I think what your talking about is illustrated well in the first image from this post. In that case the “path” is covered by some broken branches, but it’s still clear where the “trail” is because of the clearing in the trees. If you want another example, there’s this image from Wikimedia Commons. In both cases I’d agree the “path” isn’t very clear in either one. But a “trail” is more then just the “path”, it’s the complete field of view of the person hiking, and no one hikes by looking directly at the ground all the time. What people do instead is constantly shift their focus between the foreground and background (or horizon depending on how technical you want to be about it). So sure the path in the second image is overgrown, but it’s still complete visible where to go because of the clearing in the trees at the top of the hill. Same goes for the first image, it’s pretty obvious where the path winds around the tree on the left side in the background despite the over growth. So sure, you can say path is invisible in both examples because of the overgrowth all you want, but so what? Again, no one stares directly at the ground when they are hiking.
I read through the article. This is a quote from the District Trails Manager on the Pemigewasset Ranger District from taken directly from article "And we’re walking on some trails that aren’t exactly legal. And they’re pretty clearly defined. Now maybe you can answer me this, does “pretty clearly defined” sound like the trails have a real issue with visibility or maybe the people who got lost were just disoriented because they were unfamiliar with the area? You’d have to agree that someone being lost because they don’t know the area well is different from them being lost because the trail isn’t visible.
Sure, but there should at least be some or at the least an example of where someone had trouble because of trail visibility if your going to cite that as a reason for why the tagging scheme should exist and so far all I’ve seen is a news article about clearly defined trails intermixed with a lot of hyperbole. Granted the hyperbole isn’t coming from you, but there’s definitely been a lot of it over the years this has been a topic. Yet 13 years later I have to see any solid evidence that trail visibility is even an issue. At least outside of a few cherry picked examples that probably had nothing to do with it in the first. Let alone have I seen evidence that it’s a problem that can be resolved by these tagging scheme.