Went for a trail run this morning, and the path had gone

That would suck. No, that doesn't happen in the US in my experience. But I'm in California and the western US is mostly publicly owned land unlike the eastern US. Most 'trails' in the US (west) are either on publicly owned land or in local parks. The only path/trail I've run that is not publicly owned is on land owned by IBM. They have granted an easement through their land to connect up two large public trail systems. I suppose they could one day deny this easement.

What trails?

In about 1982 this happened to a group of us who were running on what had been an old horse trail in the Catalina foothills in Tucson, AZ.

At the time it was the only long non paved trail in Tucson that wasn't paved in the mountains.

Anyway, we were cruising along the trail when we ran into a house foundation... and the new owners were there looking at it. They yelled at us to get off of their property.

We went around the foundation and resumed on the trail. A little while later we hit a huge swath of desert that had been plowed up (and is now Sunrise Blvd) in Tucson.

It was the last time we ever got to run on the Fred Frye Horse Ranch trail.

I ran the American River Trail in Sacramento from 1995 to 1997. One year, the river flooded and when the water receded, part of the trail along the river had washed away and was part of the river. No one could ever run that stretch of trail again.

Now you can see why we see bears, coyotes and other wild animals more often in the suburbs. Expansion of residential developments is gradually decreasing the wooded areas these wild animals live. They are losing their habitats like you are losing your trails.

Sounds to me that it WASN'T a public right of way. You just assumed it was because nobody had ever blocked it off before. This is actually common in the rural eastern US.

Damn..

IBM easement (Calero Creek trail) allows Santa Teresa County Park to connect with Almaden Quicksilver Park and Los Alamitos Creek trail.

ridgetrail.org

Santa Teresa County Park and Calero/Los Alamitos Creeks Trail - Bay Area Ridge Trail

The Ridge Trail route branches east and west through Santa Teresa County Park. Take the trail east through high, oak-studded grasslands up to Coyote Peak. Then head back west on well-graded, exposed paths, past spring Read fu...

Open link

When cornpop said that, my first thought was Stile Ranch trail, which I helped work on during a trail work day in the '90s. Calero Creek isn't on IBM property.

Yeah, I ran through somebody's kitchen once after their house was built. I wasn't consulted about the location of the house so......

Coach FLINT

very unusual for this to result in a decent trail. They can grant an easement but someone else usually has to cut and maintain the trail. And why should they if, as you say, it can be revoked any minute.

on the other hand, public trails are nearly always spoiled by gravel. And especially big public easements for power lines etc.

Maybe strangely, this has happened to me at least once in every place I've lived long term. Seems somewhat common with big selloffs for new roads and houses or when new management comes in and cracks down on previously tolerated paths through private land.

I grew up in a small east coast town that had a bunch of nice wooded trails nearby. These were mostly on land owned by the township but weren't official parks or anything and the trails were just maintained through frequent use. A couple segments of these have been converted to official (but tiny and disconnected) parks and trails over the past 40 years, but the large majority was sold off for housing or had roads built over them.

In the city I went to for college, we had a large park that was cut in half by infrequently used freight tracks. There were some nice wide trails connecting both sides of the park that were well maintained enough to think were official, but near the end of my last year of college whoever owned the rail line decided they weren't happy about this and started putting up barriers and even got the police to stake out the area and hassle anyone still trying to cross about trespassing. The nearest official place to cross was a few miles away from the park, so this only temporarily stopped anyone.

I had a fairly similar experience in the next city I lived in. We had a big park and cemetery bumped up next to each other. And while the cemetery had no problem with runners using their paths, there was only one official entrance that was pretty out of the way. So people cut a bunch of holes in the fence and maintained quite wide trails connecting through them. These were around for at least a decade before the cemetery owners decided to block them all up one day.

I currently live in the UK with access to a very extensive network of footpaths and commons. This time the paths I have in mind are public right of way and land owners are required to maintain them and give access, but of course this doesn't stop some from illegally closing them and wrongfully putting up private land signs. There are official channels for reporting these, but they're usually slow to act and very dependent on the mood of the local council. There are also some commons that are public access but completely surrounded by private land, and it can be pretty hit or miss whether owners allow people to cut through their land to access them.

The summer before my senior year of hs I discovered a dirt road linking a neighborhood to a major road. It was fun to run for a year, but when I came back after my first semester of college they were paving it and getting ready to put more houses along it. My mother remembers when the city where I grew up was a farm town with lots of dirt roads and less than 50k people.

The old rail trail near me is 17km of flat cinder/soil track through countryside. It originally ran all the way to the beach but at 17km it's just farmland so you gotta run the roads to the beach.

It's the ONLY place to run off-road around here without driving for an hour. I can do double my mileage on it. It ain't no Kenyan trail it's narrow and has rabbit holes etc but this year they've been spraying the bushes blue and marking the ground to pave.

They've cut down a huge section of the woods along the trail, looks like the apocalypse it's an absolute shame as there's already a fast road and walking/cycle path very close by. All those bushes they cut provided blackberries to eat on runs during summer. Bast****

Man, do I feel fortunate to have lived my entire adult life within 10 minutes of wonderful trails. Long Island, New York; southern Rhode Island; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Pensacola, Florida; even Fargo, North Dakota had decent access to trails, or at least soft surfaces.

Most major cities have plenty of paved and unpaved trails to work with. Especially older ones that have converted railroads to running trails or have riverfronts with trails.

I live in the eastern US and this has definitely happened to me on running and cross country ski trails. Usually the edge of a development has encroached over the trail. Sometimes the trail peters out and you have to figure out where it picks up on the other side, sometimes boulder have been placed in the way, sometimes a fence shows up across the trail.

This happens across the country. However one recent experience the county cleared out 10 homes and part of the woods to make a beautiful trail connecting to the lake and then city.

the previous homeowners did get above market value