Surely there aren’t enough people walking them constantly to mash the grass to death, is there some kind of membrane placed under the dirt to stop grass growth?
Here is a pic of worn path from walking on, rough edges, clearly not intentional.
Will post pic after walking the dog of the trail that I’m speccifically curious about.
Yes, there are enough people walking on it to just kill the grass. No further effort is needed to form the pathway. Many wild animals make paths by walking on them a lot too.
No, it’s just foot traffic everywhere I’ve hiked
edit- I guess maybe you’re talking about those nature hikes with the box-landscape-stairs. Those are filled in with rock and clay so the grass doesn’t have any nutrients, then maintained with the fine granite gravel, which I think even has a chemical effect on the soil, suppressing plants
Plants are actually pretty sensitive to soil compaction, which can take a lot of time to reverse. the composition clay/sand in the soil can changed the time it takes to resettle, and it might even just erode down to rock.
This one makes the most sense. There’s trails behind my house that I walk pretty much daily and maybe meet three people the entire time. There’s just not enough people walking on that path to cause that so it must be the compaction.
I built an office shed in my back yard. Almost all the grass is gone where I walk between the back door and the shed. I do this fairly frequently, but I’d think still quite a bit less than an even lightly trafficked hiking path.
I’ll put some stepping stones out there eventually.
dirt compression its what killed my potted plant
You walked on your potted plant?
My first thought was “ah, squished by a cat”
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Cool
The fact that the trail exists there in the first place means that there’s enough people walking on it that the grass dies and doesn’t grow bag. I’ve started a trail from scratch and I doubt there’s more than a handful of people walking there every week but the trail just keeps getting more carved in.
