Hello! I am glad to see you working on stewardship of this type. As you can imagine, this comes up a TON with various trails and protected areas. The US local chapter has an entire working group dedicated to helping sort these things out and you would be absolutely welcomes to participate in those efforts. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/United_States/Trails_Stewardship_Initiative

They've produced some FAQ style documentation that you may also find useful (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Why_can%27t_I_delete_this_trail%3F). The short answer is that deleted things don't stay deleted and that it causes other (perhaps worse!) side effects than your already trying to combat.

There's a large community of US trail/park mapper and app developers in the OSM-US Slack instance and we're generally a helpful bunch to try and resolve issues of this type. Just takes a bit of sorting through.

Look forward to hearing from you.

Matt (OpenStreetMapUS board member)