Happy Trails
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Six young adults are pulling out rocks in a small stream that threatens to overwhelm a hiking trail in Central N.H. Hi, I'm Bryan Yeaton and you're listening to the Weather Notebook.

This was a record year for snowpack in New England. Now as it melts, six people are trying to divert the natural flow of water to make way for a manmade trail, as Rob, a volunteer, explains.

What happens in the springtime after a lot of snowmelt is that it erodes a lot of the drainage. It just runs off right through the trail and the trail is in a place where it shouldn't have been, but we're trying to work around that by making it the best trail that it can be in it's already existing place.

If the water comes down the trail and we don't have somewhere for the water to go then it will just create a ravine down through the middle of the trail and wash out all the soil.

You might see how people walk up to it, nobody wants to walk through water and mud so you'll see that people start walking around it. In many parts of a trail you'll notice what I call a blister. It starts to swell out. That's one manner in which the weather specifically affects our work.

The process involved with this trail maintenance can be an extremely messy one. Work gloves are little protection from the grit and grime of the forest floor and each persons clothing is stained from hours of work. Even though the mud shoveling and rock pulling is backbreaking the making of this culvert will have a positive effect on the trail for many years to come. Eric, another volunteer talks about why the maintenance is important.

The volunteers explained that even a standing puddle of water in the middle of the trail could have detrimental effects on the landscape.

You wouldn't think that in the wild backwoods of NH that it would take so much effort to clean a trail. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory and is generously supported by the National Science Foundation.