Well-worn, splendidly accessible trails in the foothills between Red Butte Garden and the This is the Place monument are getting a makeover.
    Crews have spread out on the University of Utah’s Heritage Preserve above the Fort Douglas cemetery, shoring up hiking paths, removing non-native vegetation, blocking erosion-prone paths with boulders and slash, building berms, mulching, grading and reseeding.
    The project started more than five years ago with a conservation easement agreement between the U. and the nonprofit organization Utah Open Lands. The work aims to prevent further erosion, not just of the soil but also of the plant and animal habitat and remarkable recreation opportunities within easy reach of residents, a rare amenity for any major city, said Utah Open Lands executive director Wendy Fisher.
    “You’re 10 minutes from downtown and you can have a sense of solace and recreation, and the grandeur of the mountains close to a metropolitan center,” she said. “It’s really about stewardship. Everybody is a partner in that.”
    But not everyone understands what is happening to the beloved trails. On a recent sunny morning, Salt Lake City resident Sands Shotwell was hiking with her dogs Toby and Molly and wondering why earth was being turned, rocks removed and straw scattered along newly widened trails.
    When she first noticed the work, she worried that groundbreaking had begun for the university’s new Museum of Natural History, and her trail was being obliterated. Or maybe the smoothing was to ease mountain bike access.
    “I was shocked because I thought I would lose my hiking spot,” Shotwell said. “What I really liked about the trail is it was just a path. I’m sorry to see it happen. But we’ll get used to it.”
    As she spoke, someone started a chainsaw a ways up the trail that leads to the Living Room and Wire Mountain.
    Minutes later, Salt Lake City residents Robert and Susie McGannon headed that way with their dogs Russo and Louie. The couple said they have heard the trail will loop around hundreds of acres above the new museum when it’s built.
    While declining to speculate on that, Fisher said people need to realize that the preserve offers experiences that can create conflict. Her organization’s goal is to help the university manage all of them: recreation, public access, scenery, wildlife habitat and historic and natural values.
    The restoration includes 80 acres at the southern end of the preserve’s nearly 500 acres. Little work is being done on the trail that leads from Colorow Drive to the Bonneville Shoreline Trail. Above the Shoreline Trail, however, eroded gullies are clearly blocked. Nevertheless, a jogger runs downhill, skirting a 20-foot wide barricade.
    In July, a year-long study of the Heritage Preserve showed how trail users—hikers, runners, walkers and bikers—contributed to hillside erosion. The field inventory, funded in part by the LeRay McAllister Open Space Fund, identified 55 erosion problem areas, most likely from heavy-user activity and from past excavation and extraction activities.
    Deborah Alto, the university’s Heritage Preserve Erosion Control and Restoration Project manager and staff architect, said the work focuses on the trails above the Bonneville Shoreline, where workers are re-seeding bare areas with native grasses and planting native shrubs to restore closed trails. The project’s completion is expected in December, she said.
    Meanwhile, mountain bikers get their kicks flying down the trails. Hikers turn a corner on a narrow trail and hear the sounds of the city give way to birdsong. The birds in turn need to have certain vegetation to survive. Native plants compete for space with interlopers. Unchecked erosion threatens it all.
    “At the end of the day, every trail user has a different value they associate with that land,” Fisher said. “It really comes down to responsibilities and rights we have as property owners.”