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Trail Construction and Maintenance Notebook
Sign maintenance consists of remounting loose or fallen signs, repairing or replacing signs, and resetting or replacing leaning, damaged, rotting, or missing posts.
If the sign is missing, a replacement sign should be ordered and installed. Check out the probable cause of the loss. If it was theft, consider using theft-resistant hardware to mount the replacement. If the sign was eaten by wildlife, look at less palatable materials. If the weather or natural events munched the sign, consider stronger materials, a different location, or an alternate strategy for mounting.
For signs mounted on trees, you may need to loosen the lag screws slightly to give the tree growing room. If the sign is on a post, check to make sure that it is snugly attached. Replace rotting posts. Don’t just try to get through “one more season.”
Check with your manager for guidelines when signs should be replaced due to bullet holes, chipped paint, missing or illegible letters, incorrect information, cracked boards, splintered mounting holes, or missing pieces. At each candidate sign, consider the consequences of not repairing or replacing deficient signing. Take some photos to help portray the situation.
Cut blazes may, on rare occasions, need to be “freshened.” If a blaze has “healed” to the point where it doesn’t resemble an official blaze, it may be carefully recut.
Blazers and marker tags should be checked for continued usefulness. If the tread is more obvious than when these markers were originally installed, consider removing some. If folks are getting lost, restore more visible tread, move existing reassurance markers to more visible locations, or add a few markers where they will be most effective.
Remove all signing and reassurance marking that doesn’t fit the plan for the area.
| Before-and-after photos are useful for documenting what is happening to signing in the field and for documenting how new signing looks before the forces of nature (and visitors) resume work. A good sign inventory with photos makes ordering replacements for missing or completely trashed signs much easier. |
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