Hiking Mt. Washington, NH

[Silent3]

9. I didn't realize until recently that there's plenty of artificial engineering...

...that goes into both building and maintaining these hiking trails, not just in the trails with a more obvious staircase-like appearance. A lot of the rocks you see along a trail have been moved and shaped to make the trail, they've just been in place for so long (decades, even a hundred years or more in some cases) that they look very weathered and natural in place.

I don't know the details of how these trails have been made, but my guess is that they represent quite a bit of back-breaking manual labor, perhaps with the help of horses and mules in the old days, or nowadays with whatever power equipment you can manage to haul along the trail. I'd guess that people would often have to camp out in the woods while doing this work since going back and forth to a work site far along a trail would be even more work than camping out to get the job done.