Trail Party

This week I discovered the Washington Trails Association (WTA). WTA organizes groups of volunteers to maintain existing trails and build new trails on public lands throughout the state. Today we worked on Taylor Mountain in the Issaquah Alps, a line of foothills that point from Seattle's Eastside into the Cascades. Most of the land on Taylor Mountain is owned by the county and is designated as a place for "passive recreation," including mountain biking, horseback riding, and, of course, hiking.

Playing in the dirt

WTA is helping to expand the trail system here. This means that WTA volunteers get to play in the mud, haul rocks around, take out aggressions on bystanding vegetation, laugh a bunch, and generally have a great time in the great outdoors. We gather at the trailhead at 8:30 (after driving for an hour toward a Mt. Rainier whose snows are tinged pink by the dawn) and work, more or less, until 2:30. A bucket of candy is passed around at 10:30, picnic lunch at noon, and breathers as often as you wish. Hard hats are in fashion (and if you join five work parties, you get a personalized one of your very own as a self-serving thank-you gift). The WTA supplies the tools—shovels, grub hoes, rakes, loppers, buckets—and once the crew leader outlines the plan, we get to work cutting brush, moving dirt, uprooting shrubs, redistributing rocks, and digging ditches. Turns out there's a lot more to building a durable, water-resistant trail than trimming a path through the underbrush.

At the end of the work day, we gather in the parking area, muddy and spent but in the high spirits of those who have completed a physically demanding but deeply satisfying task. Someone produces a Coleman cooler of steaming-hot washcloths for our hands and faces, and someone else pours plastic cups of hot apple cider to go with a bin of chocolate chip cookies. On these sunny springtime days, we stand around chatting for as long as possible before returning to the real world and its rush-hour traffic.

"Boot-sucking mud-holes"

I've joined two work parties so far. On Tuesday, we began with an abandoned road whose gravel surface had turned into a mud-clogged drainage ditch. (The WTA website uses the term "boot-sucking mud-holes" to describe trails like this one in their pre–work-party state.) By afternoon, we had prodded it into a somewhat wider dirt path edged with the suggestion of a rocky gutter.

The ten-person crew consisted almost entirely of retired men. Flannel and suspenders were conspicuous. One WTA veteran, a small man with a round, grinning, boyish face, had just turned 80 and worked just as hard as I did on the trail. Most of the crew had gotten to know each other through years of trail work and entertained me by trading wisecracks and wordplays and ridiculous stories (including something about "old-growth salmonberries").

The forest transformed

Today (Friday) I returned to the same stretch of trail. Trail crews had been out during the two intervening days, and it was amazing to see the trail's transformation. Where there had been a sketched-out gutter and a rough path, now there existed a well-formed and rockless canal next to a cobbled road. The walkway had been lined with watermelon-sized rocks and filled with fist-sized rocks to give it the appearance of a quaint country lane. A future crew would smooth a bed of sandy soil on top of the rocks to create an even, solid surface that drains instead of turning to mud. The trick is to remove any organic matter, which absorbs water, decays, and turns to muck. This painstakingly built but hidden structure underlies all trails where there is risk that water might seep into the trailbed.

Through the woods

Our job today was to create a gentle switchback from the cobbles through the forest to another trail section downhill. We ploughed through salmonberry bushes and blackberry tendrils, raked away many inches of leaf litter, pried large rocks out of the underlying soil, hacked at inconvenient roots, and moved a lot of dirt. My task was to shovel dirt that others had loosened into a satisfyingly large mound.

This time the women outnumbered the men on the 16-person crew. One sported French-tipped nails, another wore a fashionable hat when her head wasn't covered by her green plastic helmet. Another proudly displayed curly white hair and looks like she could have retired years ago but still kept busy as a physical therapist and avid hiker.

I'll ache tomorrow, but now I feel great.