The Trail Blazed

I was having a semantic debate with a friend a few days ago, in the wake of a recent Grimy Handshake. In it, I had referred to the markings on trees used to denote a trail as "flashes." He asked me if I had intended to write "blazes." I didn't know. Where I grew up the marks hacked into trees had been called flashes, I think. But around here, the 150-year-old chops hewn into the sides of trees, impervious to weather and erosion, but not chainsaws, are called blazes. I'm not going to argue with it.

According to Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (not quite in the same league as Webster's Third International Unabridged, but this is being written on the road and beggars can't be choosers), blaze can be defined as follows: "a trail marker; esp: a mark made on a tree by chipping off a piece of the bark." So, there it be. Flash, on the other hand, doesn't warrant any such credibility, unless you were to somehow confuse exposing "one's genitals usually suddenly and briefly in public" with the more widely accepted and longer lasting aforementioned trail markings known as blazes.

Making the shift from noun to verb, by strict definition blazing a trail means marking it with blazes. However, in the few hundred years since blaze became a verb (1750, according to the Collegiate), the English language has gone to hell in a metaphorical bucket. Nowadays, any sort of activity involving leaving tire tracks or hoof or footprints where there were none previously is referred to as "trailblazing." Chevy even makes a soccer mom approved SUV called that, although the percentage of those Pleather-seated suburban reptiles that see real dirt is probably about the same as the percentage of soccer moms that wield hatchets against telephone poles to mark paths homeward from IKEA.

But it's a catchy word, and it makes people feel like pioneers to use it, and these days there seems to be no limit on the use of words describing hardy acts of utilitarian purpose to make our increasingly sterile lives feel a little more rugged. To that end, it's becoming pretty vogue here in mountain bike land to toss blazing verbage around. "Dude, you should check out the new trail we just blazed..." (Translation: "Hey, we just scored first tracks down the face of a scree slope. You can still see our skid marks. We are trailblazers. Hear our manly roar.") Or, "Someone just blazed a new singletrack in the back 40..." (Translation: "See those tire tracks through the soft ground in that meadow? Trailblazers...") And, just like the image projection associated with new SUVs (loud music and hectic sideways action!), the concept of this hijacked terminology sticks in my throat something fierce.

Why do we, as mountain bikers, need to blaze any new trails? Manifest Destiny came and went. The West was won (or lost, depending on perspective) generations before we came along. The forests were cut down, and grew back, and were cut down again, and grew back again. The gold was discovered, taken away and towns left to crumble. The trappers came, killed, skinned and left. Trails, then tracks, then roads, then highways, laced the country end to end. Trails have been blazed across this land so many times in so many directions for so many reasons that there is no shortage of trees with patches hacked out of them telling us to go somewhere. Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone have hung up their coonskin hats, Kit Carson has ridden off into the sunset. There is nothing left to discover, and our footprints are trampling all over each other in every corner of this country. There are so many damn trails out there, in so many different textures, offering so many different challenges, that the idea of "blazing" new ones stinks only of hubris and greed.

We are not pioneers. We are just a bunch of geeks on bikes. Bikes that can be ridden down any and every previously blazed trail without shitting out a compost of foreign seed stock as we go. We don't take up much room, make much noise or need very special terrain to get around. No roads need to be paved for us, no parking lots created, no "Go west, young man" sense of destiny, no special tools required. The whole world could be ours for the riding, if we could just stop pretending to be trailblazers for a few minutes.