A Political Economic Guide to Becoming a Trail Worker
A Political Economic Guide to Becoming a Trail Worker
Answering the question I get all the time
The first person I ever asked this question was my little brother. In 2019 he packed up his two-door 1990s Honda Civic to the brim and moved to Bozeman, Montana to work for something called a Conservation Corps. Though I’d heard the term before, I didn’t know what one does in such a Corps—or in “conservation,” for that matter. Was it research of some kind? Would he be swaddling baby endangered species? He’d been a youth expedition leader for Outward Bound before that, so I at least could guess it was something similarly outdoorsy. But at the time I was working three jobs to save for a thru-hike that same summer, so I wasn’t exactly bursting with jealousy.
A few months later I was home from the Pacific Crest Trail nursing a broken foot, and that’s when my brother’s work pictures started showing up in the family group chat. He looked different than before. His poofy, curly hair was suddenly long and spilling out of a white hard hat. He wore dirty Carhartts and leather work boots and a bandana draped over his work shirt collar. He posed and smiled with his rag-tag coworkers holding saws, picks, shovels, and other tools I couldn’t name. We knew by then that he was primarily building hiking trails, but the pictures revealed what that actually entailed: something between a construction job and a Jim Bridger reenactment. And behind them in each photo was a ludicrously beautiful country. It looked, I had to admit, dramatically cooler than any arrangement of thru-hikers I’d ever seen, with their rave-y ultralight gear and trekking poles. It looked more fun too.
“Hey bro, question for you” I texted him one day. “How does someone get a job like that? And do you think it’s something I could do too?”
Since I became a trail worker myself I’ve had dozens of people ask me the exact same thing. My brother’s answer to the last question was, obviously, yes, and for almost everyone who asks me so is mine. But the harder and more interesting question is the first one: how? Interesting both because it seems very few people who would enjoy being a trail worker know how to actually become one, and because there are actually a few different ways to do it. Harder because, while certainly achievable, none of these paths is straightforward.
Answering the question in my DMs usually takes a few long paragraphs even when I’m trying to be brief. Eventually I thought about writing up a post with my usual answer that I could send people, and that’s partly what inspired this essay. But as I wrote it I realized there was more that people needed to know. After all, what enticed me about trail work were my brother’s photos and stories, just as my own photos and stories tend to draw most of the questions I get myself. These are the highlights of trail work, and while they’re certainly real, they aren’t the full picture. Even the backbreaking labor they depict isn’t necessarily the hardest part. Before you sign up for that, you should know what you’re getting into.
We can dwell on those highlights I mentioned for a moment longer though. There’s no getting around the fact that trail work can be immensely exciting, fulfilling, or simply very rad. Trail workers get to see spectacular places, run chainsaws, swing axes, go camping on the clock, and generally do the sorts of vigorous, jolly outdoor activities that tend to appear in the visions of people hypnotized by desktop screens. It has its downsides like any job, but the upsides are hard to beat. Now let’s talk about how to do it.
Step one is the same as any job: gain some experience. The problem is that the work experience required to become a trail worker is not something a lot of people tend to have beforehand. Few professional trail workers had used a crosscut saw or built a rock wall before trail work taught them how to do it. Some, however, do begin with various related skills already, like using a chainsaw, chopping firewood, carpentry, landscaping, and so on. Generally if you’ve ever done manual labor before, especially outdoors, you’re off to a good start.
If not, there are other ways to get some baseline experience doing trail work. The easiest and probably least risky of these options is volunteering. Wherever you live, your local trail system almost surely has a few volunteer trail work events, often called “Trail Days.” The groups running these events always need more workers. Volunteer days are also usually supervised by staff trail builders at whatever nonprofit or public agency manages the trail, who will often provide some basic training for newcomers along with liberal doses of their own opinions and advice about their profession. Volunteering for a few of these events will give you a good sense of a trail worker’s typical day and what the work really looks like. It will also help you decide if you even like doing this kind of work before you change your life and move to the middle of nowhere for a trails job, which is nice too.
Of course, as Ishmael said, there is all the difference in the world between volunteering and being paid. I’ve occasionally found advice on this question suggesting folks try to land a full-time trails job by building their skills and network at volunteer trail events. While it’s possible, I don’t think that’s an ideal route unless it’s your only one. Volunteering is as different from being a professional trail worker as visiting a place is from living there. While some longtime volunteers I know are genuinely expert trail builders, one skill they haven’t needed to learn is how to make a living and support themselves by building trails. That, again, is the real challenge.
But more importantly, it’s my view that hard labor like trail work ought to be compensated just like any job; so should investments in the trails workforce like training and professional development by the organizations that hire them. It’s fine to volunteer if you just want to lend a hand, but our goal where is to make you a professional. Fortunately, if you’re serious about trail work, there are better ways to make that happen.
If you want to get paid while learning how to build trails, you basically have two options. You can dive right into the job market with whatever skills and experience you already have, or you can do what I did and join a Conservation Corps.
My brother and I both got our first trail jobs in a Corps, which ultimately tends to be my recommendation for most people asking me. We’ll get into that more shortly, but there are some good reasons to consider the former option as well. For one thing, Conservation Corps trail crews primarily exist as training programs for full-time conservation work in public land management agencies. Therefore, if you can skip that part and simply get an agency trails job right away, you’ve saved some time. As for the agencies that hire trail workers, you’ve heard of most of them before: the U.S. Forest Service, the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management and a few others. State and municipal parks and recreation departments run trail crews too. If you can land a job with any of these agencies, you set yourself up well not only for a trails career but possibly for all of the other kinds of work these agencies do. And for whatever reason, most people seem to like the idea of working for the Park Service or Smokey the Bear.
Granted, your first job in any of these agencies will likely be seasonal, rather than year-round, but that goes for the Conservation Corps too. Lately, however, the federal agencies have been shifting to a hiring model that lets their seasonals keep their insurance in the off-season, which no Conservation Corps I know of do. The agencies also typically pay better than the Corps, and as a government worker you’ll get better benefits and insurance than almost anywhere else.
Now, the main downside of going directly into full-time agency trail work is the challenge of landing one of these jobs. To say that the hiring process for government jobs is confusing would be an understatement. For federal agency jobs at the Forest or National Park Service, all hiring is done through the USAJobs system, and USAJobs does not necessarily become easier or less stressful to navigate whether you are trying to land your first or your hundredth federal job. State and municipal hiring portals can be just as opaque. Then in addition to these unique, rather rickety government hiring systems, agency hiring also runs on certain unwritten norms, tips, and hacks (e.g., always hit “most qualified” on the skills assessment) that would take an entire other essay to explain. But if you do want to take on the system, you can find some good resources online. I’ll post some at the end of this article.
The other downside of going right into full-time work without much experience is that you will inevitably be starting at the bottom. Folks who are looking to make a sort of mid-career change into trails tend not to love that idea, but for younger folks—anyone just out of high school or college—I would actually recommend trying to start out this way if you can. One of the best District Rangers I ever had—that is, the highest position on any Forest Service district—got his start that way. His first job was cleaning toilets on the developed recreation crew on that same forest, right in his hometown. From there he worked his way up through trails and wilderness, a Hotshot fire crew (important for future DR’s), and a few higher agency positions before taking a top job back in his hometown district where he started. Not a lot of higher-ups in the agencies do it that way anymore, but the agencies could use more of them.
If you do take that route, you’ll get all the training you need at various points along the way. You’ll also get to know the bureaucracy inside and out, and when you do reach the higher ranks, you’ll know what the seasonal workers are doing each day to keep the forest running, and what they need to do it. Ultimately getting one of those jobs isn’t as hard as it might seem. Browse some hiring announcements on USAJobs, think about your closest qualifications and give it a shot. Often some demonstrated passion and work ethic will be enough. When in doubt, look up the phone number of a district you want to work for and just give them a call. Chances are the person who picks up will be happy to talk to an eager, prospective seasonal worker. They were probably in your shoes once too.
However, if you’re older, if you’d prefer to learn certain skills in a more educational or training-focused environment, or if you didn’t get through USAJobs but don’t want to wait until the next federal round of hiring, I would recommend starting in a Conservation Corps. This is how most trail workers I’ve ever met got started, and if the vibes are anything to go by (data unavailable) I’d call it the standard pathway into any kind of trails or conservation-focused career today. Again, it’s how I got started, and if I were to do it all over again—even now knowing how to reliably get my applications through USAJobs—I would probably do it the same way.
The main reason has to do with the training you’ll receive in a Corps. As a federal agency trail worker, you’ll probably spend a few days early in various agency training courses on topics like chainsaws, crosscut saws, and wilderness first aid. In a Conservation Corps, meanwhile, you may spend anywhere between a few weeks and several months learning these skills. The staff of most Conservation Corps are usually educators as much as project work supervisors, and they’ll often have at least as much trails experience and wisdom to offer as the crew leader or trail program manager at a given agency, plus more time and patience to share it with you. In addition, Conservation Corps usually work closely with the agencies in the region to train the Corps crews that will work on their Forest or National Park on projects. I learned to fall trees from a Forest Service district supervisor known for being exceptionally good with a chainsaw. I learned how to use a crosscut saw from a similar legend on a different forest. Both seemed happy to spend a day in the field with us away from the bureaucracy, and both were extremely generous with guidance and advice.
Another benefit of the Corps is the format of those programs, most importantly being the number of coworkers and peers you’ll have there. Most large conservation corps run a handful of different crews, and you can expect to spend the season with at least a few large handfuls of like-minded, early-career trail workers to hang out with and share the experience. Your crew will probably be 4-8 people strong, giving you decent odds of finding at least one coworker who doesn’t drive you crazy on a long backcountry trip. A Forest Service district, meanwhile, can be a lonely place. Some district trail crews may consist of only two people, with few other seasonals with whom to form a social group in a remote mountain town.
Corps also provide a somewhat broader perspective on the conservation field than what you’ll see in a single agency unit. Once the season starts, your Corps crew will work on, usually, more than one National Park, National Forest, or state park. You’ll learn how these organizations all perform trail work slightly differently—for example, the special virtuosity of a National Park stone mason versus the wide-ranging, generalist duties of a National Forest backcountry crew—and ultimately which one you find most attractive. It will give you a good overview of not only the possibilities ahead of you, but also a professional network across many of these units. In the small world of trails, where everyone really does know almost everyone else, those introductions alone are usually worth a future job or two.
The Corps format also often includes training beyond how to wield tools and dig drains. AmeriCorps was meant to be the domestic Peace Corps, and something of that service-minded spirit remains in programming offered by some Corps on leadership styles, community volunteering, personal development, and more. The important upshot here is that Corps are a good resume builder in the event that you decide you don’t want to dig ditches for a living. One thing I’ll never forget, during my first interview with my MCC supervisor, was his response to my question on whether me being 30 and a former office worker would be unusual compared to their typical crew leader hire.
“Oh no,” he said, “the oldest I can remember we had was 36, and had a similar background as you.”
“And now,” he continued as if to encourage me, “he works for a defense contractor!”
You should reconsider if that’s your goal.
Lastly, a Corps will have some flexibility of starting positions that may suit your particular circumstances better than agency work. Both the Corps and the agencies will offer positions as either a Crew Leader or a Crew Member, but only the Corps will train you to be a Leader without any conservation prior experience. As a 30 year old with previous non-trail leadership experience on my resume, that’s what I did. My season was four months longer than that of my crew members’, and all of that time was spent training to lead them in the field. That in turn allowed me to get my first Forest Service job as a crew leader, which helped me earn annual promotions each season that might otherwise have taken a few years. So if you do have some leadership experience already, a Corps can take care of the trails stuff. If not, one year as a crew member is usually enough to come back to that same Corps the next year as a crew leader, if you find that ditch digging suits you.
There may be other less important advantages to starting out in a Corps, but there are disadvantages too. The top one is either pay or housing. Most newcomers are surprised to learn that the living stipend paid to AmeriCorps workers is not considered a “wage” by employment laws—and, sometimes, is actually below minimum. While this situation has improved since my year in Montana Conservation Corps, a quick search turns up Corps crew member stipends as low as $250 a week. Such wages are undeniably hard to live on, making housing in a new area extremely hard to find. The only reason I might consider housing the larger of these disadvantages is that most outdoor gateway towns around the country are in the midst of an extreme housing affordability crisis that stresses even well-paid workers in those areas.
Granted, Corps life often presents ways around this. Many conservation workers are perfectly happy to live in cars, camper vans, or tents on public campgrounds during the minority of days each month that they are not at work in the backcountry. Before I moved to Montana for my Corps season, five other crew leads and I rented a three-bedroom apartment together and shared bedrooms college dorm-style; the rental company said it had done the same for other Corps workers before. AmeriCorps wages also often entitle you to public services like food stamps and food banks—admittedly its own ironic commentary on AmeriCorps poverty wages, but extremely helpful. (I’m not sure if the increased stipends in some Corps now disqualify those workers.) The Corps, like the agencies, also pays for your food while you’re at work in the woods, which on a backcountry crew like mine was most of the summer. Those with student loans can also pause their payments for the length of their AmeriCorps term. Ultimately, trail work life is pretty cheap, but each person’s financial situation will be different.
The other disadvantage, to me, is a bit more ideological. Today, a vast amount of work done by our public lands agencies, at every level, is done by volunteers. While this is admittedly a testament to the love and devotion our public lands inspire in scores of people, including Conservation Corps servicemembers, it’s also a result of a long history of eroding public services. The land management agencies’ budgets have shrank considerably for decades. The Forest Service alone has half as much staff today as they did 20 years ago, despite the dawning recognition of its crucial role in wildfire management and climate adaptation. In both a Corps and an agency district you will witness the disheartening effects of chronic budget cuts and staff shortages on conservation. AmeriCorps and trail volunteers are vital, somewhat emergency strategies to compensate for these shortages, but you wouldn’t want to structure an agency around that strategy. We need drastically more professional trail and conservation workers in the agencies, or soon the newly-trained Corps workers will have no worthwhile public service careers to pursue.
What you will find in almost every federal land agency district is a sense of service and obligation at least as strong as the national service ethos of the Corps. The people in those agencies today, for the most part, endure the hardships and low pay of their professions out of a deep belief in public land management. Our public lands, I think most will agree, deserve effective public stewardship and adequate public resources—at least as much as we give to the military or fossil fuel companies. As grateful as we must be for the Corps, conservation’s dependence on their structurally underpaid labor is, at best, contrary to the very notion of public land management. At worst, it’s an affirmation of private industry’s decades-long scheme to undermine and abolish it. So that is something to think about.
If you’re still with me after that, there is another possible ideological objection. Trail work is an immensely skilled trade: it combines carpentry, landscaping, logging, masonry, rigging, horsemanship, mechanics, and heavy machinery, plus the unique knowledge and skills of trail work itself. One former supervisor once told me that practically no one is a true expert at trail work because there is simply so much to learn, and so many ways of building a trail. Conservation Corps, as I’ve said, are currently the primary training and feeder programs our country uses to produce trail workers. The question is: should they be? If an aspiring carpenter or plumber has opportunities for extensive, well-paid apprenticeships to gain the expertise required of their trades, why not trail workers too? If those trades have unions, with their apprentices included, shouldn’t trail workers have them too?
Certainly AmeriCorps national service has its place. Conservation Corps are enriching, useful, and extremely fun—at least as fun as an equal amount of college. They are ideal in their current form for a certain type of person. For others, though, they can be a struggle, or even an impossibility. They do sometimes reflect various forms of inequality that pervade the conservation field and nonprofit sector as a whole. To their credit, almost every Corps I or any of my friends have experience with is run by people who understand these challenges, and the Corps themselves mostly take a staunchly progressive stance in their policies regarding race, gender, sexuality and accessibility, purposefully, to address those inequalities in the conservation field. They’re imperfect, but so’s everything else. The point however is to change it.
I’ll leave you with a few bits of advice.
Take care of your body. It’s your livelihood now. Notice I did not say, “get in shape.” Trails is not always a mountain endurance sport, and it is not a career limited to only freaks of athletic nature. I’ve seen children do good trail work, along with the elderly and people who are not particularly fast hikers. Unless you have a disability or illness that preclude this kind of work, like I do now, you can likely do trail work. Of course if you’re excited for the endurance aspect you may already know you can crush miles on a trail crew. But what I mean by taking care of your body is, do not sacrifice your body to this job. Many people who ask me about getting into trail work have not any done blue- or green-collar work before and haven’t met people with no knee cartilage, a ruined back, hearing loss or crushing injuries. The title of trail worker badass isn’t worth any of these things. As my MCC supervisor said, “There is no such thing as a conservation emergency,” and, well, it’s true for trails. The good news is trail work in both the Corps and the agencies comes with certain rights and safeguards courtesy of OSHA and various workplace “wellness” programs. Whether or not your supervisors have heard of them or practiced them before, take advantage of them. Use time off and file workers’ compensation claims.
Become some kind of naturalist. I’ve met too many trail workers who can’t identify the species of tree they cut out of the trail or the species of grass they kill with a shovel. Admittedly I tend to exaggerate this number, but only due to the wider ecological ignorance of American society at large. If you’re reading this thinking, “Why would anyone become a trail worker if they didn’t like trees,” you’re good. But if you’re thinking, “I’m here to hike, not study biology,” this message is for you. The best way to improve even the spectacular outdoor experience of trail work is to learn a few things about what you’re seeing out there. Those places, after all, are in grave danger. More of it is lost each passing year. Trail work will be a period of your life that takes you closer to the precious diversity of living things on Earth than many people will ever get. Learn some trees and plants, download the birding apps, read a book on natural history or geology or foraging. It’s not going to come through osmosis on long hikes, but the work you put in will be extremely worth it.
Do not skimp on boots. Trail work boots is another topic that could take up a whole essay to explain, so I’ll leave that for another time. But trust me, you do not want to skimp on boots.
Finally: consider other options. Trail work is a wonderful experience, and a fine job. Moreover, it’s a good job, a useful job: trail workers build and maintain the infrastructure that allows millions of people to find nature, enjoy solitude and adventure, and imagine a world not filled with concrete and traffic. This, to say the least, is in contrast to a great variety of jobs out there. Bullshit jobs. I can’t help but think that this is one of the main reasons people ask me about how to get into trail work. They sense, as I did when I started, that it would be more meaningful than whatever line of work they’d chosen, or went to school for, or unaccountably found themselves in.
Why reconsider, then? Simply because there are so many ways to create and pursue meaning in the world. Look around. What is it that you most want to do? What are your dreams? What do you wish you saw in your daily life, in your community, or in the world that you don’t see now? Maybe your answer to all these is already “trail work.” That’s how I felt when I accepted my first job at Montana Conservation Corps, for the record—until, all of a sudden, I found myself hesitating.
As I was packing up my things in my final week at my old job, I second guessed my decision. Why was I uprooting my life, leaving my friends and family, giving up my privacy, moving across the country, and taking a huge pay cut to do backbreaking labor? Was it just to see mountains? Mountains stood just hours away in New Hampshire and New York. Was it to find more happiness at work? I might hate trail work, or my coworkers, or all of Montana. Was I trying to prove something to myself? Probably. Was I trying to fix myself? Ah.
One day I spent an evening writing it all down. I pushed back on the plan. I could have adventures here, I thought; I could commit more fully to my outdoor pursuits; I could learn more flora and fauna where I already live and go deeper into the local outdoor community. I could take up my creative pursuits again, become an activist again, do the much harder work that’s needed in places less protected and less loved than national parks and forests. A change of location and scenery would not fix me, and I’d tried it enough times by then to know. I put these reasons next to the highlights in a list of pros and cons. When I counted them up, the list said not to go.
There’s no shortage of good, necessary work to do in the world, and so much of it remains undone. Many of us at some point glimpse the discouraging reality of our time and feel helpless to change any of it. From that position, the best option can look like escape. And one could do worse at escaping than by joining a trail crew. A temporary escape, certainly, but what other kind is there? But we are also not as helpless as we may feel. Our capacities have never been measured, Thoreau wrote, nor can we judge what we may do by precedent, so little has been tried. But what haven’t I tried yet? I thought, mulling over the list. So I went to Montana and became a trail worker.
Resources
Having said all that, here are some more resources to consult to get started.
Writing an Effective Federal Resume, U.S. Department of Interior
How to Get A Job in Trails, Trail Crew Stories
Tips for Applying for Federal Jobs, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
Find A Corps, The Corps Network — List of state conservation corps
American Trails Job Board — Trail worker professional organization job search tool
~
Good luck, and have fun.
