Connecting to the world through trail work
By Claire Thompson
Cover photo courtesy of Xander Demetrios
Not far from the trailhead on the Indian Creek trail in the North Cascades’ Glacier Peak Wilderness, an unnamed side stream spills from the eastern flanks of Mount David into the White River. A few summers ago, my Forest Service trail crew and I spent many weeks on Indian Creek, replacing a bridge that had buckled under winter’s heavy snows. We hiked the first two miles of that trail over and over, hauling tools into and out of the bridge site, often with the help of our string of mules.
That side stream—steep, rock-tumbled, and log-jammed, its banks clotted with brush—proved tricky for the mules to cross, so we spent half a June day making it more passable for stock. We brushed the banks, rearranged boulders, and cut and moved waterlogged wood, our fingers growing numb from repeated plunges into water that had been snow hours before. Through July and into August, I’d pause at that stream on my way to or from the bridge, to top off my water bottle and rinse the sweat from my face. By September, the stream crossing lay dry as a bone, just a spray of cobble across the trail.
Photo courtesy of Xander Demetrios
I was first drawn to trail work out of a typical twenty-something hunger for adventure and novelty. I kept at it because I loved how it challenged me mentally and physically. I loved the people I met, every one of them with stories and experience to share, and I felt at home in the quirky community to which I now belonged. Mostly, I couldn’t imagine anything better than getting paid—however poorly—to camp, hike, and work my body to exhaustion every day in wild places. Eventually, I kept at it because I couldn’t imagine anything else.
I loved the way trail work activated my imagination, changing the way I saw the world around me. Working on a Forest Service trail crew means covering the same routes over and over, stopping for minutes or hours to work in places a hiker would never pick for a snack break. You end up noticing things—like the seasonal fluctuations of a minor stream, or the sheer quantity of squirrel caches in a stand of fir—that might not otherwise draw your attention. Insignificant parts of the overall scenery become familiar, take on meaning. The rock halfway up Buck Creek the exact shape and size of a throne; the lone larch growing in a scree field off the switchbacks below Stuart Pass. Working on trails strengthens a connection to the wild landscape as a whole, yes, but also to certain of its individual parts, denizens you’ve grown to recognize and depend on as markers of both constancy and change.
Photo courtesy of Xander Demetrios
We build connections with the more-than-human world the same way we build any relationship: through interaction, cooperation and friction, intimacy and specificity. An admiration for the wild can come from the wonder of summit views or wildflowers on windswept ridges. But for me, the real intimacy is in the smaller things: the comfort of reaching an unassuming camp where I’ve sheltered before, of touching the skin of a cedar whose shape I remember, of tracking the recede and return of trickles not marked on maps. Of returning to places with which I have a bond built by labor, not passive appreciation. By lingering, not passing through.
It’s only recently, as political chaos has forced me to face the end of my time as a professional trail worker, that I’ve started to understand the deeper reason I’ve stayed all these years. Every day I spend doing trail work, even the sloggy, tedious ones with wet socks or stubborn logs or silly spats with colleagues, reinforces my relationship with the land and landscape, and reminds me how that relationship has shaped my own life and understanding of the world.
I want everyone to have the chance to experience that intimacy, to feel our innate connection to the more-than-human. To touch grass—and sage, and huckleberry, and spruce bark and snowmelt. Trails themselves are, quite literally, conduits for such connection. When I’m clearing trails, I can tell myself I’m also, in a way, clearing some of the gunk out of a clogged-up system that has tried for too long to separate us humans from the wild world we’ve always been a part of.
Last September, my crew spent six days clearing the Indian Creek Trail. For all my time on its first few miles, I’d never made it to Indian Creek’s upper reaches. As we pushed toward Indian Pass from our base camp nine miles in, stopping along the way wherever the work demanded it, I felt the heady rush of discovery—peaks and meadows and old-growth groves I’d never seen before—begin to mingle with the warmth of familiarity. A slow burn of belonging not unlike falling in love.
Claire Thompson worked on and led trail crews on the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest for eight years. She teaches English at Wenatchee Valley College and is pursuing an MFA in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University.
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