DryStoneGarden

These are my photos of the Cap Ferrat trail. It’s quite similar to the Cap d’Antibes trail, so it’s maybe not strictly necessary to hike them both, but I’m so glad I did. They’re both fantastic.

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Last year I posted about the Ruta de Cares in Asturias and it reminded me how much I love trails as a thing in and of themselves, separate from the landscapes and scenery viewed from them. Trails are awesome, and their simplicity — a walking surface, usually made from the land and materials found right there trailside — leads to a surprising variety.
In France this summer I hiked another exceptional pair of trails, the coastal walks at Cap Antibes and Cap Ferrat. Great scenery, great hiking experience — walking along the water and swimming in the coves — but beyond that they seem distinctively ‘of their place’ and it’s hard to imagine them anywhere other than the south of France.

I’ll post Cap Ferrat separately. Cap Antibes was my favorite of the two, but they’re both exceptional. Both trails are mortared with trailside stone like front-country hardscaping. They front posh resort properties and there’s almost always a yacht somewhere in view, but the landscape feels a bit austere and savage.

On the inland side, the trail is lined by the garden walls and fences of plutocrat vacation properties, a weird aspect of the trail. I’m not sure if it made me feel mildly unwelcome or if it made me feel satisfied that I was getting a millionaire experience for free. Probably a bit of both. It’s also a feature of the trail that there’s always a yacht visible somewhere out on the water. (more…)

This one isn’t sculpture or land art, but it has some of the same effects. It’s the Ruta de Cares in Picos de Europa National Park, a fantastic trail in the mountains just a little inland from the north coast of Spain. It’s an exceptionally flat trail through an exceptionally un-flat landscape, which might not sound amazing but just look at the photos and imagine yourself there. It’s spectacular.

I was a little slow to figure it out while I was hiking, but the trail was built to serve as the access trail for maintaining an aqueduct. It follows along beside the aqueduct, and because the aqueduct is at such a shallow grade, the trail is also flat, like a desert trail except it runs through a limestone gorge. And then, because it goes through the mountains (sometimes literally), a ton of effort went into making it flat, into matching the shallow grade of the aqueduct, much more work than anyone would ever use on a recreation trail. It has tunnels blasted through the rock, bridges, rock walls, arches, I’ve never seen so much effort put into a trail.

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I spent a week hiking in the Pueblos Mancomunados a couple hours by bus into the highlands above Oaxaca City. The Pueblos are a group of 8 towns communally organized with tourist cabins and a place to eat in each town. They’re about ten to twenty kilometers away from each other so it’s easy to hike from town to town with just a daypack. It’s pretty country, a nice easy walking tour, and the highlight was a section of pre-hispanic trail between Lachatao and Latuvi. My photos and watercolors from the hike are below. (more…)

Kilroy was Here

Happy New Year everyone. For the first post of the year, something from the days before BuenoLuna and DryStoneGarden: Ryan’s Bush Track from the winter when Anita and I did some bicycle touring and WWOOFing on the South Island in New Zealand.

Another crew leader in the trail building scene just got back from New Zealand and sent me photos of Te Hapu, a one thousand acre sheep and cattle farm along the coast in the uppermost northern corner of the South island, New Zealand, on the west coast just below Farewell Spit. Anita and I spent almost a month there, during which time I made a trail through a section of native rainforest and did a reroute on another trail that goes to a waterfall. The Te Hapu website has a map of the property viewable as a pdf. Ryan’s Bush Track is near the northern (right) property boundary. It gives a sense of the size of the property to see my tiny little track and know that it is a kilometer long. It’s an amazing place and Sandra and Ken, the owners, were great hosts when we stayed there. Pretty funny that they named the trail and put the sign up. I guess people will know who to blame for the muddy spots.

The Track

Start of the Track through Gorse and Ferns

I got to know prickly-leaved gorse, as well as the native plants, while I was playing around in the bush making the trail. Gorse is one of the big problem weeds of New Zealand and the target of a lot of eradication efforts, but it also gets some begrudging appreciation as a nursery plant for native trees, getting tall and leggy in its old age and providing shade for native rainforest trees to recolonize and then eventually shade it out. At Te Hapu it seems to have acted as a barrier to keep out the cattle. From the outside of the gorse, there was little sign of the rainforest hiding inside; I could just see gorse and the tops of a few trees rising out of it.

I remember three kinds of tree ferns at Te Hapu. I think the one in the photo is Dicksonia squarrosa, a relative of the Tasmanian tree fern that is common in Bay Area gardens. The most beautiful one was the black tree fern, Cyathea medullaris, which I’ve never seen available in a nursery.

Hapu Beach

Outside of the rainforest, the scenery reminded me somewhat of the central coast of California, though California doesn’t have this type of limestone outcroppings. Some of the rocks are still topped with rainforest where the sheep and cattle can’t climb up to it. I had climbing shoes with me to explore the rock a bit, and it was a strange experience to start on turf and climb up into rainforest so dense that it was difficult to move through.

Gilberts Beach

It’s the only private property I’ve ever known where the owners had multiple beaches to pick from — one for swimming in calm water, one for playing in the waves and body-surfing, one for tidepooling and abalone hunting, and others for just watching waves crash violently against the rocky shoreline. They rent guest cottages to travelers, something that’s common in New Zealand where farms often have nicer scenery than the public lands. In fact, Te Hapu has a national park bordering it, but the park doesn’t have any trails or access.

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My thanks to On Lee Lau for the photos. Anita and I were traveling without a camera when we stayed at Te Hapu, so it was great to see photos of the place; they make me want to go back. More photos can be seen at the Te Hapu website. Really, though, the place needs to be seen in person to be truly appreciated, and there’s more to it than I can cover in a single blog post (first place I watched dogs mustering sheep, there are caves on the property, and google turns up a recent photo of a blue whale carcass on the property). Anyone who is ever going to be in that part of the South Island should try to make a visit.

On a somewhat related note: Tomorrow, Anita and I leave for Baja to bicycle tour around the southern section between San Ignacio and Cabo. A couple of posts should happen while I’m gone, but I won’t be responding to comments for a while.

Pack Mules on Duck Pass Trail

The topic for this month’s design workshop at Gardening Gone Wild is dealing with slopes. The description mentions “tips for building steps and paths to make slopes easier to navigate,” so I thought I’d cite the source I learned from, the forest service Trail Construction and Maintenance Notebook, which is online and in the public domain (Who owns this government document? We do!). The text might have a few elements geared towards public trails rather than residential gardens, but the diagrams are good and the principles are solid.

Step Construction

‘Build stairways from the bottom up, at a break in the grade. The most common mistake is to start part way up a grade. If you do so, the trail will wash out below the stairs. The bottom stair should be constructed on a solid, excavated footing. If it is constructed on top of exposed rock, it should be well pinned to the footing. Each successive stair is placed atop [or against] the previous stair. Dry masonry rock stairs usually rely on the contact with the stair below and with the footing to provide stability.

‘Hikers, especially backpackers, generally don’t like steps and will walk alongside them if there is any opportunity. The steps need to be comfortable to climb or they won’t be used. This means keeping the rise a reasonable 6 to 8 in (150 to 200 mm) and the run long enough to hold a hiker’s entire foot rather than just their toe. It’s helpful to armor the sides of steps with rocks to encourage users to stay on the steps.’

Stepping Rock and Riser Stairways

‘The most important area of the step is usually in the run. This is where most traffic steps as it climbs. If the step is composed of something like a board on edge with fill behind it, then the traffic will step onto the landing. Almost all foot traffic descending the step will walk off the edge of the step. The top of the step (and landing) should be stable and provide secure footing. The edge of the step should be solid and durable. The face of each step should not contain a batter that creates a “face run” of over 2 in (50 mm) from top to bottom. This is particularly important as the rise of the step increases.

‘Steps with landings are a bit harder to secure in place because the stairs do not overlap. Each step can either be placed in an excavated footing and the material below the rise removed to form the landing of the next lower step. This is usually the most stable arrangement. Or the step can be secured on the surface and fill used to form a landing behind it. The material used to provide the rise does double duty as a retaining structure when the landing consists of tamped fill. These steps must be seated well to prevent them from being dislodged by traffic. For stock use, landings should be long enough to hold all four of the animal’s feet.’

Riprap Stairway

‘In more primitive settings, you don’t need a uniform flight of steps as long as the route is obvious and there is solid tread at each stepping point. In the Sierra, a cross between cobblestones and stairs, locally called riprap, is commonly used for this purpose.

‘If the stairway climbs straight up the hill, each step should be slightly crowned to drain water to the edges or slightly sloped to one side. When the trail traverses a slope, each step and landing should be slightly outsloped. Water should not be allowed to descend long lengths of a set of steps or to collect on or behind a step on the landing. A drain dip where the trail approaches the top of the steps is a good idea.

‘In all steps, the key is to use the largest material possible and to seat it as deeply as possible. Rocks should be massive and rectangular. On steps that traverse a slope, it helps to seat the upper end of the step material in footings excavated into the slope.’

Rock Staircase

Best practice for building a stairway these days, if the rocks are big enough, is to butt them against each other instead of on top of each other. That way it is possible to repair one of the steps without redoing the whole staircase.

Rock Staircase

It doesn’t say in the notebook, but I was taught to kick test every step. If the stone moves when you kick it, it isn’t solid enough. A bit of a shock, sometimes, to see someone kick the structure you just labored on, but the step is definitely going to get kicked when people use it, so you might as well find out if it is going to last. You want to feel confident that your stairs are safe. It’s scary enough the first time you see a mule train crank through a set of steps that you’ve built even when you know the steps are solid. There aren’t mules in residential backyards, but the foot of a 150 lb. person can easily impact with 300 lbs. of force, so the basic principle is the same. Steps should be strong.

Steps also need to be regular. The test is to walk up and down the stairway without looking down at your feet. If the rise and run are even, you shouldn’t trip or stumble.

Old Town Wall Steps

In the front country I usually don’t get to work with stones that are “massive and rectangular,” but I still kick test every step and walk the staircase with my eyes closed. This set of steps, built with a local sandstone called Old Town Wall, was a lot of work, getting the risers to all match and the stones all interlocked enough to stay in place. I was working for a designer who is a serious dry stone purist, so mortar was out of the question. I think the steps and cheekwall took me longer than the entire rest of the wall.

Mortared Arizona Flagstone Steps

When it’s up to me — though I’m a dry stacker at heart — I usually build steps with mortar, usually by stacking flagstone with a recessed mortar joint. I don’t think that method holds up in areas with heavy freezes and probably not if the steps are going to be used by mules, but it does well in Bay Area gardens. A before photo of these steps and another mule photo are below. (more…)