A view along Tyler Arboretum's Blue Trail.
For Jon Bauer, his interest in trails began around 1980 when he started backpacking in the Pennsylvania woods with friends. He grew up in Wallingford, so Tyler Arboretum was a convenient location to pursue trail hiking. He and his friends would walk and talk and then go get pancakes for breakfast afterwards.
After about 20 years of backpacking and hiking, Jon at that point knew that he liked trails — he had learned about trail maintenance, he liked the comradery of being on the trails and he liked being in the woods. So, around 2001, he began volunteering at Tyler doing trail work. Having walked trails for 20 years, he saw that there was more to the trails than just walking on them and he wanted to start working them.
When the Natural Areas Committee was formed, Jon joined it. Walking the trails at Tyler, he and others noticed erosion here and there, a lack of uniformity in the blazes (the colors on the trees indicating the direction of the trails), a lack of trail language and some windy turns. The committee began working on fixing these things.
Around 2004, he and others created the Trail Stewards Program, which involved assigning each volunteer a particular trail on which to work. And that is what he has done for another almost 20 years.
Finding a Home Among Tyler’s Wooded Areas
His love for trails drew him to Tyler, but it was the location, the collections, the beauty of Tyler and the large natural wooded area that kept him volunteering year after year. He just did not have any reason to go anywhere else and he really liked Tyler. The people were supportive and he could work when he wanted.
And it was the physical, constructive work on the trails, too, that he continued to enjoy. Working on the trails was a great way to burn off his endless supply of energy. He would scrape off old blazes on the bark of trees and put on a new blaze. The blazes are what essentially sets up the trail map on the tree. He also did a lot of digging, which involved a system of building water bars to take the water off the trails so it would not erode the dirt. He and others would dig a little, soft trench to encourage the water to travel a certain way to prevent erosion. Over time, Tyler had different influences on the trails. There became a more useable layout and an accurate map.
Investigating a Case of Disappearing Blaze
Jon recalls a time shortly after the pandemic when he re-blazed the Middle Farm Trail in yellow and was disappointed to see that in just two weeks’ time, the new blaze was laying on the ground. This was peculiar because the blaze should last for years rather than just two weeks. Jon thought it was the work of a bear and went around telling everybody that some kind of bear was out in the woods scratching off blaze. Well, it turned out that it was the work of a pileated woodpecker going after ash borer. It would be the last time he was outsmarted by a woodpecker.
Now that he is older, Jon misses being out on the trails as much as he used to be. He encourages others to pursue an interest in the trails.
