Following the Footsteps – The trails we inherit

October 6, 2026
Categories - Articles, Pet-friendly Accommodation

BY ZANI KOEN

As my dog, Soda, and I follow yet another set of markers on a trail we’ve never been on, my brain starts wandering down the road of the people that cut this path. Someone decided the route. Someone painted markers every so many steps for kilometers upon kilometers. I will almost certainly never know who any of them were. And yet every hike Soda and I have ever done rests on their quiet, unseen work. It’s made me think about the legacy of it all, not as something one person leaves behind, but as something handed down the trail, from one pair of feet to the next.

The markers left behind

Sometimes that legacy is a single, deliberate object. On the 5km trail at the Big Red Barn in Centurion, there’s a large wooden carving of a face set along the route. I don’t know who made it, or why, or how long it’s been there. But it has quietly become an icon in its own right, like an old friend to reassure you that you are on the right track. Nobody, I suspect, set out to build a monument. Someone simply made a thing and left it where others would pass, and over time it became part of how the trail is remembered. That’s the strange, small scale that legacy often works on. Not statues and plaques, but a carved face in the trees that thousands of feet now navigate by, made by someone who will likely never know how much it mattered.

Land Worth Tending

Sometimes the legacy isn’t an object at all, but the land itself, and the ongoing choice to look after it. Take Die Bosveld, in the

north of Pretoria: a beautiful stretch of ground, alive with wildlife, that someone decided to open to the public rather than keep behind a fence. What strikes me most about it is that the work is never quite finished. The trails are constantly being updated and maintained, which means that somewhere behind every clear, walkable path is a person still choosing, this week and next, to keep it that way.

It’s easy to think of what we leave behind as something completed and handed over, but places like Die Bosveld are kept alive by continuous, unglamorous care. And there’s a quieter gift folded into it, too: not every landowner opens their gates to dogs. Every time Soda is free to trot alongside me somewhere like this, it’s because someone chose to make room for her.

Built by Many Hands

The Lynnwood Ridge Pine Forest is a different kind of legacy again, one built by a community. It was, not so long ago, an unkempt piece of public land. Then people came together and decided it was worth something. They cleaned it up and slowly turned it into a vibrant hub, alive with free activities and the kind of easy energy that only comes from a place people actually care about. Yes, someone had to spark it (these things always begin somewhere), but what makes it work is everyone who showed up afterwards and kept showing up. A legacy doesn’t have to rest on one set of shoulders. It can belong to the many, and anyone can add to it. You don’t have to have cut the first path to be a link in the chain. You just have to add something.

My Link in the Chain

When Soda and I first started hiking, I quickly learned that all this generosity, the cut paths, the carved markers, the tended land, the reclaimed forests, were scattered across the internet in a hundred different places. Finding a trail that suited us, one that was genuinely dog-friendly and matched where we were in our fitness and confidence, was harder than it had to be. So I did some virtual trailblazing of my own and built WozaPaws: a map to gather all those scattered paths into one place so the next nervous beginner and their dog can find their way a little faster.

And that’s the thing about legacy. You invest a little bit of yourself for the greater good with no guarantee of what it will amount to. You inherit what others left for you, you use it, and if you’re lucky, you get to leave something small of your own for whoever comes next.

The End, or Just the Beginning

Soda trots ahead of me on the well-marked path, entirely unbothered by any of this. She just knows the trail is good and the day is hers. Maybe that’s the truest measure of a legacy, that the people who inherit it don’t have to think about it at all. Good trails outlast the people who created them, tended to them over the years, and the websites that map them. They’ll outlast Soda, and they’ll outlast me. But that is not a sad thought. The point was never to be remembered. It was to leave the path a little clearer for the next pair of feet (and the next set of paws) coming up behind us.