In a surprise twist, we're going to start this episode walking through the woods.

This is something called the Smarts Brook Trail System in the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire, so federal property.

And we're walking on some trails that are not exactly legal.

The trail going up this way. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Pretty defined.

I mean, these are not the stealthiest of stealth trails.

And this one that we're on is, like, how many miles of trails are there here?

There's about 17 miles on the ground right now.

Our tour guide to these not entirely above board trails is Jody Chinchin.

District District. Jody has been a forest ranger, a trail builder, and a wildlands firefighter.

She manages 600 miles of mostly hiking and snowmobiling trails.

But these days, she's been spending a lot of time with mountain bikers.

And mountain bikers are obviously a biggie.

They do a lot of work. They have a lot of energy.

So.

Jody is, as far as I can tell, a model federal employee polite accurate and

circumspect. She calls these trails incidental trails user-created trails

non-network trails. Bureaucratic euphemisms for what they really are,

trails that got built on federal land without permission.

She estimates there are about 35 or 40 miles of them

just in her district of the National Forest.

So strictly speaking, it's not okay to just go dig a trail, but people have done it,

...