Unofficial Trail Authority · TS-F1 · Revised 7 November 2026 · https://trailauthority.org/standards/features/ · Uncontrolled copy when printed. The Unofficial Trail Authority is an independent fictional organization. It is not a government agency or land-management authority.
TS-F1 · In force
Keeping the feature
The people who built a feature are the editors of that feature. Everyone else is a reader. Readers may go fast. They may get off and look. They may decide the question is not for them today. They may not rewrite the sentence.
A trail is gnarly enough when a willing rider still has something to do. If the interesting part has been lowered, widened, or bypassed until the answer is automatic, the trail has been over-served. The office's instruction is to stop. Further polishing, done by the afternoon's visitors, is the loss of the ride.
The following are revisions, and are outside this standard:
- Knocking the top off a hit so the next person need not commit.
- Filling a drop because it looked serious in the morning.
- Cutting a walk-around that becomes, by evening, the main line.
- Adding a bigger hit of one's own so the trail feels more serious than the builders made it.
The last item is the same error in the other direction. Gnarliness is the feature that is there. It is not a dare constructed to impress the group. If the builders are at work, ride what is already open or wait until they are done. Their session is not a public comment period.
A person who finds that someone else has already revised the feature records it on Form 04-B and leaves the dirt where it now sits. Two unauthorized edits do not restore the original. Directive EC-14 is the short form of this standard. Standard FN-3 is the reason the feature was worth keeping.