With Our Own Eyes

Witnessing climate change and disaster from the trail

I would have preferred if the images of catastrophic flooding in the southern Appalachians this weekend didn’t look so familiar. For one thing, it felt like I’d just been down there, driving the Great Smokies Expressway into Asheville on my way home from seeing my old trail buddy in Cherokee National Forest this summer. The downtowns submerged by frothing brown floodwaters looked just like ones I’d passed through on my winding drive home, nestled under usually reassuring green mountains in an impossibly rugged world of narrow ridges and valleys. The highway I took out of Asheville on that drive is now gone. I remember my first visit to the city many years before, its hills and floodplain, the encircling fortress of mountains visible from downtown. In fact, my buddy in Chattanooga had a mostly uneventful storm, shielded by the same mountains that elsewhere concentrated the destruction.

It was familiar for another reason too. A few months after I moved from Burlington, VT to start my trails job in Washington, my community back east was hit by “The Great Vermont Flood of 2023.” I was working for a maple sugarmaker there, commuting from the city to our sugarbushes down the Winooski and Lamoille river valleys. A friend of mine there, a videographer, posted a drone shot of the entire Winooski floodplain replaced by a lake. Friends in Montpelier navigated the city in kayaks, and others who farmed during the summer lost their whole seasons’ crops. Across the state, thousands of homes and properties were destroyed. It was the worst flood since Hurricane Irene in 2011, and it wasn’t even a hurricane.

It can feel ridiculous to see such immeasurable destruction to life and property and wonder how the trails held up. Yet the troubled mind reaches for familiar things. After the Great Vermont Flood, I asked another friend who still worked at the sugarbush how the ATV trails and mountain roads looked after the storm. “Honestly they held out fine in the flooding,” he said. “I mean the roads are getting pretty bad in areas, but not really from the storm. Just from poor maintenance.” Sounds about right, I said.

I started this newsletter to write about trails and trail work, but often I find it hard to stay on trail, so to speak, and not bushwhack far from my own expertise. Granted, most people can’t help letting their thoughts wander when they’re on a trail. In easier times, following a trail into nature is a time-tested way to raise big questions, especially about our relationship to the natural world. But in our era of climate change and ecological collapse it just as often feels like a head-on collision.

The first place I saw the destruction was the Northern Rockies, on forests in Montana and Wyoming. I worked among millions of acres of burn scars where meadows grew under the blackened spires of dead, burned trees in every direction. I saw whole mountain ranges of “beetlekill,” vast gray forests of dead pine, spruce, and fir trees from supercharged pest outbreaks. I read warnings about toxic algae blooms, new to those mountains, in alpine lakes no longer cold in the summers. There was the devastating rarity of living whitebark pine, succumbing everywhere to blister rust but worsened by the warming alpine climate and the reach of hotter fires. One day we met scientists hiking with a class of students to chart the vanishing glaciers of the Wind River range.

On the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire, our first week of the season began with three unusually large fires for our area. Later, our project atop the famously stormy Mount Washington lasted a month longer than expected simply because it never rained. Rain would appear in the forecast, but somehow not in the sky. Most of New England remained in a multi-year drought that season. Still, one day I led our forest’s hydrologist to a planned trail construction project in a wetland for his input on the environmental review. (He opposed it.) “Did you know,” he said at one point on the hike, “that the White Mountains have not seen a thousand-year flood since European colonization?”

In the Washington Cascades, even our longtime trail supervisor was shocked by the red crowns of dying mountain hemlocks on the highest slopes in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. Snowpack that winter had lagged the historical average until a few fortunate late-season storms, but it melted out too early to prevent drought conditions through the summer. Our maps showed glaciers which existed now only in history, and commutes through Stevens Pass and the North Cascades showed entire mountainsides of rainforest reduced to ash and rock. My last hitch before getting COVID and Long COVID took place under a heat dome, and I got heat exhaustion at 5,000 feet.

On more than one occasion, seeing such destruction in our wild landscapes made trail work feel trivial, if not outright indulgent. Sure, we did our best to build trails “sustainably,” which in trails is closer to resiliently, i.e. better able to withstand erosion and require less maintenance over time. Environmental review ensured our projects didn’t trample endangered species or fragile habitat, and the Wilderness Act constrained our work impacts. Our trails certainly helped people discover the wilderness, which we hope can impart the values needed to protect it. But in the grand scheme of the crisis we face it’s all pretty small potatoes.

And yet sometimes in my despair I think: all we have is small potatoes. If you follow the progress of this storm in the news, you may have noticed the howling silence of our political leaders about the need to address the root causes of the ecological crisis. Where is the plan to end our reliance on fossil fuels? It’s not in our current president’s record, which helped produce record amounts of American oil and gas, or in his likely successor’s, or needless to say in Trump’s. Most Americans, by far, accept the reality of climate change and the need to address it, but even the nominally pro-climate action Democratic party continues to break promises and water down the policies necessary to do so. It goes without saying that this situation needs to change, and we all must continue to fight for comprehensive policy. But at the risk of my realism sounding too much like pessimism, it simply does not look like a comprehensive moonshot, WWII, New-Deal-style climate mobilization—the big potato—is going to happen anytime soon. (Though it’s not like we don’t have the money.)

In the meantime, and with little choice, I dream of what else we can do. One result of seeing the climate crisis firsthand is the realization that there’s work to be done virtually everywhere you look. This is the hopeful corollary of the “penalties of an ecological education,” as Aldo Leopold wrote: the truth that we are not alone in this world of wounds. Each year, as climate disasters blot out the map of unaffected regions, more and more people have come to understand that nowhere is safe from the climate crisis. And from there it might not take much convincing to get them to do something about it.

Obviously I can’t say for certain what that work might entail where you live, only for mine. Luckily, much of that work here is already underway by many dedicated and brilliant people, as it probably is in your region. Those folks also tend to hold the opinion that much of the work is simple and eminently possible to do. All I need to do is to lend a hand. Projects like backyard native plant gardening for endangered wildlife, urban watershed restoration for storm resilience, local campaigns to fund and expand public transit—these things are local, small in scale, but far from trivial. When the scale of the crisis is as large as what we’re facing, even comparatively small acts assume great importance. During the Great Vermont Flood, the residents who provided rescue and mutual aid to their flooded neighbors were small acts compared to the effectiveness of FEMA and federal relief funds. But they got there first, and they saved lives. Residents along the Gulf Coast and in the Southern Appalachians have been doing the same since the storm.

I don’t want to sound too sanguine about the situation we’re in. The fact remains that without a massive, coordinated national and international response to the climate crisis, the future ahead is grim. The present is already intolerable, unconscionable. But at least it’s also undeniable. We can all see with our own eyes that we live in the midst of an ongoing disaster. When it threatens to level your town or community, there’s not much to do but get to work.

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I haven’t had time to dig up any mutual aid funds or disaster relief orgs at work in the South right now yet, but I’ll update this post soon with some links and send a note to subscribers when I can. Solidarity with all the readers and their loved ones in the path of Helene.