When heartbreak is a lost trail

By Ammi Midstokke
Reader Contributor

My favorite trail segment on my favorite trail in my favorite place in the world has been closed. I am heartbroken, despondent even, at what feels like the loss of a thousand tree friends.

It’s not just any section of trail. It’s a little corner of forest with thick trees — the kind that offer heavy shade and lower temperatures in the summer, and something mythical and silent in the winter. The trail had the perfect short rises and descents to be delightfully playful, with twists and turns that reminded me of childhood running.

In the late fall and early winter, the tamaracks left a brilliant orange carpet, sprinkled with cedar needles, letting one move along the trail without making a sound. Occasionally, a gnarled root would rise from the dark soil, and like the arm of a slumbering creature, lay across the soft ground. It always smelled at the same time like something primordial, metallic, ancient and earthy. In rain and snow, the petrichor hung like a veil heavy between the trees.

The cedars here felt old and wise. They had a kind of patience for our pattering and our bike bells. The trail marked the top of the hill for me, a forest reward for all the other beautiful forest I’d just run through — a half-mile or so connector that felt like the Meow Wolf opened a room of wooded witchcraft. A place haunted by the ghosts of the caribou or prehistoric bison that once wandered here. 

Photo courtesy of Stuck in North Idaho blog

I liked how close the trees were, because when I ran through them I felt fast and light. I liked how one day I would enter from the west and another day I would enter from the east, and each direction would offer an entirely different perspective. I liked how if I came early enough on a summer morning and tucked in through the branches of the west entrance, I knew I was first because there was, without fail, a spider web waiting for me. I liked how when winter gave way to spring, the detritus took its time getting warm or sprouting green. 

I liked that I have a clear memory of a group of volunteers shoveling and raking one of the first banked corners in the trail system, giving it a name while we ate the cupcakes I’d delivered (via trail running) to the crew. I liked that this particular section holds other memories for me: I once curled up in tears on its tender spring soil and cried away a decade of fear and abuse and the trees kept my sobbing and snot a steadfast secret until now.

When I saw the yellow ribbons and sign, I thought maybe a cougar had left half a deer in there and the stewards of the trail were ensuring we give it space. What I’ve also loved about our local trails is how carefully they have been managed by private land owners; the land trust; and, to the (questionable) best of our ability, the users of this beautiful space. This land belongs first to the flora and fauna. I agree: We should come last.

I am naively optimistic about such things. It is true I have caught mountain bikers dragging their bikes around fences and used choice words to express the community risk of blatant disregard for owners’ rights. I always want to think that people break rules because they don’t know about them, that it is our responsibility as benefactors of these spaces to learn about and educate each other on what proper etiquette is. 

Crossing property lines, ignoring signs that express private landowners’ wishes, leaving trash, not picking up after dogs, riding our bikes too fast and — for the sweet love of preserved forest floor ecology — going off trail are all detrimental to the sociological ecology of these resources. 

When a private landowner offers their land to conservation and public use and we fail to adhere to the rules, we risk losing not just this privilege of access to those lands: We make other potential owners resistant to putting land in conservation and offering public access.

I have made this mistake myself, for a variety of what I now see as inexcusable excuses (barring a bushwhack rescue and a behind-the-tree-pee or two). I pay penance for my prior sins by trying to share the importance of respect to others in the woods, by picking up errant dog poop and trash, by staying on trail, by learning about the conservation priorities of the owners. Sometimes by being that lady on the trail, I suffer the abuses of someone telling me “they’ve always gone this way.” 

For the longest time I have argued for better public relations. “If the people understand, they will support the cause!” Or I assume the egregious ducking of fences and dragging of bikes is some flatlander from some geographic location we’ve labeled as problematic or entitled. Sometimes it is those folks, but sometimes it’s our neighbors, people who should know better, people who just ignore the signs. 

I just wish they’d have learned before this pristine and beautiful swath of land was closed to all of us, before I had to trot up to the cathedral cedar gates one morning and feel my heart sink to my shoes. 

And I wonder: Will we learn now? Or will we have to lose all access to these lands, be sequestered to city parks, national parks, paved bike paths and paid parking because a few people could not walk along the fence just a little farther to the actual opening? 

I wonder how I can alchemize my grief into something useful, something that feels less powerless than this profound loss. Maybe other — or more normal — people mourn their pets and humans, and surely I do, too. But right now, I am mourning the trees I’ve come to know for years and can no longer commune with, or speak to, or watch change with the seasons, or seek shelter in, or run through, and I am inconsolable.

Ammi Midstokke can be contacted at [email protected]. For once, she begs you to follow the rules. This article first appeared in the Spokesman-Review.