Director of Trails Alexander DeLucia (far right) and AMC Trail Crew members at work on the Cardigan All Persons Trail.
In September 2023 AMC’s Professional Trail Crew unveiled a trail unlike any they’d worked on.
The Cardigan All Persons Trail (APT) at AMC Cardigan Lodge in New Hampshire is a half-mile-long path designed with all hikers in mind, including those who use wheelchairs, walkers, strollers, and more. APTs are built in accordance with Forest Service Accessible Trail Guidelines. This means the trail at Cardigan is wider than most in the White Mountains, with a smooth, consistent surface. Signage indicates changes in grade so users can make informed decisions. Drains improve weather resistance.
“This work really embodies our vision of accessibility to the outdoors for all. It also exemplifies our vision of the power of our community,” said AMC President & CEO Nicole Zussman, speaking at the trail’s ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Soon, it won’t be the only All Persons Trail on an AMC property. In 2024 trail staff are completing an accessible path at AMC Noble View Center in western Massachusetts. They’ll work with the Massachusetts Audubon Society on APTs at Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary and Pawtucket Farm Wildlife Sanctuary — after already completing an accessible trail at the organization’s Brewsters Woods Wildlife Sanctuary. Finally, they’ll be in Maine, transforming the Great Meadow Loop Trail—a connector between the town of Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park—into a path for everyone.
Adding this slate of projects wasn’t simple. Trail crews need specialized equipment, materials and training for different kinds of work. A lot of AMC’s trailwork in the backcountry, like restoring the Franconia Loop, is done by hand. APT projects, meanwhile, usually require machines like excavators and motorized wheelbarrows to transport materials and flatten them to a consistent grade. Builders, especially nonprofits, rarely do both jobs.
“It’s a niche for AMC to be doing that scale and quality of work while still qualifying as a Conservation Corps and not a private contractor,” says Alexander DeLucia, AMC Director of Trails.
2024 may seem like the year of the All Persons Trail, but these projects are the result of extensive behind-the-scenes work. And it’s just the beginning.
“It was a conscious decision to invest the time and resources to develop a skill set of APT construction within our crew. Now we’re realizing all the benefits of that effort,” says DeLucia.
A New Philosophy
About one in four Americans lives with a disability. For these folks, experiencing the outdoors often comes with additional hurdles.
In public buildings and businesses, disabled people are protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which lays out minimum design guidelines for accessible construction. The outdoors, however, are a different story.
Enock Glidden, an accomplished adaptive athlete who reviews trail accessibility for Maine Trail Finder, says obstacles may precede the trailhead.
“I look for anything that might impede a wheelchair user from accessing or continuing on a trail. I first assess the parking lot and its associated amenities, such as bathrooms. Once I am on the trails, I take note of large rocks and roots, whether the trail is wide enough, and whether the inclines are too steep,” says Glidden.
As part of his assessment, Glidden also checks for information that allows a user to make their own decision about a trail. What’s passable for one person may not be for others, even on an “accessible” path.
“I look for signage that communicates the conditions of the trail and any other information that someone might need to decide if the trail is accessible to them.”
People with disabilities have always recreated outdoors, despite these obstacles. But the COVID-19 pandemic— when lockdowns drove record numbers of people to participate in new activities—was a wakeup call for trail building organizations like AMC.
“We saw a lot more people engaging in the outdoors, a greater diversity of individuals involved with the outdoors. And there’s a recognition that we need to modify these outdoor public spaces and recreational trail networks to meet a wide range of visitors,” said DeLucia.
Adding accessible trail building to AMC’s repertoire of services made sense. Similarly minded landowners, like Mass Audubon, wanted to construct more of them, and needed a trail building partner. And, most importantly, the move would show hikers of all abilities that AMC was looking out for them.
Making the decision was important. Following through would be the challenge.
“It’s a highly technical form of trail construction. It’s not something that we said, ‘Oh yeah, piece of cake,’” says DeLucia.
DeLucia calls APT construction, “A highly technical form of trail construction.”
The Cost of a Trail
All Persons Trails can be much more expensive to build than other kinds of paths. Gravel, or a similar surfacing material, needs to be brought in. That requires mechanized equipment, most of which AMC didn’t own, and the proper training and certification to use it.
“We’re talking about trails in the woods where a twenty-ton load of gravel can’t make it a half a mile down the trail, so it gets dumped at a site. A lot of what we’re doing is labor and machine work to just move that material from where it was staged to where it needs to go,” explains DeLucia.
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These logistical constraints make a trail’s location especially important. APTs are usually built near existing roads. This makes staging easier but ensures the most possible people can reach the trail. Ideally, it connects to other accessible infrastructure.
For their first accessible trail, AMC chose to modify a path near AMC Cardigan Lodge—now the Cardigan All Persons Trail. Building from an existing path cut some of the costs and ensured the trail was reachable by car. The Cardigan APT has its own parking area, complete with an ADA-compliant composting privy, and is just down the road from AMC Cardigan Lodge, which has wheelchair access.
DeLucia believes the same principles could be applied to build accessible trails near other AMC Destinations.
“We’d love to see an All Persons Trail at Pinkham Notch Visitor Center [and] at the Highland Center in Crawford Notch… For us, it’s recognizing the current use and opportunity to attract an even broader audience to an existing asset that AMC has.”
Attendees at the Cardigan All Persons Trail’s ribbon cutting ceremony, including trail volunteers from the AMC New Hampshire Chapter.
Specialized Knowledge
AMC Professional Trail Crew turned to multiple sources to learn how to build their first All Persons Trail. Some of the expertise was already on-staff. Partner organizations in the trail-building community also lent a hand.
Ellie Pelletier and Becca McNeeley both honed their skills with machine building while working for private contractors. Now, they’re leading APT projects for AMC. Pelletier was the project manager at Cardigan Lodge, and now leads the AMC team working in Acadia National Park. McNeeley is in charge of the All Persons Trail at Long Pasture Wildlife Sanctuary and lead construction at Brewsters Woods.
DeLucia also cites a culture of collaboration in the Northeast’s trailbuilding community as a big reason for the project’s success.
“The environment and the community that we have now with events like Trails Skills College, where we’re bringing everybody together and learning and working and sharing resources and information… We were able to really focus on this new set of skills.”
The spirit of collaboration came up in other ways. AMC’s professional trail crew doesn’t just build and maintain paths on AMC properties. They also contract with landowners across the Northeast interested in building recreation infrastructure. Having partners like Mass Audubon that trust AMC with their accessibility projects has been essential.
“We’ll talk to the project partner about what they want, and from this information we can decide what quarries we need to work with and what rental companies we need to contact. So, it’s really a team effort… it’s usually a pretty open conversation,” says Pelletier.
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Building on the Legacy
AMC has offered professional trail services for more than a century— the oldest active professional trail crew in the country. And yet, after all these years, it’s still an organization that values honing new skills, expanding its repertoire, and considering new perspectives.
One of AMC’s upcoming All Persons Trail projects is an update to the Great Meadow Loop in Acadia National Park. It was already mostly flat, but the team that built it wasn’t “striving to meet accessibility standards at that time,” says DeLucia.
He speaks from experience. He was on that trail crew more than 20 years ago.
Back then, the team worked almost exclusively with shovels and human-powered wheelbarrows of gravel. Today’s crew will use motorized wheelbarrows. Pelletier is serving as project manager while DeLucia looks on from the director role. The new work doesn’t negate what’s come before, it simply expands it.
“There’s an understanding of the value of recreational trails, the importance that recreational trails provide to communities and humans,” says DeLucia.