Your Opinions

Trail walkers as important as bicyclists

Columnist Carol Weimer’s article about trail walking is well done and long overdue. Bicycling on these trails is fine but bikes are given too many possessive advantages over the many kinds of pedestrians. The faster or heavier traffic inevitably controls the multiple-use trail. We must find more ways to give the walkers a better experience.

The hot and hard asphalt is definitely for faster biking but it is a bigger safety hazard for those who don’t hear well or wheelchairs and baby strollers. Much better is the smoothened stone dust surface that is also easier on foot and joint problems.

It is the only material that allows a compromise between trail riders and walkers.

Most important about the canal and rail paths is they are flat or nearly so for those who have health problems. Pave with asphalt and these walkers must go elsewhere and unnoticed.

That helps the bike statistics to gain more advantage for even more asphalt.

The authorities of urban or multiple-use trails are facing more bicycle management problems.

Technology is not stopping from making them even faster and no one knows yet how to regulate the anticipated swarms of electrically assisted bikes that look the same as ordinary bikes.

Here is a tip for more local hiking that is exciting because it will give you that feeling of wanderlust.

Madison County is blessed with an extraordinary hiking trail that few people know about and that is the 4600 mile North Country National Scenic Trail. It travels from North Dakota, pauses the hiker for the pretty scenery in Madison County and the Adirondacks and finally to Vermont. It is for local walkers like you as much as it appeals to the long distance hikers. We hope you chat with them. Some people here call it the Link Trail but that is a mistake because it has no justification and uselessly hides our great distant national scenic trail.

Many hikers from far-away places are looking for the North Country Trail in Madison County and not somebody’s Link Trail name.