Julia Goren speaks at the 29th annual Conference on the Adirondacks in Lake Placid on Thursday. (Enterprise photo — Chris Gaige)

LAKE PLACID — Julia Goren knows a thing or two about Adirondack trails.

She spent nearly 20 years with the Adirondack Mountain Club, most recently serving as its interim executive director. On Monday, she will begin a new chapter — serving as the Adirondack Rail Trail Association’s executive director.

Goren tapped her decades of professional experience to present on trails in the Adirondacks on Thursday at the Adirondack Research Consortium’s 29th annual Conference on the Adirondacks, held in Lake Placid. This year’s theme was titled “Resilience to Climate Change in the North Country.”

Goren focused on the challenges that climate-related concerns — such as an increase in excessive rainfall events or hotter summers — and non-climate issues, such as increased usage, pose to hiking and biking recreational trails locally. She also discussed ways to abate these, citing a number of solutions that have been recently implemented and are already proving to be a success.

The presentation began with a brief history of Adirondack trails. Goren said many of them are known as “legacy trails.” While this might sound like a good thing, she noted how it makes for a problematic situation on the trails today.

“They were built before we understood the science of trail building,” she said. “They were built because guides like to take the shortest distance between the bottom and the top. So we have, without climate change (factored in), aging insufficient infrastructure in need of repair and replacement.”

The crux of the issue is that although the routes the guides took may have served them well back then, today it has created paths more susceptible to erosion, poor drainage and blowdown — among other issues.

“So we have a bad system to begin with,” Goren said. “And not because the people who built the trails were bad people, but because we know more now than we did then.”

Goren then described how climate change compounds these preexisting problems. She said heavier rainfall events speed up erosion on the trails, which is worsened by the steep Adirondack trails. Goren said it doesn’t stop there.

Rather, it sets off a cascading chain of negative effects. More erosion, she said, leads to increased blowdown along trails as trees and other vegetation have more exposed roots and, subsequently, less of an anchor system.

This renders them more prone to falling during heavy rain and/or wind storms. More blowdown, in turn, makes users go to the sides to get around the obstacle, which causes additional erosion and vegetation damage.

“We see these are impacts that build upon each other,” she said.

Goren noted that climate change not only impacts trails, but also the people who use them — and how the two can relate. Hotter days tend to lead to more rescues from, among other factors, heatstroke and dehydration.

Rescues, while obviously necessary, are extra impactful on the trails. They frequently require first responders to work on the edges as they transport subjects, who are often immobilized from the injury, out of the woods on apparatuses that need personnel supporting from the side.

After walking the audience through a series of case studies highlighting trail damage in the High Peaks, Goren pivoted to solutions. She said the first — and least expensive option — tier is maintenance. Unfortunately, she said many spots in the High Peaks need more intensive rebuilding “We need regular, high-quality trail maintenance,” she said. “Unfortunately, because we have a lot of trails, not a lot of trailbuilders and not … a regular kind of investment because we have these legacy trails, the kind of trail work we’re talking about now is called ‘recovery maintenance.'”

She said recovery maintenance often requires more highly trained crews who start from scratch in many places, either re-routing or drastically changing a trail to improve its longevity through measures like re-grading or installing better drainage systems underneath or along a trail. She said these same features need to be incorporated whenever new trails are built.

“That kind of work takes more time, takes more expertise and — guess what — takes more money,” she said. “But, if we do it, and if we do it now, that’ll save that trail in the next rainstorm.”

Goren said more attention needs to be paid to building, maintaining and promoting less strenuous trails that both accommodate hotter days and allow people of a wider range of physical ability to enjoy the outdoors. The Adirondack Rail Trail, she pointed out, was a prime example.

While building better trails is expensive, Goren also saw it as an investment. Its reverberations, she said, spill over into the broader regional economy.

“The trailwork that is being done in order to build sustainable trails is highly technical,” she said. “It is work that requires a skill set and it is work that supports our local economy because these are non-exportable.”

Threading it back to the conference’s theme, Goren said this approach can enable the Adirondacks — and the iconic experience of enjoying the region’s trails — to remain resilient, even as the impacts of climate change continue.

“We have some of the finest trailbuilders in the country working on our trails to rebuild them,” she said. “We have the opportunity to build that network as we rebuild our own infrastructure so that we can continue to survive and thrive in a changing climate scenario.”