Ode to Trail Work

As a native of Texas and a college student in Ohio, my everyday existence is void of the surety and security of mountains on the horizon. This was saved for family road trips when I considered mountains as gentle guardians, watching as I grew from a firmly anti-hiking kid to a young adult yearning for a less temporary stay in their surroundings. I don’t remember how it came up in conversation, but I do know I was 14 and on a trip to Oregon with my parents. I even remember the stretch of trail—piney switchbacks zigzagging up to Mt Hood. I suppose we were talking about trailwork, which I’d never fully considered the necessity of. “You know, your Uncle Eric was on an Appalachian Trail crew,” my dad said. “It’s hard work. He came back different, stronger.” I wished I could’ve been the kind of person that goes on an adventure like that. On the surface I minimized myself, deciding I wasn’t. But subconsciously, that relentlessly stubborn side of me latched onto the surety that someday that I would be brave, strong,and crazy enough to do trailwork. When that future came, I would be living free and at peace underneath the mountains. At 20, I spent the fall lightly considering trailwork, and by January my stubbornness had kicked in and no one could convince me against heading to the trails out West. A friend who’d done RMYC told me to apply. If I hadn’t asked her about trailwork, I wouldn’t have found RMYC, and perhaps without Uncle Eric I never would’ve thought of doing trailwork in the first place. Life is only sometimes a highway. Mostly it’s just a sketchy dirt road up a mountain that has you frantically checking your maps to make sure you’re on the right path. But when you get to the top of that long and winding road, the view is astounding. Mountains—some desert, some snow-cappedas far as the eye can see.
—Olivia Griffin-Erickson (BLM Colorado River Valley Field Office)