I used to walk a property's road network and feel reassured if it looked maintained. Solid mistake. On a 160-acre parcel I nearly bought in the Ozarks, the old logging roads were in decent shape — gravel, minimal ruts, passable in a pickup. I took that as a sign the land drained reasonably well. Wrong.
What those roads actually did was intercept hillside sheet flow and concentrate it. Every draw below a road crossing was channeling erosion into the creek bottoms, and the riparian areas were a mess of scouring and invasive establishment I didn't recognize until I brought a watershed coordinator out for a second look. Fixing that hydrology would have cost more than the land's marginal value justified.
Now I walk perpendicular to the roads, not along them. I follow water downhill and look at what it hits before it reaches a stream channel.
Anybody else found that infrastructure that looked like an asset was actually masking serious site problems? Curious whether this pattern shows up in different terrain types or if it's something specific to dissected hill country.