WOODSTOCK — The Ottauquechee River Trail averaged around 500 visitors a week during peak months until last July’s flooding, which left behind debris along the trail, which begins at East End Park off Route 4.

The roughly 3-mile trail in downtown Woodstock, which opened in 2020, is a project supported by the Woodstock Community Trust, a nonprofit organization that aims to improve the quality of life of the town’s residents.

Around three-quarters of a mile of the trail is built to Americans with Disabilities Act specifications — flat and wide enough for people in wheelchairs to use — and the parts that are not are relatively flat. The landscape along the floodplain surrounding the Ottauquechee River is part of the trail’s appeal.

“It’s amazing what you see down here,” Wendy Jackson, a member of the Ottaquechee River Trail Committee, said as she walked along the trail last week, citing kestrels and bald eagles, among other birds. “It’s so pretty and it’s right next to the river.”

While the location is part of the trail’s appeal, it’s also a vulnerability.

That’s true too with the trails that surround Thetford’s Union Village Dam, which is in the Ompomanoosuc River’s floodplain, which were similarly damaged by last July’s rains. While the damage to trails built in floodplains tends to be more extreme, no recreational trail is immune from adverse weather events such as floods and windstorms. Those who work and volunteer in recreation say such events are getting worse and more frequent.

“We know the 100-year flood is now a 10-year flood,” said Russell Hirschler, executive director of the Upper Valley Trails Alliance, a Norwich-based nonprofit organization that works on projects throughout the region. “Moving forward, the greater question here is climate change is happening, weather events are getting more extreme so we’re rethinking the way we do things and making sure the hardware that we use to keep our structures intact can handle a flooding event.”

It could, at times, seem futile to continue to put effort into trails that are bound to be covered in water over the years. But there is value in doing that work, particularly with trail systems that are already well-established like Union Village Dam.

There, the roughly five miles of trails are owned by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and maintained in conjunction with volunteer groups including the Upper Valley Mountain Bike Association and the Thetford Trails Team.

“This is one of those situations where people have been using them for so long that the expectation is that they’re going to be there,” Hirschler said.

Another value of having those trails is that they are generally flat and can be a good access point to the outdoors for people who might not otherwise have the opportunity to be out in nature.

“The areas that are near water where we want to get people with access with mobility issues are really susceptible to this type of stuff,” Hirschler said.

When the flooding hit last summer, Upper Valley Trails Alliance staff and members of their Upper Valley High School Trail Corps were in the process of building a wooden staircase that went from a trail down a sandy bank to a swimming hole at Union Village Dam known as “the Chutes.”

The staircase, which had eight steps and was supposed to grow to between 15 to 18 steps, was pushed around half a mile down the river and 50 feet higher in elevation than where it had originally been.

Instead of rebuilding the staircase later that summer, the group built a staircase using rocks found along the river.

“If another water event comes it will likely get washed away, but it’s a safer more sustainable way to get down to the water than the steep sandy trail,” Hirschler said.

Upper Valley Mountain Bike Association and Thetford Trails Team member Brent Mellen said that, after July’s floods, volunteers spent more than 65 hours clearing debris from the trails to make them passable again.

Looking to the future, the Thetford Trails Team will be working with the Upper Valley Trails Alliance to make infrastructure improvements, including bridge replacements and other projects to make the system “more resilient to water in general,” Mellen said.

“It will flood and there’s only so much you can do,” he said in a phone interview. “In general when the trails along the river flood, they come back amazingly well. It’s really just moving debris.”

While Lebanon’s trails largely escaped damage during last July’s floods, the city’s recreational amenities are still vulnerable to storm damage. Lebanon manages around 7½ miles of trails across 436 acres at Boston Lot, off Route 10 in West Lebanon.

Late last summer, a “wind event” that seemed to be isolated to Boston Lot caused around 15 trees to fall across trails in the popular hiking and biking spot, said Mark Goodwin, GIS coordinator in the city’s Planning & Development Department.

Most of the trees were removed by a group of volunteers from Hypertherm.

“We’re still recovering from that wind event,” Goodwin said in a phone interview. He added that a couple trees still need to be cleared from the trail network. “It feels like in the past decade, maybe even in the past 5 to 7 years, the extremes are more prevalent.”

While city staff, along with volunteers, do “trail armoring” work to make the paths more resilient from extreme rain events by improving drainage or putting in more stones to firm up the ground. Wind, however, is a different story.

“As far as the wind events, there’s not really anything you can do,” Goodwin said, adding that the trees that were taken down late last summer “were healthy, mature trees,” and not older ones that were afflicted with disease.

“Rarely, almost never do we proactively go fell trees to avoid trail blockage,” Goodwin said, because it can be hard to say for certain which trees are most likely to fall.

Back in Woodstock, the Woodstock Community Trust has raised more than $10,000 for a matching $20,000 grant from the Vermont Department of Housing and Community Development’s Better Places program.

That funding will go toward rebuilding the Ottauquechee River Trail and making it more resilient to flooding. There are plans to move parts of the trail away from the river, replace picnic tables and benches that were washed away, and plant trees to create a stronger buffer between the water and land.

While the trail is not officially closed to the public, people who walk around the property are urged to be cautious of rocks, debris and the thick silt that continues to coat the landscape.

On the recent walk along the trail, Randy Richardson, a member of the Ottauquechee River Trail Committee who also serves as development director of the Upper Valley Trails Alliance, surveyed the trail, pointing out spots where people would stop and take in the views.

“It was gorgeous before the flood and it will be gorgeous again,” he said.

Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-7 27-3221.