HUELLA VERDE

* Grand Canyon
National Park
The 2009 face-lift of
South Kaibab Trail was
part of the Grand
Canyon’s biggest trail
reconstruction project
since the 1960s.
said about those.) It allows small people, like me,
to make truly enormous rocks dig themselves out
of the earth. It allows groups of people, rowing
with the bars as though they were oars, to maneu-
ver those rocks with what I’ll go so far as to call
precision. Even though you may be deep in the
wilderness and beyond the aid of power tools,
with a rock bar you are mighty. You can bend the
raw materials of the earth to your designs.
The summer I first fell for rock bars, I was 18
and volunteering on a crew rerouting a popular access
trail leading to the Appalachian Trail in Virginia.
Before, I thought I knew trails: I’d grown up
20 minutes from Tennessee's Great Smoky Mountains
National Park, where hiking and camping
were … pretty much all there was to do. But before
long I felt like Mark Twain after he learns to
ROCK BAR
Lever used
to dig out
giant stones
captain steamboats and can never look at the Mississippi
the same way. What once looked like sim-
ple tracks through the woods revealed themselves
to be complex marvels of engineering, the results
of the careful designs and grueling work of a whole
cadre of people who live in the woods for weeks at
a time and speak in their own vocabulary of pick
mattocks and McLeods (both tools), of French
drains (gravel sluices for managing water in moderately
wet spots) and Griphoists (hand-powered
cable ratchets) and corduroy (a stopgap measure
of laying down a bunch of logs to give hikers a dry
place to step when the mud is too overwhelming).
The most iconic trails have become such fundamental
parts of their home parks that they can
seem like natural features, part of the patrimony
of the park alongside waterfalls or vistas. The best
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES
60 southwest july 2016