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How long do you suppose it would take one person to clear a path through a dense jungle which is 5 foot wide and 1,000 feet long? Assume this person has all the mundane tools necessary and work a regular shift of 8 hours.
How about ten persons? How about ten persons with 0-level divine and arcane spell access?
I really have no idea how to come up with even a ballpark figure. The path should be passable enough for horses with wagons.
I know from my own personal experience that clearing overgrown and very dense brush takes quite some time for one person, but clearing a dense and overgrown old growth area would be very, very time consuming.
EDIT: The jungle is a tropical rain forest, so fire would be a difficult tool to use; besides, it would be important to prevent excess damage beyond the path.
When I was in high school we used a backhoe and cleared 8 acres of lightly wooded area which took about a week. I figured this could be used as a base figure for calculating the time it would take clear a lightly-wooded forest. Of course, trying to figure out how long it would take x number of people to clear the same 8 acres is the other question.
There are 43,560 square feet per acre. Let's say for simplicity's sake it took the backhoe 1 day to clear 1 acre.
How long would it take that backhoe to clear a 5-foot wide, 1,000-foot path through that same area? This equals 5,000 square feet. If we look at the 1 acre per day figure, converting it to 43,560 sq. ft. per day, than every hour that backhoe could clear 1,815 sq. ft. So theoretically, the backhoe could clear that 1,000-foot path in 3 hours.
Let's say that woodland path is dense, old growth. Would it make sense to set up 3 categories of "denseness?" Light, Medium, Heavy? Heavy being akin to old growth forest, where's light would be like an orchard... If we use these paramaters, would it then make sense to multiply by 1,2,3 the time it takes to clear? For instance, a heavy area would take 3 times as long to clear, and in the case of the 3 hour time to clear a lightly-wooded area above, the time to clear a heavy area could be 9 hours...with a backhoe.
Now let's remove that backhoe. How fast could one person clear it? What about 100 people? If we could figure out one, then it shouldn't be too difficult to figure out 100.
A tropical rainforest can have thick undergrowth or the canopies above can cut out the light to the point where there's not much to block movement. If it's the former the hardest part will be keeping it clear as plants to either side try to move in to take over the cleared space - this will take a day or two not months. And it won't stop happening. You'll need to clear more than 5' wide unless it's used every day.
Of course you could abstract this a bit if you're willing to use the downtime rules or even the kingdom building rules, depending on why you're doing this in the first place.
Well, if the jungle is 5 ft wide...