Are you thinking of building a trail? Or wondering why your organization's current trails keep flooding or facing problems like soil erosion? Unfortunately, it's easy to carve out a path, only to discover later that certain sections come with a host of pitfalls. Surprising as it may sound, the first step in good trail design is really a step back to think about your organization's mission. Is your goal to protect wildlife, or to nurture native plant species, or perhaps to provide recreational experiences to hikers or paddlers? Whatever your goal, think about how it may impact your trail-making decisions, from the basics of trail width, grade and surfacing, to where the path extends to how much access to offer visitors.

Next, says John Monroe of Rivers & Trails, "You need to think like the land, as if there's not a trail there. What does the land want to do without a trail? If it wants to get wet for six months a year, maybe you say a trail shouldn't go there." Trail siting and alignment choices based on the landscape's natural attributes not only helps the environment, but also saves your organization money and headaches, because you're working with nature, instead of against it, and significantly reducing maintenance costs.

Look for features of the land that will lead to maintenance headaches down the road-and try to avoid them. Typical reasons to avoid siting a trail somewhere include:

• Wetness: You don't want to interrupt water flow, because you'll have to build structures like bridges to keep walkers' feet dry.
• Steep slopes: They're challenging to walk on, and they create a place for water to run downhill. If you have to go up a hill, try as much as possible to make it a gentle contour.
• Fragile vegetation, rare species, or breeding/nesting areas: Before beginning trail construction, check in with your state Department of Conservation, which can alert you about the location of important flora and fauna in the area.
• Stone walls: You don't want to break up these historic remnants; try to go around them.
• Unsightly neighbors: It's not necessarily a dealbreaker, but if you're constructing a nature trail, you may want to avoid routing it near modern incursions like the backside of a shopping mall.

Picking the best location for your trail is all about "reading the landscape," says Monroe. First, write up a log of your existing trail-literally go out and take notes, foot by foot, on the existing conditions (you can use GPS or just an old-fashioned notebook). You'll need to do this over time to evaluate the trail in different seasons and under different conditions to find any wet spots. At a minimum, visit in both the fall and spring, after the snow melts.

Once you identify problem areas, go out again and identify potential alternatives. Ask yourself, "How can we go around this spot?" Take some "flagging" (a ribbon-like material you can buy from forestry supply companies) and mark trees on possible routes, then judge them over time to see if your alternative route is actually better than your original one. If you're crunched for time and already have a sense of problem areas, you can test alternatives at the same time as you conduct your initial landscape reading. As Monroe notes, trail design is "both art and science." The key is to look at trail possibilities and "see how they perform before you pick up a shovel."