You know those roads where if you turn to hard/late, then you’ll end up dropping 2000 ft off a cliff? Yeah my brain cannot comprehend how they were made. I know most trails are made by people/horses constantly walking over it. But the fact that these trails are almost perfectly made for transportation, and are just casually on the side of a mountain confuses me.
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A combination of naturaly existing paths and people carving out part of the mountain to make a wider path. The reasons why they are just “there” is that if they werent there and werent good for transportation you wouldnt know about them, as in there are plenty of small “paths” that arent wide enough for transportation but you wont know about them because well you cant use them for transportation so there is no reason to know about them.
If you’re talking hiking/biking trails then many are actually built and maintained by whatever department is in charge of the area like a national park service or forestry agency.
Nothing casual about them though, it takes a lot of back breaking manual labour to move the equipment up and work on the trails for days or weeks at a time. Sometime they’ll have to hike in the equipment, sometimes it might be on pack animal, or if they have the budget – a helicopter.
Before dynamite, excavators, or jack hammers, they would sometimes build a large fire and throw water on hot rock to fracture it into movable chunks. It was a slow process but it was a better option to build a trail than pickaxes in some scenarios.
In the memoir “Green Mountains” by Bernard O’Reilly, there’s a passage that describes this.
Bernard and his brothers are trying to build a road to their mountaintop farm.
It talks about he and his brothers climbing out onto the cliff face with dynamite in their pockets.
Then jamming a stick in, lighting it and climbing back.
Then boom.
Then move forward with picks and shovels to clear the mess and even things out.
And then climb out again.
(TBH, Green Mountains is crazy read, as the first half is about O’Reilly’s role in an airliner crash and the second half is about building a hotel nearby. If you’re interested in a wiki hole, it’s a good one https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Airlines_of_Australia_Stinson_crash)
https://whc.unesco.org/en/tentativelists/6230/
Levadas of Madeira Island.
Just “water trails” in Madeira Island, Google it for some images.
People went up there with tools and/or heavy equipment to make the trail perfect for transportation. The mining industry does this ALL the time to get drill rigs up on top of a mountain. Send an excavator and a dozer up there and they’ll have you a road in a few days.
In the past the loss of human life was acceptable for those kinds of projects. People would frequently die while working and the only solution was to hire replacements.
The Panama Canal cost 30.000 workers their lives. Can you imagine that the governments and construction companies were willing to spend that much on a project? Imagine how many died in building those roads and carving them out of mountains.
One technique often used to build a track across a steep slope was called ‘benching’ …
Imagine a slope, running downhill to the right. Now cut an L-shaped notch out of it. There’s your track.
If the land downhill of the path isn’t too steep you can pile the material you removed there to support the edge of the track or even make it wider. You can also support both sides of the track with retaining structures.
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