Solutions: Stewards point the way

Stephanie Ley looked like she had just heard a sour note. The 32-year-old watched one hiker after another weave through the trees at the

base of Gorham Mountain in Maine’s Acadia National Park, bypassing the rocky trailhead. They were following a path called a social trail, an unauthorized offshoot eroded by foot traffic.

Ley, summit steward coordinator for Friends of Acadia, said it probably started as someone’s quick bathroom detour.

“It’s just really astounding to me that this has cropped up,” Ley said. “It’s so obvious and so bad, and through this lovely mossy area, and it’s only taken a few weeks!”

She approached a couple emerging from the social trail and asked them to stick to the rocky areas to protect the moss.

“We were just following the well-worn trail,” they said.

The interaction was one of many Ley had with hikers as she climbed less than a mile to the top of Gorham on a sunny September day. Though she is technically a summit steward, Ley and her colleagues also enjoin people to use the paths “before they get that chance to walk off trail on