Help for horses, hikers

Turns out you don’t need to be a driver to benefit from the stimulus package that President Obama signed almost a year ago amid great fanfare about how the bill was going to smooth the nation’s potholed highway system.

In fact you don’t even need to be human.

Horses are getting a leg up from all those billions, too.

Actually they’ll get to keep their legs down.

A tiny fraction of the federal largess — $1.6 million — was sent to the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest to do the basic tasks necessary to keep backcountry hiking and horseback trails passable.

Specifically, passable to people (and horses) who don’t enjoy clambering over fallen trees or detouring around washouts.

The Wallowa-Whitman certainly can use the money.

For many years the Wallowa-Whitman, which has one of the most extensive trail systems among Oregon national forests, has been unable to do yearly maintenance on hundreds of miles of trail due to declining recreation budgets.

Many of the neglected trails are in the Eagle Cap Wilderness or the Hells Canyon National Recreation Area.

That’s precisely where forest officials intend to spend most of the $1.6 million.

This spring the Wallowa-Whitman hopes to hire contractors who, during the summers of 2010 and 2011, would work on 624 miles of trail in the Eagle Cap and 458 miles in Hells Canyon.

Some of the contractors’ jobs will have obvious benefits — it’s hard for hikers or horseback riders to miss a three-foot-thick fir that’s lying across a trail, and awfully easy for them to appreciate its removal, for instance.

But even less conspicuous work is worthwhile, too. Simply clearing dirt and debris from water bars (a sort of drainage ditch that directs water off the trail) can prevent summer thunderstorms and spring snowmelt freshets from eroding sections of trail.

The scope of the entire stimulus package, all $727 billion, exceeds most people’s ability to comprehend.

But a $1.6 million crumb is pretty easy to digest — especially when you can take a hike nearby and see what the money paid for.