Trail markers in the Whites are way older than I thought

I was reading an old AMC guidebook from 1972 and found out some of the cairns on the Franconia Ridge loop have been there since the 1920s. That blew my mind because I always figured they replaced them every few seasons, not that any structure could survive 100 New England winters. The book even mentions a specific one near Mount Lafayette that was rebuilt after a hurricane in 1938. Has anyone else stumbled onto trail history that made them rethink how permanent these routes actually are?

1 comments

1 Comment

riley_price26d ago

Digging into old guidebooks is such a rabbit hole, it really hits you how much effort people put into keeping these paths open. I found a 1960s map once that showed a reroute near Kinsman that I always thought was natural, turns out a logging crew just got tired of fixing the same washed out section. Makes you look at every cairn differently, like they're little time capsules holding up through every storm. It's cool and kind of humbling at the same time.