The term "natural trail" has emerged in recent years with the increasing number of flow trails that are artificially carved into the mountain. The term "nature trail" is the counterpart to the fashionable trail highways, but basically means nothing more than a beautiful, classic single trail. However, such a trail has nothing in common with nature - as the name suggests. Nature has never built a trail in the last 4.6 billion years, nor are these paths a gift from God. It has always been humans who have created such paths with a specific purpose.

The romantic notion of a natural trail is a fallacy: a trail is always an artificial separation from nature so that humans can move around more easily and leave the rest of nature untouched. By definition, a trail must not be part of nature. "Nature trails" are a contradiction in terms.

In fact, the inflationary use of the term "nature trail" could now backfire for mountain bikers. This is because many conservationists still believe that mountain bikers harm nature, even though they only ride on paths and trails - precisely and deliberately outside of nature. Mountain bikers are at best a burden on the paths, but not on nature. And now we mountain bikers are using the term "nature trail" to conflate what does not and should not belong together.

Because a trail has nothing to do with nature and mixing it up is likely to backfire for us mountain bikers, I declare "nature trail" to be the bad word of the year. Especially as the introduction of the term would have been completely unnecessary. Because we have long had a terminology for the term "nature trail": the good old "single trail".

More blog posts by Thomas Giger

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