Dillon Osleger

“If anything could be gleaned from the varying vintages of maps and countless pages of government fiscal reporting I had collected, it was that the grand majority of trails in the United States do not meet government standards for use. It did not help that the bar for those standards was set as low as it was, amounting to little more than structurally safe bridges, minimal trash, some vegetation management, and maintenance of trail tread and drainage to function for intended use. In fact, on average over the last several decades, only 26 percent of our nation's recorded trail system has met these standards. The other three-quarters of our nation's history lies under encroaching brush, fallen trees, and eroding hillslopes, and that's not to mention the trails that had been erased from current maps. My hunch that they were erasing trails because of funding issues was confirmed through a Freedom of Information Act request for the USFS's strategy to attend to deferred maintenance—a request that returned a nine-page PDF outlining a "purposeful use of scarce funding to deliver the agency's mission and reduce the size of the portfolio, which will result in a reduction of the backlog of deferred maintenance in the long-term." The report itself conveniently erased 7,000 miles of managed trail from the 158,000 that had been noted in the report six years earlier. They called this process "rightsizing.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“Our public lands are sold in ways that benefit neither the public nor the land.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands