HOT SPRINGS -- To celebrate Hot Springs National Park's 100th anniversary, the Friends of Hot Springs National Park has started a Century Club, which is raising money to replace trail signs in the park.
"If you walk the trails in the park, you'll come to a junction of one trail with another, and there's no sign telling you which way is which," said Roxanne Butterfield, president of the Friends organization. "Signs have been damaged by vandals, by weather, some signs have been broken, many are missing," she said.
Hot Springs National Park Superintendent Laura Miller agrees that the signs are an issue that needs addressing.
"If you're familiar with hiking on the trails, there are a lot of posts, wooden posts in the ground with metal signs on them that identify the different trails, and they are often placed at the different junctions of two trails or three trails to help people find their way through the trial system," she said.
"The metal signs extend past the sides of the post itself so they can get broken off on either side of the post from time to time, whether inadvertently or deliberately."
When asked if lost hikers is an issue that the park sees often, Miller said, "We have a lot of different trail users. We have a lot of local folks who run the trials all the time or hike the trials all the time, sometimes daily, and they're very familiar with the area, but we also host one and a half million visitors a year, many of them from out of state or outside of the community who may not be familiar with the area.
"If signs are missing, that can be the difference between having a great day and being prepared, having enough water, knowing where you're going, to having a not-so-great day if you end up taking a much longer or more difficult hike then what you are prepared for."
Butterfield said replacing the signs is a short-term solution "so hikers will know what trails they're on." She said the "long-term solution is to replace the wooden poles with metal poles and metal signs that are less likely to be damaged by weather or by vandalism."
Miller said that when park officials are able to replace all of the signs, the signs will be replaced with ones that are "more impervious to damage." Noting again that the current signs stick out on the sides of wooden posts, Miller said, "that does lend itself to being damaged ... so it's an older style sign."
"I think a lot of parks, and especially forests, if you go to a lot of national forests you'll see a different kind of sign but they're on carsonite posts, and it's just one, vertical post with all the information lined up on it, so there's no additional sign attached to it or sticking out to the sides of it," Miller said.
This project is the latest to help make the park's trail system easier to navigate. In February 2020, a prospective Eagle Scout oversaw the installation of more than 800 trail markers in the park, and in November of 2019, the park began installing new trailhead maps and new signs that tell the history of the park.
The last of these information signs was installed in the first week of June. "It took a little while, but we finally got them all in this week," Miller said.
Miller said that in addition to the various efforts to make the trials easier to navigate, park officials have also done some work to make the trails easier to hike. "We've done several projects to resurface the tread on a lot of the trails ... to eliminate erosion problems."
As for installing new signs that the Friends purchase, Miller said the effort could be overseen by a prospective Eagle Scout. "I love the idea of being able to hopefully work with a potential Eagle Scout to serve a couple of different purposes. To help him achieve a significant rank in scouting, and also do a really good job for the park and all our visitors who use the trails," she said.
Butterfield said that in addition to helping with the signs, the Friends will help clean up the park, including on two dates in the summer -- July 24 and Aug. 15.