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the Perfect Hike by Gloria Lieu. Long straightaways with infrequent turns can be problematic, he says, because people get anxious when they're aware that they're moving in the opposite direction of their objective. The trick is to keep hikers engaged enough that they're convinced they're on the best route possible. If you're fully imbursed in your environment, Talbot says, you're not looking for another way. Talbot grew up in Maine and started building trails in college in Minnesota. When he

joined his school's conservation crew. He found his people there. He recalled they were down to earth, happy and dirty. He regularly slept outdoors in the campus arboretum, showing up to class smelling like camp fire smoke. When Talbot graduated in nineteen ninety eight, trail building wasn't an established career path. Virtually no one was willing to pay a living wage

to build trails, he says. Talbot enrolled in a programme run by AmeriCorps and the Student Conservation Association, which leads youth trail building crews, and learned skills like rock work, rigging and chainsaw operation. He fell in love with the challenge, physicality and satisfaction of creating something that served people and

protected the environment. For several years after that, he lived out of his truck and traveled around the country, training crews for the SCA and working on projects four other trail builders, in particular veteran New England trail builder Peter Jensen.

He learned the same hand building techniques used by the Civilian Conservation Corps and Works Progress Administration during the trail building boom of the nineteen thirties and forties, and was inspired to likewise build trails and structures like stone staircases

and bridges that could last centuries. In two thousand four, he launched his own business, which to day employs several full time staff and a handful of subcontractors, and is usually engaged in multiple projects throughout New England and Patagonia to day's young trail builders enter a very different industry.

Global hiking tourism is projected to grow over seven percent a year through twenty thirty three, according to the market research firm Data Intello, driven by the increasing popularity of adventure and wellness based travel. The worldwide demand for professionally built sustainable trails has just skyrocketed, says Dawn Packard, former president of the Professional Trail Builders Association, whose one hundred forty plus member companies represent twenty to thirty percent of

the global trail building industry by its estimate. Talbot is a former PTBA president. People seeking more ways to get outside during the pandemic may have played a factor. The number of companies in the PTBA has grown by more than forty percent in the past six years, while revenue has grown three hundred and fifty percent to just over two hundred million dollars according to a recent member survey.

Communities have come to see trails as cost effective infrastructure in the past decade, says Colorado trail builder Scott Linnenberger. A new municipal sewer line might cost thirty million dollars, for example, compared to a five million dollar estimate to build Bailey's, an eighty eight mile mountain bike trail network outside of Athens, Ohio that's projected to generate over twenty seven million dollars in taxes and tourist spending in a decade.

Most new routes being designed today are mountain bike or multi use trails, often built with excavators and dozers. But when a project is in a designated wilderness area in the US, which is which in most instances prohibits not only motorized access but also motorized tools, or in a remote back country location like Alaska and Patagonia, it requires someone like Talbot, who specializes in hand built backcountry trails.

It's difficult for the average highat hiker to grasp how much work goes into any trail, but hand building in a wilderness area demands a level of effort that can seem practically paleolithic. Consider the task of drilling a hole through rock without a power tool. Tailbot must line up a drill bit on a rock, hit it with a hammer, rotated a quarter turn, and hit it again, over and over.

It takes an hour to drill through an inch of Sierra granite, and a crew once spent two full weeks in California's john Mere Wilderness using starbits to drill dozens of three inch deep holes so they could insert feather wedges, two L shaped shims with a wedge driven between them to split the rock. For all this work, a trail builder usually remains anonymous. You go out in the woods to gather material and you build something you hope people

don't even notice. Talbot says, it's in service to the environment. You don't sign your name. It's one of the most beautiful things I could imagine doing. On the best trails, hikers enter an almost imperceptible flow state as they are pulled deeper into the natural world. After a few days shooting grades in El Chatin, Talbot and Bittner took me backpacking on the trails they designed in Perito Moreno to

experience that feeling firsthand. On the Big Loop, a ten point five mile circumnavigation of the Bel Grano Peninsula, Talbot pointed to how the trail contoured the mountain side, swooping in and out of micro ungulations in the terrain to turn users and thus shift their perspective between the snowy tigers, striped mountains in the distance and glowing grasses in the foreground. If there isn't continuous variation in what we're doing, we

tend to lose gratitude for it. Talbot explained, changing a user's picture like this leads to a continuous renewal of the senses, even in places where massive views abound. He'll shift a hiker's attention between small, up close details and grander pistas. Whimsy or play is another element of a well designed track. When out, Talbot helps fellow New England trail builder Erin Amadon Reroot, a popular and badly eroded

trail in New Hampshire. The pair wove the trail to every beautiful glacial erratic that we could possibly tie into, Talbot says, referring to the boulders strewed about the landscape the prehistoric movement of glaciers. They also anchored turns with rocks so that hikers couldn't see what was coming around the bend, and in one spot, Talbot used boulders to construct what trail builders call a gateway when a trail

threads between two obstacles like a pair of trees. Gateways make hikers feel as if they're walking through a portal passing from one experience to another, says Talbot. Exciting and engaging hikers like this makes them forget they're even walking a trail. They think they're just meandering through the woods. Amadon says, conversely, hikers rebel against a poorly designed trail. On my third day in ill Chatin, i hiked the fourteen mile round trip from town to the Laguna Delos

Terrace on my own. For the first time, I noticed ways that the trail influenced my experience. How for example, the wood in case steps had an awkward rhythm, as Talbot had pointed out, they were astride and a half long instead of once dried, and how hikers had thus flowed like water around them, widening the trail on either side and providing feedback without realizing it. Talbot was also right about the energy shift in the final one point

two miles, when my scenic hike became a slog. There were beautiful views of the valley below, but my eyes were trained on my feet. Yet the summit was spectacular, and the hikers nestled among the rocks like concertgoers seemed as satisfied as I felt. The murmur of different languages filled the air as people took selfies, poured mate from Thermoses, or just stared at the cracked face of Mount Fitzroy

in quiet contemplation. One young woman was crying. Talbot, like most trail builders, is motivated by a deep love for the outdoors and the belief that it can heal and transform us. He hopes that bringing more of us to wild places will persuade us to save them. Connecting people with nature could solve a lot of humanity's problems, he says. But a good trail does more and bring people into nature.

It protects nature from us. The same hikers who were overcome by the sublime beauty of the lake also told me that theoretically they would prefer to walk the steeper, eroded, and more direct trail than a longer, but more moderately graded reroute. Someone seemed some seem to have mis interpreted what they were experiencing, saying they preferred the raw and natural character of the existing trail over what they envisioned

as a more manicured redesign. This is a misconception that many hikers have about sustainable trails, and it makes Talbot uncharacteristically irritated. Anyone who thinks that that eroded gully is natural, that's a human made travesty, he tells me as we drive back to El Chatin from Perito Moreno, most people don't think about trails. They don't know what's natural. That may be because unsustainable trails still vastly outnumber sustainable ones.

While scouting for the Laguna del Trice redesigned one day, we descended a slope adjacent and identical in aspect to the damaged mountain side. This is probably what the mountain originally looked like, Talbot told me. Instead of being brown and rock strewn like its beleaguered twin, the slope was verdant and fuzzy, liketed in vegetation. The contrast was startling. We are so habituated to the site of our own damage to the land that we don't even recognize its

native state. After more than a week of tramping through the woods, Talbot and Bitner unlocked a design for a new trail, but it's unclear when their vision will come to fruition. The project is now facing an obstacle that even the most vestigious designer can't avoid politics. Last March, while Tabot was wrapping of his scouting, community members protested the APN's construction of a new all terrain vehicle trail that led up to the foot of the problematic section

he had been tasked to solve. A court has since halted all projects in the area until the ap N completes the necessary environmental analysis and public input process. Even once work is greenlit, the trail faces significant hurdles, namely funding for construction and labor. Talbot's redesign sounds phenomenal, says professional climber Rollo Garibalti, who led volunteers in a two

thousand eighty nine restoration of parts of the trail. But trail work, more than anything, is hard work, he reminds me, requiring lots and lots of hands. For now, the fate of the embattled upward segment of Laguna Delo's trace remains unclear, But having been with Talbot the day he figured out the reroute, I can tell you what the trail could be. The new track would begin by gently ascending through a

forest of old, widely spaced langa trees. About half a mile in it would turn up hill around a small rib in the terrain to reveal a sight that made both Talbot and Bidner laugh in wonder when they found it, a willowy waterfall framed between a pair of vertical rocks.

Here the trail would change tack and ascend gradually back toward the old route, crossing three more waterfalls, and emerging from the forest to sweeping views of the valley, where hikers might enjoy that paradoxical comfort of feeling like a small creature in a vast landscape. At this junction, hikers would probably see the old, eroded trail for years to come, But if this path is built, they could one day make the pilgrimage up to the Laguna de Lustrace on

a route that no longer tears apart the land. They'd continue to find awe or peace or a sense of accomplishment or whatever else they came for along the way, and the old wound would begin to close as the mountain slowly heals the new rules of trail building. Professional trail builders deploy their knowledge of psychology, geography, and geology to lead highs on an immersive, ecologically friendly journey. Their best routes feel as if they are part of the landscape.

Preserve the land. A sustainably built trail follows the contours of the terrain to prevent erosion. Subtle dips and rises on the path on a moderate grade insure water sheds easily immerse the user. Using rocks and trees as anchor points, helps signal turns and urges up hikers to stay on the path. A designer uses those same materials for structures like steers and bridges when needed keep hikers on their toes. The best trails feed our desire for novelty. They'll alternate

between close up, intimate views and expansive vistas. It's even better if the changes unfold gradually, allowing a user to build anticipation for a grand reveal. Manage behavior wide climbing urns are easier to navigate than tight and steep switchbacks. They also discourage all users hikers, climb Himer's, bikers and equestrians from cutting the trail. Next Decoding the Lost Scripts of the Ancient World by Joshua Hammer. Across the Globe, a race is underway to crack some of the last

mysterious forms of writing that have never been translated. Here's how new technology and fresh breakthroughs might help scholars solve the world's most vexing puzzles and rewrite history. The room we are in is locked. It is windowless and lit from above by a fluorescent bulb in the hallway outside. Two stories beneath, the City of London attendance in dark suits patrol silently, giving the scene an air of cinematic drama.

Where in the downtime Safety Deposits Center where the Iranian British art collector Pombi's mahbub Bayan, direct keeper of one of the world's great trobes of Near Eastern ancient art, houses some of his more precious pieces under lock and key. Sitting across from me at a small table, mah bu Bayan reaches gingerly into a green plastic shopping bag from Wytrous and Partners, the British supermarket chain. From it, he produces a silver beaker covered with friezes long ago hammered

out in high relief. As he places the tea kettle sized vessel on the table, I can see on it the image of a helmeted, barrel chested man with a long braided beard, his arms held outward in a gesture of devotion. Mah bub Bayan emotions for me to take a closer look. Can I pick it up? I ask him? Of course, he replies. Neat Rows of engraved symbols wrap around the object. Asterisks, triangles with antenna like appendages, hatch diamonds, lightning bolts. As I hold the beaker to the light,

I catch a slight tremble in my hands. The metal is so soft and pliable that I fear it will break apart in my fingers. The beaker dates to the early Bronze Age, meaning the craftsmen whoulously scratched these symbols into silver did so roughly forty three hundred years ago. What they all mean has been a riddle that's baffled

archaeologists and historians. The characters belonged to a system of writing called linear Elamite, which took root between twenty seven hundred and twenty three hundred BC in a peaceful kingdom called Elam in what is now southwestern Iran. The Elamite writing system endured for several hundred years before it was

swept aside by another script and lost to history. Then, just over a century ago, French archaeologists excavating the Elamite capital of Susa discovered nineteen inscriptions written in stone and clay. The long sequences of signs clearly meant something, but what. For decades, the philologists studying the symbols in a quest to understand linear Elamite made little progress. For one big reason, the corpus of written material consisted of only about forty inscriptions.

The code cracking researchers who piece together ancient languages generally rely on an abundance of symbols to spot repetitions, patterns, and signed clusters, the raw dead data that provide clues to grammar, syntax, names, and places. One such scholar who fell into the seemingly impossible mission of making sense of linear Elamite was Francois des Sat, a French archaeologist whose curiosity turned into a twenty year journey to decipher the

writing system. His recent headline making claims of success have both galvanized public attention and incited skeptics. They've also underscored the idea that we might be at a pivotal moment in the study of these ancient scripts today, roughly a dozen forms of writing remain undeciphered, and a new generation of scholars as set forth, often with the aid of new technology, to reveal the last secrets of the ancients.

Decipherers have used AI in recent years to locate arclical sites, restore illegible texts, and analyze linguistic patterns to make inferences about grammar and vocabulary. But while AI has sped up the translations of languages and writings already known to a handful of scholars, the technology has yet to demonstrate the creativity needed to decode hitherto unknown scripts. Indeed, creativity is what Dessett summoned when he set out to understand linear elamite.

His first conclusion was that he needed to find more examples of the script. Around two thousand and four, he heard about the mah Bu Bayan Collection, the stockpile of Near Eastern treasures. The family claims had initially been acquired by mah Bubayan's grandfather, a physician turned archaeologist named Benjamin Machbubayan. The collection included ten silver vessels and fragments known as kunanki,

decorated with images and covered by linear elamite inscriptions. The family has long maintained that Benjamin Mubabian uncovered the art himself in a tomb in Campfurus in southwestern Iran. He found them all in one place, cambiz Maubumbian told me, and then he sent them all to Paris, where they remained with relatives before making their way to London. But experts have challenged the authenticity of the Kunanki. The family

has no documents proving their provenance. The mab Bubayans fled Tehran just before the toppling of the Shah in nineteen seventy nine and arrived in London, where they became prominent art dealers. To say, eager to get his eyes on what he imagined to be linear, Elamite reached out to the mabu Bayans, who ignored his approaches for years. Then

a British museum curator they trusted made an introduction. In twenty fifteen, the Kunanki, which had been stored in the London vault, were delivered by a secure team to the home of mom Bu Bayan's sister Roya, where to say, it was at least permitted to inspect them. What to say, found amazed him. Laid out before him, he could see rows of symbols wrapping around beakers, cups, and fragments of

broken vessels. He was elated as he snapped hundreds of photographs documenting everything, while suspecting he might never see the artifacts again. He told me that he thought, maybe this will be the last time I should get all the

information possible to say. Says that the visit to Roya Mabubian's home has vastly increased the number of symbols available to him, and he hoped that among the symbols he might find the missing link he had yearned for, the break that would allow him to solve one of archaeology's most vexing puzzles. Every now and again, there are moments when history seems to lift its veil and the secrets

of long lost scripts are freshly revealed. In the early eighteen hundreds, the discovery of the famed Rosetta Stone ignited a competition between england wishman Thomas Young and Frenchman Jean Frecois Champollion to decrypt Egyptian hieroglyphs the sacred writing of the Pharaohs. Three decades later, the excavation of twenty five hundred year old riverside palaces in northern Iraq set off a race between the Victorian scholars Henry Wallinson and Edward

Hinks too understand a Cyrio a Sirio Babylonian. Their break through these captivated millions, stirred patriotic fervor, and made accessible the science, medicine, history, mythology, and quotidian life of some of the ancient ancient world's greatest civilizations. Deciphering ancient writing reveals how people understood the world, organized their soco acieties,

and thought about love and death. The work reanimates the voices of kings and ordinary citizens alike, exposing dreams, insecurities, obsessions, and even humor. It makes the ancients human, and the scholarship underway now to recover and decipher some of the oldest and most mysterious writing is reshaping our view of how languages spread, and, in the case of linear Elamite,

how early writing itself might have begun. Of course, the scripts that remain undeciphered occupy that category for a reason. They present extraordinary challenges. For instance, linguists have been working for a century to decipher Rongorongo, a collection of glyphs carved mostly into wood by the Rapa Nui people of

Easter Island. Success has eluded the experts. Similarly, the ancient writing known as Etruscan, used from the seventh to the first century VC and found inscribed on clay tablets in Italy,

has defied attempts to crack it for generations. But the progress that is seemingly being made on several ancient systems, among them a form of writing referred to as the Indus script, a system of writing called linear a, and certainly the advancements that Francois de Say captained on linear elamite provide instructive insight on how new tools and fresh ideas might soon reveal some of history's longest held secrets.

When Drisley morning in Chennai, India, the bustling capital of the state of Tamil Nadu, I rode in an auto rickshaw out along the Bay of Bengal, traveling past a beach covered with wooden fishing boats and tin roofed shacks, returned onto a side street and stopped before a yellow concrete building marked the Indus Research Center. Inside I found Sukamar Raja Gopal, a software engineer and amateur decipherer who has been working for more than eighteen years on the

Indus Script. He was hunched over a pile of academic papers immersed in what he calls my obsession. Raja Gopal describes himself as an irrepressible problem solver. He was twenty years into a software engineering career when he first grew intrigued by the ancient script, joining a long line of whitby decoders, professionals and amateurs alike who've tackled the Bronze age script, perpetually optimistic that the critical break through is

right around the corner. Just last year, interest in the long running project was given a major boost after the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu offered a one million dollar prize to anyone who solved the mystery and could prove it. Not surprisingly, the bounty has ratcheted up the stakes in the hunt for solutions. Back in the nineteen twenties, when archaeologists found the script, they recognized its importance right away.

Researchers have been working at two sites, Mohenjo Daro and Harappa along the Indus River in what is now Pakistan, when they located twenty four hundred small pieces of soapstone, as well as a few bits of ivory and clay, all engraved with what looked like both abstract characters and recognizable objects, such as fil fish, water, buffalo, plants, and

human like stick figures. The British archaeologists leading the excavation, Sir John Marshall, theorized that they were looking at evidence of one of the world's first literate societies, the achievements of which were, he wrote, far in advance of anything to be found at that time in Babylon or on the banks of the Nile. If Marshall suspected that he was on the brink of unlocking something extraordinary, those hopes eventually fizzled. The inscriptions on the soapstone seals are frustratingly

maddeningly short. Ninety percent of them consist of fewer than four characters. The longest has only fourteen. What could you possibly communicate with that? Asks Raja Gopal. In two thousand and four, three noted scholars in the field published a paper titled the Collapse of the indiscript Thesis The Myth of a literate hareupon civilization. In it, they posited that the signs say nothing at all. Most recently, the Indus Research Center has become a gathering point for linguists and

a locusts of modern investigation into the script. Raja Gopal began volunteering there in two thousand and nine. He had always nurtured a deep admiration for the great philologists of the past. If there were a shrine for Champollion, I would be seen worshiping there, he told me, referring to the decipher of hieroglyphics. Now he was working among Chapoleon's intellectual descendants, including Iravatham Maha Divan, an Indian epigraphist who

helped establish the organization. Raja Gopal told me that Mahadevan, who died in two thousand and eight, took him under his wing. He converted what was a hobby in my head into a formal discipline. In the nineteen seventies, Mahadevan, along with a colleague named Osco Parpola, a professor of indology at the University of Helsinki, compiled separate lists of about four hundred unique signs from the end descript the characters had been glimpsed on thousands of objects found across

half a dozen archaeological sites. Next, they tried to determine what they were looking at. Philologists know that all systems of writing fall into one of four categories. Some types use alphabets, composed generally of twenty five to thirty five signs denoting consonants and vowels that form words. Other writing depends on what's called a syllabary, which is a symbol used to represent a combination consonant vowel vowel consonant or

consonant vowel continent that comes together to form words. A third form of writing is known as logo graphic Chinese, for example, and is composed of a galaxy of unique signs, often numbering in the high thousands, each standing for an object and action or an idea. The final category includes hybrid systems like hieroglyphics or Japanese that mix logograms and

a phonetic alphabet. If the Indus script was indeed real writing and not random combination of characters, Mahadevan and Parpola figured it likely belonged in the hybrid category, as a mix of distinct word components. For phenomes, and logograms. This concludes readings from National Geographic Magazine for today. Your reader husband Marcia, thank you for listening, Keep on listening, and have a great day.