Popular White Mountain Trails Show Signs of Erosion From Crowding

Trail stewardship organizations working in the White Mountain National Forest say visible erosion on some of the range's most popular routes has accelerated in recent years, a consequence, they say, of visitor numbers growing faster than trail maintenance capacity or the underlying infrastructure was designed to handle.

Crews rebuilding eroded sections describe a difficult tradeoff: hardening trails with stone steps and drainage structures increases durability but requires expensive, labor-intensive work that can only be completed on a handful of trail miles each season given available funding and the short high-elevation work window. In the meantime, informal social trails continue to widen around the worst erosion, expanding the footprint of disturbed alpine vegetation.

Some conservation groups have begun studying reservation or shuttle systems similar to those used in more heavily managed national parks, though officials acknowledge implementing such a system in the White Mountains would require coordination across multiple trailheads and jurisdictions that has not previously been attempted at this scale in New Hampshire.