Sustainable Trail Design
Fina Trails is a new trails company born out of my twenty one years of volunteer trail maintenance and trail building experience, and my passion for bringing sustainable practices and training to the trails community. Fina Trails allows me to combine this passion with my technical knowledge and experience from owning a construction company for more than 40 years.
Our area is rife with legacy trails, trails that were not sustainably designed, that are often old road beds, user-created short cuts, or the shortest distant between points. These trails typically erode, hold water, are difficult to maintain, and have a negative impact on the user experience as well as the environment. Twenty years of putting band-aids on bad trail has lead me to the conclusion that most of our area trail systems need a total redesign to provide a sustainable trail system that will serve the ever increasing hiking public, and withstand the ever worsening storm events, for generations to come.
My goal is to move away from the repetitive maintenance approach, such as cleaning water bars, to a thinking that involves building better trails that will last for generations with minimal maintenance. This is the core of my sustainable trails mission. I hope to do this both by designing and building better trails, and by training others to do so as well.