Illustration Aaron Jansen

Sense is far from common. If it rose even to the level of occasional, Alaska winter trail users might get along a whole lot better.

As it is, no one seems happy. Fat-tire mountain bikers are mad at post-holing hikers. Hikers are mad at unfriendly skiers who yell at them for messing up ski trails. Dog mushers are mad at speeding, sometimes reckless snowmachiners. Snowmachiners are mad at all those "elitist" non-motorheads. Skiers are mad at, well, almost everyone. And almost everyone gets mad at horses.

Yes, it's winter in Alaska, and everybody seems to have a beef. The situation has grown to the point where the television stations now run commercials wherein Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race champ Lance Mackey pleads with people to be careful and polite on the trails. Part of this might be due to the lack of winter sunlight, which tends to make everyone in Alaska touchy this time of year. There's no doubt simple thoughtlessness plays a part, too. But it would seem it has been this way for a long, long time.

"A well-used dog trail becomes so hard and smooth that it offers scarce any resistance to the passage of the sled, and for walking or running over in moccasins or mukluks is the most perfect surface imaginable. But put a horse on that trail and in one passage it is ruined,'' wrote Archdeacon Hudson Stuck 85 years ago in Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, "So there is not much love lost between the horse man and the dog man in Alaska.'

Little has changed since Stuck's day except the addition of some new forms of travel to gum the works, and the addition of ever more people with ever less sense -- common or otherwise.

Stuck, the man who wrote one of the best-ever Alaska books and led the first expedition to summit Mount McKinley, North America's highest peak, pretty well summed up the essence of the continuing problem when he wrote this:

"As a rule, the (dog) trail is of so little service to the horse or mule that it were as cheap (in time and energy) to break out a new one in the snow, and it is this knowledge that exasperates the dog musher.'

In other words, why destroy someone else's trail when it takes no more energy to make your own or use another?

And yet, people do. Crosscountryalaska.org is a website where people can post up-to-the-minute reports on local trail conditions. On almost any given day, you will find anger there like this:

"Jodhpur is fairly fast, hard pack, Margaux's is a bit softer. Icebox has decent coverage, icy in some of the downhill stretches. Once again, as in the past few years, there is a doofus who walks back and forth on Icebox (apparently early mornings). There had been walkers and bikers on a portion of Margaux's as well. We need to make these people feel like the selfish people they are. Let them know to stay the hell off the groom."

For those who don't know, Jodhpur, Margaux's and Icebox are groomed ski trails at Kincaid Park in Anchorage. Many of the people who ski at Kincaid buy trail pins that provide the money to pay for the grooming. Given that there is no requirement to buy a pin, there are a fair number of scofflaws who take advantage and use the costly-to-maintain trails for free, but at least they do no harm.

Plenty of harm can, on the other hand, be sometimes done by the walkers and the bikers. Why they do this when there are plenty of alternatives to hiking and riding on groomed ski trails is hard to figure. Sometimes, admittedly, their poaching of ski trails is no big deal.

What walkers and riders do to ski trails depends largely on conditions. When the trails are frozen rock-hard, people can walk and ride a fat-tire bike on them almost without it being noticed. When the trails are soft, though, the walkers punch big holes in the surface, and the tires of the bikes carve out snow snakes seemingly designed to grab a ski and pitch a skier on her face.