Andinistaloco wrote:Hiking an existing trail which doesn't have vegetation on it due to heavy traffic is one thing. Stomping around off trail when there's not enough snow cover (or none at all) is another thing entirely.
If there is a designated trail, nobody would need to stomp around off-trail like a wandering idiot. So I don't see why a reasonable solution would not be as follows:
Construct one single, well-marked, 2-foot-wide trail for the whopping three quarters of a mile between the Humphreys trail and Agassiz' summit. Then tell people to stay on the trail and not wander all over the fucking landscape up there.
People would be much more likely to follow that rule than the current one that tells them they can't hike their desired peak. And the plant's range up there might be small, but it can't possibly be less than a couple orders of magnitude larger than the area that would be taken up by a 2-foot-wide, 3/4-mile-long trail. So the trail can't possibly destroy a significant fraction of the plant's range.
From what I saw when I hiked Humphreys, it's basically pretty moderate terrain up there, in other words, relatively wide, relatively big. So this plant's range is not just a 15-foot-wide strip on some narrow ridge that would be decimated by a trail. Correct?
Anyway, until something has changed with the rule or I manage to encounter snow conditions, I personally wouldn't consider hiking to Agassiz. I got to look over at it from the ridge when I did Humphreys in the summer of 2004, so that's probably the most of it I will get. But it just seems absurd that hikers sticking to one narrow path would cause the destruction of this plant.