done for them as of now, published or yet-to-be published.

Ideas planted in my head after Alaska last summer coalesced over the next few months of backpacking in Glacier, Yellowstone, and the Bob.  Alaska had shown me what a landscape looked like when human trail builders had never been there, which in turn enabled me to begin to estimate how the presence of human trails in the major wilderness areas of the lower 48 affected animal traffic.  I in turn realized that while the rules governing human and animal trail travel were in some ways different, they were in many ways the same.  Hence this article; written with the assumption that the vast majority of the time, the human traveler will be following established paths of one sort or another.