  Gottschalk and Vygen proved that every solution of the subtour elimination
linear program for traveling salesman paths is a convex combination of more and
more restrictive "generalized Gao-trees". We give a short proof of this fact,
as a layered convex combination of bases of a sequence of increasingly
restrictive matroids. A strongly polynomial, combinatorial algorithm follows
for finding this convex combination, which is a new tool offering polyhedral
insight, already instrumental in recent results for the $s-t$ path TSP.
