Pavers. Here's my theory:
Most people don't actually like riding pavers. It's clearly worse, dirt is clearly better, and given a back to back comparison even the lowest members of the human species would conclude that pavers on trails are a torture device straight from the seventh circle of hell.
I think there are exactly three people on the entire planet who actually like pavers, but they are prodigious advocates of belief system, traveling far and wide to share pavers with land managers everywhere. In the absence of good trail builders doing likewise, these missionaries of misery have been able to fill this information vacuum, spreading pavers to the ends of the earth, from Sandy Ridge to Colonnade to Mammoth Mountain to the Azores Islands in the picture above.
I firmly believe there are only three agents of the paver movement, but in truth I don't pretend to know what motivates these three people. Perhaps it's a genuine love of paver berms, but alternatively it could be a one-dimensional power trip and pavers are merely the instrument to consolidate power. Traveling the world to exercise their will on unsuspecting trail users quells the urge they've always had but never satisfied.
Maybe it's a small masochistic group installing pavers for their own use, to self-punish as an act of contrition.
If pressed, I'd wager that the paver advocates are part of some fringe religious group seeking to punish the sins of mankind, and in their search for a widespread system of pain and suffering as reckoning for our sins they talked to the people who invented speed bumps and highway on-ramp signals. Those ideas were already taken, of course, so they settled on pavers as their modus operandi.
This desecration comes to us from Steamboat Springs, Colorado from people who should know better.
