The lush corridor of streamside vegetation and access to Peavine Peak’s network of trails make the Evans Creek trail one of the most popular on the mountain.

The route starts in Rancho San Rafael Park north of McCarran Boulevard as a single thin trail but soon branches into many paths that weave among each other and the creek before dissolving into wide roads with deep ruts.

In trailspeak, the Evans Creek routes are called “user-developed” or “user-defined” trails, because the users make them up as they go along. That works fine for a while, said Dick Benoit of the Truckee Meadows Trails Association, but it’s rarely sustainable.

“The use is just increasing,” Benoit said. “The user-defined trails, they erode. They wander around. They just kind of fall apart and create problems.”

With more people hitting the trails around Reno and the rest of the nation, trails have to carry a lot of traffic, cater to different tastes and protect the local environment.

The Truckee Meadows Trails Association is rerouting the Evans Creek trail to restore the damaged stream habitat and consolidate the braided trails into one. So far, they’ve worked on several hundred feet of the trail that reaches nearly a mile into the canyon before hitting a subdivision being built off Hoge Road.

Benoit and two other trail volunteers hauled some two-by-fours to a section of trail worn three times as wide as the rest of the path by visitors trying to sidestep the creek. The trailworkers would build a bridge to keep people on the middle of the path so that vegetation on the edges can grow back and less soil will wash downstream.

They eyed a stream crossing and agreed on the best place to build a bridge.

“Once you put something in here, that’s what’s going to stay here for a long time,” Benoit said.

One with nature

Trailbuilding manuals published by the U.S. Forest Service and the International Mountain Bicycling Association encourage the use of natural materials such as rocks, logs and soil for trails.

Few Truckee Meadows residents volunteer to do trail work, however. Benoit and his two friends did not feel like muscling some massive boulders into place by themselves for an armored crossing, a series of flat rocks to walk across.

Elsewhere on the trail, tiny engineering feats accomplished with nature’s hardware abound. Joey Klein, a member of the bicycling association’s traveling Trail Care Crew, led a trailbuilding workshop here in February for a Western Trailbuilders Association conference in Reno.

“We like to use nature. It’s less work,” he said.

Klein routed the new trail on the uphill side of a tree, for example, to protect the tree’s roots.

“It’s a pain to dig up roots anyway,” he said.

The workshop attendees dug a new trail that was sloped away from the hill to allow the water to wash over it. When water puddles or begins to flow down the trail, erosion occurs.

Where the terrain was too steep to build such a path naturally, Klein showed the others the best way to build a stone wall that holds the trail on the sharp slope.

He also studied the entire canyon and proposed a route that minimizes stream crossings, blends with the natural contours and features of the land and skirts the neighborhood being built at the end of the canyon, where the old trail used to cut through.

“We want to impart that same shady, wet feeling without mucking up the riparian area,” he said. “I think we can cut the number of stream crossings but still keep the feeling by keeping people above the water and maybe dancing down to the willows every once in awhile.”

Numerous rock outcroppings, a few pine stands and some great views of the city give the canyon lots of potential, said Klein, who travels around the nation training local trail groups.

“I think it’s world class,” he said.

Something for everyone

Dale Beesmer, the bicycling association’s Nevada representative and longtime member of the local cycling scene, is helping the Truckee Meadow Trails Association build the new Evans Creek trail.

“The part I enjoy is looking at what we have and trying to make the best out of it,” he said.

He, Benoit and Eric Martin took a break from their bridge building project in Evans Canyon to survey the trail ahead of them, where no rerouting work had been done yet.

One alternative would take hikers to a rock outcropping and might save a stream crossing, but it would cut through an untouched thicket of shrubs. Another path would add a stream crossing but protect habitat elsewhere and avoid steep and rugged terrain.

Moving the trail 20 or 30 feet up the hillside could circumvent those problems, but would hikers then create their own paths to keep close to the stream?

“Depending on whose eyes you’re looking through, one way might be better than the other,” Beesmer said.

To simplify matters, the city doesn’t allow motorized vehicles on its property as the U.S. Forest Service does on the rest of Peavine Peak. Beesmer foresees a drop in illegal use now that development begun in mid-May has cut off the road motorists once used to drive into the canyon.

The trail does serve users with different expectations, though, he said. Many hikers want smooth paths with mellow hills. Some of them might like being as close to the stream as possible, some might prefer views of the canyon and the city in the background. Among mountain bikers, some want easy routes. Others like technical challenges, such as rocky sections. Downhill mountain bikers prefer steep, extremely technical terrain.

Away from the creek, for example, one side trail follows a drainage down technical terrain laced with boulders and tight turns. The February trail-building workshop worked on this trail to illustrate erosion control and show trailbuilders how to appeal to as wide an audience as possible.

Above the canyon, Beesmer and some bicycling association workers replaced pallets and cinder blocks in a downhill obstacle with rocks from the area. Before, the obstacle looked like a pile of trash, Beesmer said. Now, a casual observer might not even notice the trail.

The trail along the creek will have to serve trail runners, hikers, dog walkers and mountain bikers. Although that means it won’t be as technical as some mountain bikers would like, the trail leads to the larger network of single track on Peavine Peak, where plenty of technical opportunities await.

“When we finish these trails, there will be something for everyone,” Beesmer said.