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Thursday, May 27, 2004 - Page updated at 09:30 P.M.

Dedicated volunteers hit the trail, scrambling to keep hikes safe

By Stuart Eskenazi
Seattle Times staff reporter

HARLEY SOLTES / THE SEATTLE TIMES

Washington Trails Association volunteer Julie Hudak fills in a ditch in the middle of the Old Sauk Trail, part of an effort to reroute a washed-out section near the Mountain Loop Highway.

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DARRINGTON, Snohomish County — A whooshing river provides background music for volunteers in work boots and hard hats who have hiked into the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest early on a weekday morning to replace a washed-out trail. If they don't do it, who will?

The same river hit a violent crescendo during last October's floods, ravaging a one-mile stretch of the Old Sauk Trail, a three-mile lowland forest pathway especially popular with families because it is easy to find, easy to hike and, with moss hanging off trees like curtains, easy to adore.

Old Sauk also is easy to take for granted — until it's gone. The old trail now leads to an abrupt dropoff into the depths of the rushing river. About 30 feet in from where the flood cut a new bank, the eight-member volunteer work crew shovels aside nature's trail of moss, bark, twigs, leaves and needles, following a line of wooden stakes the U.S. Forest Service had laid out along the forest floor. In just a couple of hours, the workers have dug to the hard soil beneath, clearing a two-foot wide swath. This is the start of a new Old Sauk Trail.

This spring and summer, volunteers with an appreciation for the outdoors will devote tens of thousands of hours to tending our hiking trails, picking up slack left by budget shortfalls.

"Our volunteers have helped stave off a crisis," says Elizabeth Lunney, executive director of Washington Trails Association, which last year inspired 1,800 volunteers to work almost 70,000 hours on 112 trails scattered throughout the state.

"Their work has kept the forests from becoming completely nonfunctional."

But volunteers can accomplish only so much. Trail advocates say last fall's floods, which damaged more than 100 miles of trail at Mount Baker-Snoqualmie, are pushing trail maintenance beyond the breaking point:

• While the Forest Service is asking Congress for $4.2 million to repair Mount Baker-Snoqualmie's damaged trails, so far, it has received just $100,000.

• The overall recreation budget for the forest has dipped — from $3.8 million in 1993 to $2.1 million in 2004.

• In 1990, the forest employed 50 seasonal workers for trail maintenance whose salaries were paid through appropriated dollars. This year, the forest employs five — and much of their job is to coordinate volunteer work crews.

The WTA's volunteer-trail-crew program was launched in 1993 to do secondary maintenance the Forest Service couldn't, but instead has become a primary resource for keeping trails clear, clean and safe for the public.

Dave Redman, Mount Baker-Snoqualmie's recreation budget coordinator, says the forest's trails are getting more attention now from a combined work force of volunteers and contractors than it ever did when Forest Service crews alone did the maintenance.

"But it's a lot flakier now," he says. "We can't always rely on volunteers to do the deep back-country trail work."

Trail-maintenance budgets for national parks have taken less of a hit than the national forests, but volunteers still are needed to keep the trails functional.

"I can't say enough good things about trail volunteers," said Carl Fabiani, trail-crew foreman at Mount Rainier National Park, where between 7,000 and 9,000 trail-volunteer hours are logged each year. "We work with a lot of groups and a lot of dedicated people who give a lot of time and make a lot of difference."

'It's fun being out here'

Bob LeDoux, 65, of Renton, is tending to Old Sauk where the old trail and the new one intersect. His task is to straighten a bend in the footpath so that hikers' eyes won't lead them onto the abandoned old trail and toward the river's precarious edge. In order to cut a new section of trail, he has to remove a patch of flowering bunchberry dogwood.

Digging his knees into the mud, he cuts and pulls at the groundcover's roots. After freeing the patch from the ground, he carries it to the side of the trail and transplants it over a bald spot.

"Without the support of volunteers, these trails wouldn't have a chance," says LeDoux, who retired from Boeing in 2000. "It's fun being out here. Sometimes it's really hard work, but I think hard work is a good thing. I'll do this for as long as my body will tolerate it."

LeDoux is a participant in WTA's "Thursday regulars" volunteer work crew, which has evolved out of a group of Boeing retirees who started it eight years ago. The Thursday regulars meet for breakfast before heading into the woods. On this morning, they say, the food beat the heck out of the service.

Pete Dewell, 74, a retired lawyer from Everett, is also a Thursday regular but doesn't restrict his volunteering to that day, saying he worked on 77 crews last year. Once an avid hiker, his rickety knees don't allow him to venture much into the woods for pleasure these days. But there he is, supine, pushing hard with feet to help roll a fat log farther to the side of the new trail he has helped dig. That can't be good for the knees.

"The quality of work that WTA volunteers do, you can't pay a contractor to do much better," Dewell says.

At Old Sauk, Forest Service personnel assessed the damage, sketched the reroute and, before volunteers started laying new trail, came in with chain saws to clear their path. Typically, Forest Service workers and contractors also take the lead in building bridges and other complicated structures.

"Some of the real technical work requires more expertise than the volunteers can give us," says Ron DeHart, Mount Baker-Snoqualmie spokesman. "We cannot put our volunteers in harm's way. A big issue for us is we're concerned we could be wearing out our volunteers."

But volunteers perform their share of complex work, acting as amateur civil engineers as they slope trails in perfect angles to promote optimum drainage.

When volunteers build a trail, they use hand tools and brute strength. On Old Sauk, while clearing the route for the new trail, volunteers came across an enormous tree stump resting in the middle of the path, above grade. After digging a trench around it, they had two options: let the Forest Service top the stump with a chain saw and then bury the remains beneath grade, or take the hard way out and remove the stump by hand. After persistent prying and trying, volunteer Jim Knoke somehow accomplished the latter.

"These volunteers are amazing," says Julie Hudak, 22, of Seattle, who plans to lead WTA volunteer work crews this summer. "They've gotten so much done in so little time."

A two-year commitment

The Forest Service estimates that for every dollar it contributes to WTA's volunteer program through grants it receives about five times that value back in work. But there remains a cost attached to training and supervising volunteer work crews.

At Olympic National Forest, where the trail maintenance budget also is in decline, volunteers help maintain some of the 270 miles of trail. Olympic officials prefer that volunteer groups commit to specific trails for at least a couple of years to minimize Forest Service costs for training and supervision, says Ken Eldredge, forest spokesman. One volunteer group of retirees who loved hiking the peninsula in their younger days has given back by adopting the popular Mount Ellinor and Mount Rose trails for at least the past 15 years.

"With volunteers taking care of those trails, we can take the money we have for maintenance and spend it on other trails," Eldredge says.

WTA has 60 different volunteer work trips scheduled in June. The trails span the state, and a few of the trips are back-country excursions lasting as long as one week. One of the most popular work parties is on Mount Si trail, near North Bend, which attracts more than 80,000 hikers each year. The State Department of Natural Resources, which maintains the four-mile trail that climbs 4,167 feet, is relying on volunteers to help repair it.

The department's recreation program budget, which is used for maintaining and operating 143 recreation sites and more than 1,100 miles of trail statewide, has decreased 40 percent since the 1997-99 biennium. The capital budget, used to fund improvements to recreation sites and trails, has decreased 73 percent.

But the national forest trails are considered to be in the most critical condition. At Mount Baker-Snoqualmie, last October's floods damaged 15 trails and 20 trail bridges. If Congress doesn't buck up, it will be left to volunteers to do what they can, when they can.

"If your job is to appropriate funds for trails and you realize that you're short of money but have a good thing going with volunteers doing trail maintenance for you, what's to stop you from continuing to short the funding?" asks Mike Owens, a WTA staffer who led the volunteer crew on Old Sauk.

"I would like to see the people holding the purse strings support our volunteers by adequately funding the Forest Service and the National Parks."

Stuart Eskenazi: 206-464-2293 or seskenazi@seattletimes.com

For volunteer work-crew information:

Washington Trails Association

Protects hiking trails and takes volunteers out to maintain

them.

206-625-1367 trail_teams@wta.org www.wta.org

The Mountaineers

Dedicated to the preservation, exploration, and enjoyment of outdoor and wilderness areas.

206-284-6310 clubmail@mountaineers.org www.mountaineers.org

Volunteers for Outdoor Washington

Promotes volunteer stewardship of the state's natural and recreational resources.