Patrol

And a brief introduction

That morning I watched the sun rise over the Mahoosucs into a clear sky. The light and the fresh, humid air gave an edge to the alpenglow on the peaks, and it was harder than usual to try to separate the vermillion from the champagne and robin’s-egg blue. Even the sky itself seemed to contain more gold than blue; blue was reserved for the more distant layers of mountains tumbling east into the deep haze over western Maine. I could see for miles from the high point on this commute, a steep hill on U.S. Route 2 outside of the town of Gorham, New Hampshire. Below everything else, the clouds stirred sleepily in the ravines and river valleys.

Continuing down into the fog, US-2 became Main Street, passing the motels, hotels, McDonalds, ice cream and gift shops, ATV rental places, the red-brick-colonial Subway, and the less visibly prosperous and bustling buildings of the hardware store, church, school, and town hall. I turned right at the quadrangular brewery, passed tall pines and second homes on Route 16 South, and finally slowed as I came to a quadrangular sign. It read Androscoggin RANGER STATION, WHITE MOUNTAIN National Forest. I parked next to the only other non-government car in the lot—my boss’s—and signed my name in the logbook by the door. Jamie Tommins, Rec.

There’s something I want to clarify here. Yes, my entry that day said “Rec.” (For “recreation.”) My official job title says “Rec,” and Rec is my department. But saying that my job is “Rec” would be misunderstood on nearly all of the ten or so National Forests I have worked on—misunderstood to mean “developed rec,” which, if I had to sum up, means places with parking. When other USFS personnel ask me what my job is, I simply say, “trails,” and all is understood. Here on the Andro, I lead the trail crew.

In my experience, most people who hike enough to call the activity “hiking” are at least vaguely aware of the existence of trail crews. They mostly know, or at least sense, that the winding paths they follow through the woods must have been laid out intentionally, and that keeping them there requires more than their own repeated footsteps. (Though I’ve also heard grown men ascending a pristine rock staircase in New Hampshire ponder whether humans or nature had put it there.) But even in the wake of the post-COVID outdoor rec boom, which brought new attention to the plight of neglected recreation infrastructure and underfunded agency departments, the world of trail work remains obscure. So, what exactly does a trail crew do? We build, fix, and otherwise maintain hiking (and biking and equestrian) trails. That’s good enough for now.

And one more thing before I continue: welcome to my newsletter, Patrol. It’s about a lot of what I’ve described so far—my job in the United States Forest Service, Department of Agriculture; the seasonal nature of my job, its perks and challenges; the beautiful area described not-so-beautifully in my opening paragraph, known officially (by certain agencies and nonprofits) as the Northern Forest, or by locals as the North Country; and whatever else I feel like. Since I couldn’t talk myself out of writing this brief introduction, I’m making this one kind of a double-feature. Moving on to that.

I dropped off my bag in the dispersed recreation office, a cluttered room decked with old maps, old agency guidebooks, and other papers, kept less for reference than storage. With ten minutes to spare, I put a pot of coffee on and prepped my lunch in the office kitchen. At 0700 sharp my crew member arrived, and almost as soon as we were both sitting down our boss appeared in the door. Another typical day. “Morning,” he said, taking the room’s third chair. “Slight change of plans.”

The previous week, my crew member (who along with others mentioned here I probably just won’t name) and I had finally finished our district’s main project this season: repairing a heavily damaged, mile-long stretch of the Appalachian Trail on its descent from Mount Washington, the tallest peak in the northeast. Boss hadn’t seen the results yet, and we’d been waiting for a good weather window to head up there together and review our work. Now, on this rare bluebird day on the summit, someone deep in the bureaucracy had called him to a last-minute Zoom meeting. Boss, a 14-season backcountry worker who I think could have gladly packed his desk and computer on his own back to get outside, looked slightly incredulous as he spoke. “Pick a trail and go on patrol,” he said.

Patrol

On our district, when the plan has fallen through, the main work has been finished, or we just can’t think of anything else to do, there’s always patrol. Patrol is one of the things that everybody in trail work does at one point or another—possibly the only thing. A crew in Montana, for example, and one in New Hampshire may spend whole seasons touching nothing but timber and rock, respectively, building structures virtually unknown to one another, but chances are they’ll both conduct at least a few patrols. So what is patrol? It’s work on the move—a backpack, some heavy tools, and a walk (usually) up a trail. It’s the essence of trail work, our bread and butter.

Patrol works like this. On any trail through the woods, three things are happening pretty much all the time. Vegetation is growing into the open corridor of the trail; erosion is removing or otherwise damaging the trail’s exposed soil, or “tread”; and trees, bless them, are cratering into the ground. Left unchecked, this entropy will sooner or later erase the trail from the landscape. On patrol, we beat these processes back. We cut away, or “brush,” the encroaching vegetation, apply axe or saw to any trees blocking the path, and manipulate the soil in ways to lessen or withstand the impacts of erosion. When we’re finished, the trail, however briefly, looks the way it’s supposed to.

Perhaps the image you have in your head right now is exceedingly rugged, something not too far from people with machetes hacking and tearing their way through suffocating wood and vines. I don’t know what trail work is like in El Yunque, but where I’ve worked it’s generally a lot more meticulous than that. There are numbers involved: specifications for the trail opening’s width and height (called our “corridor"); the angle, depth, and pitch of a drainage ditch; percentage grades for digging outslope, backslope, and so on. Rough, jagged cuts left along the trail are considered sloppy and unprofessional. Clippings and other debris are piled up out of sight. When we come up to a tree branch blocking passage, we look for the subtle, raised collar of wood where it grows from the trunk, which contains, so to speak, the tree’s own cut-healing first-aid kit. Only there do we cut it. No damage to the tree—and more importantly to us, no unsightly stub.

“Patrol?” I hear some of my trail friends asking. “We don’t ‘patrol.’” What am I—a ranger? Indeed, this is local vernacular. Before coming to work here on the White Mountain, I’d never gone “on patrol.” I had started doing trail work in the northern Rocky Mountains, in Montana and Wyoming. Out there, the kind of work I’m talking about was always called “log-out.” (As in: cut the logs out.) While out on log-out, however, we improved corridor and drainage, too. It’s the same thing. Later, a few weeks into my season here, one of our returners politely asked me what the hell I was talking about every time I said “log-out.” So for now, I’ve switched.

Just saying though

Why the difference? Perhaps it’s because here in the lush, rainy Appalachians, it isn’t blowdown but rather fast-growing brush that more immediately threatens to swallow up our trails. (In fact, genuinely big, urgent blowdowns are so rare here as to be almost newsworthy. We list them on a whiteboard.) Meanwhile, in the northern Rockies—the Absaroka Mountains, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—there’s what we called “beetlekill.” These are vast, gray forests of standing-dead trees, whole mountainsides even, whole watersheds of dead spruces, pines and firs, courtesy of some native pests and climate change. Out there, after winter or a bad storm, a mile of trail may be newly blocked by dozens of large, limby, tough, dry, tangled, stacked, interlocked, or otherwise compounded dead trees. In the horse country of the Rockies, this is a problem. Some districts in the Rockies have one or several log-out-only trail crews. I’ve patrolled trails where the entire corridor was defined by walls of sawn-through logs the height of a horsepacker, a dense understory of cut logs, from so many successive years of log-out. You don’t typically do much light brushing when you’re out on “log-out.”

Patrols may differ in other ways from region to region, crew to crew. On the Shoshone National Forest in Wyoming last year, we were a “backcountry” crew, which among other things meant that we camped out every night—or went “on hitch,” as we say in trails. Each of our log-outs were eight days long. Here in New Hampshire we do “day shots,” returning home every day. Others, again like ours on the Shoshone, patrol exclusively in wilderness, which means ditching the chainsaw for hand tools circa the Wilderness Act’s 19th-century baseline. Certain lucky crews patrol on horseback. I know of one crew out in Region 5 that does it with dirtbikes. It doesn’t matter; it’s all the same. The details and distinctions say more about the varied lives of trail workers than about our shared, ultimate purpose: to maintain the existence of a trail as it perpetually disappears. Show any hastily-trained and half-competent trail worker a trail in need of corridor and drainage work and they’ll know what to do.

Back in the dispersed rec office, our boss had returned to his desk, and my assistant and I looked down a printed spreadsheet of all the trails managed by the Androscoggin Ranger District. In the second column, “Maintained By,” fifteen or so trails were labelled as “USFS.” The rest were the last names of the volunteers in our district’s “Adopt-A-Trail” program. As “adopters,” they’ve agreed to perform 16 hours of patrol on their adopted trail, and in return they receive a free parking pass for the forest’s day-use fee areas. We train them in the basics of trail work, explain the specifications of our trail system, and after that, the trail is theirs to maintain. All three districts in WMNF have trail adopters, and many have been maintaining their adopted trail for several years. They tend to be local, or else have a lifetimes’ worth of White Mountain hiking under their belt, and thus tend to be passionate about our trails and the work of maintaining them.

You see them around the forest a lot if you hike as much as we all do. We’ve struck up many nice conversations after crossing paths with them out on other trails, 16 hours into a backpacking trip, say. They all say the same thing: patrol is fun. I agree with them. On patrol you move deliberately along the trail, be it on foot, horseback, unicycle, whatever. You aim to travel quickly enough to make a dent in the maintenance, and far enough to have truly gone somewhere; you move slowly enough to see the detail and specificity of the changing landscape; you stop frequently enough, and sporadically enough at each log, drain, or cluster of hobblebush, to find things you’d surely have missed if you hadn’t. The trail reveals itself to you in rain and shine, spring, summer and fall. (I’ve tried but haven’t yet come up with a good reason for them to keep us all on in the winter.) And all of this is your job. These trails depend on it—the popular, spectacular trails that everyone goes to, the short flatland trails you might unwisely decide to skip, the trails known only by locals far from the “hiking” scene, the trails nobody’s hiked even for maintenance in years. It’s shown me some of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life.

It’s satisfying work. So satisfying, you ask, that we don’t even need to pay people good government wages to go commune with the woods and trails? Unfortunately, even our best adopters usually can’t finish all of the work on their adopted trails in a year. Some things are above a volunteer’s pay grade, like dangerous trees, but it’s mostly just that there’s more than 16 hours of work to do. When the adopters are done, we’ll go patrol their trails too. All told we’ll patrol some 200 miles of trail. Picture 200 miles of all kinds of rugged New England terrain, passing through forest and crag, as the famous northeast hiking book puts it, with trees falling, hobblebush creeping, water and snowmelt delivering our soil to the distant ocean. No, whatever kind of trail work you’re doing, however short our list of deferred maintenance projects and fat our agency budgets may one day grow, the trails will never stop fading into oblivion. “It keeps us employed,” goes the old trail joke. Luckily it’s true.