Rim Trail volunteers love their jobs
by John Trent, Outpost contributor
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Truckee students in great outdoors |
"Sure we get paid," Stuart says. "The old saying among the volunteers is that the Forest Service pays us $50 an hour in satisfaction."
Stuart, a Galena High School counselor who first started working on the Rim Trail about seven years ago, says the sense of creating something that will last well beyond the lives of those who built the Trail motivates nearly every Rim Trail volunteer. It has to. The organization is strictly volunteer and non-profit. Although the Forest Service provides some logistical, planning and permit support - as well as technical advice on how to build trail and remove rock, the actual work is done for free by volunteers such as Stuart.
One of the responsibilities of Tahoe Rim Trail volunteers is the maintenance of trails such as this section of the Watson Lake loop near Brockway Summit. Photo by John Trent. |
"It's bigger than all of us," Stuart says of the trail. "Even if you only build a foot of trail, it means the trail is one foot closer to completion - and that's one foot more people can use this summer or next fall."
Stuart says volunteers almost always prefer trailbuilding, or "trailblazing," as he calls it, to trail maintenance. Unfortunately for the trailblazers, the trail's 16-year progression has meant less trail in recent years to build, and more trail to maintain as the Rim Trail has had to deal with a multitude of federal, local and state agencies whenever a new section of trailbuilding is proposed.
Rim Trail work crews, usually in groups of 10 or 12, are dispersed along the trail each summer to either create new trail or maintain or repair winter damage on sections that have already been established. Crew leaders such as Stuart take volunteers into preseason trailbuilding workshops and teach them the essentials, including how to handle pick and shovel, how to ensure the trail is a uniform two feet wide as well as the basics of surveying and working in trail teams.
"In some years, the groups have built as much as six or seven miles of trails," Stuart says. "A lot of those were easy or pre-existing. Now, it can take a crew a week to do 100 yards. It can be slow going sometimes."
Even with the slow going, says Rosie Kimes, a longtime Rim Trail member and veteran crew leader, there are few activities equaling the sense of satisfaction after a day of work on the Rim Trail.
"We're all there because we like the same things,"says Kimes, whose lives not far from a mile of trail she and husband Chuck adopted near Spooner Summit. "We'll work ourselves to death for a whole day and go out dirtier than anybody youíve ever seen. I like to think that when weíre done with the 150 miles of trail, really, thatís only the beginning of this project.
"There will still be 150 miles of trail for all of us to maintain - sort of a way of life, and a wonderful challenge for all of us."
posted Dec. 16, 1997
Copyright 1997 Nevada Outpost
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