(1) A trail requiring limited skill with little challenge to travel. Easy is defined as relaxing, posing minimal difficulties and able to be traveled with little physical effort. Moderate is defined as not requiring excessive or extreme physical effort. Difficult is defined as physically strenuous requiring excessive or extreme physical effort. And so on.
(2) A trail of less than four miles (6.5 km) round trip and with less than a 2000 foot (610 m) elevation gain. Round trip hiking time is generally 45 minutes to 3 hours, but inexperienced hikers may take longer, and some of them choose to either get hopelessly lost, or even die sometimes, only one or two steps off the pavement. (Go figure.) This is only a guideline not a rule. You may die in some other, more interesting way.
(3) "Easy Trail" is a description you might use if you want to encourage others to die attempting to negotiate what almost just killed you. If you're that kind of person. Maybe you are. Who can say?
(4) The gummint and assorted experts and hangers-on have gotten into this cookie jar too, and gone ahead and defined difficulty once and for all and for ever and ever, so you no longer have to think. An easy trail is one that someone has decided is relaxing, posing minimal difficulties and able to be traveled with little physical effort. There is nothing really wrong with that. Just assume that trail means a long and narrow piece of ground with few stores fronting it, and you more or less have it. Sort of a skinny park. Yawn. Are we done yet? Can we go home now?
Example: Barb preferred doing the easy trails with Ed, because if she limited him to those trails he didn't end up whining so much.
Have anything worth adding? Then try sosayseff@gmail.com
Me? Easy, peasy, but still slow and wheezy.
Etc...
so says eff: sporadic spurts of grade eff distraction
definitions: outdoor terms
fiyh: dave's little guide to ultralight backpacking stoves
boyb: dave's little guide to backpacks
snorpy bits: nibbling away at your sanity
last seen receding: missives from a certain mobile homer
noseyjoe: purposefully poking my proboscis into technicals