How do man-made hiking trails keep the grass from overgrowing the dirt portion of the trail?
How do man-made hiking trails keep the grass from overgrowing the dirt portion of the trail?
Surely there aren't enough people walking them constantly to mash the grass to death, is there some kind of membrane placed under the dirt to stop grass growth?
Here is a pic of worn path from walking on, rough edges, clearly not intentional.
Will post pic after walking the dog of the trail that I'm speccifically curious about.
Yes, there are enough people walking on it to just kill the grass. No further effort is needed to form the pathway. Many wild animals make paths by walking on them a lot too.
Also once yearly trail maintenance or some other cadence. At least if a state or national park.
Plants are actually pretty sensitive to soil compaction, which can take a lot of time to reverse. the composition clay/sand in the soil can changed the time it takes to resettle, and it might even just erode down to rock.
This one makes the most sense. There's trails behind my house that I walk pretty much daily and maybe meet three people the entire time. There's just not enough people walking on that path to cause that so it must be the compaction.
No, it's just foot traffic everywhere I've hiked
edit- I guess maybe you're talking about those nature hikes with the box-landscape-stairs. Those are filled in with rock and clay so the grass doesn't have any nutrients, then maintained with the fine granite gravel, which I think even has a chemical effect on the soil, suppressing plants
Obligatory reference to desire paths: !desire_paths@sh.itjust.works
Traffic -- under foot or otherwise -- is one way to keep a path in decent shape
Where I live they're not maintained at all. If nobody uses them for a while they disappear. I have a "path" nearby that's on every single map but you can no longer see it used to be a path.
dirt compression its what killed my potted plant
I built an office shed in my back yard. Almost all the grass is gone where I walk between the back door and the shed. I do this fairly frequently, but I'd think still quite a bit less than an even lightly trafficked hiking path.
I'll put some stepping stones out there eventually.
No membrane. Just clay and stone.
https://www.fs.usda.gov/t-d/pubs/htmlpubs/htm07232806/page09.htm
The construction of a hiking path depends on the environment and budget. There certainly is membrane used in some, especially in wet/boggy environments. I think it's mostly gravel that's used to prevent grass from growing. (people don't walk on the entire width of the path usually)