We're a volunteer trail crew, about 25 people on the mailing list and eight to fifteen on any given Saturday, who "adopt" a set of trails in the ranger district a couple of hours from town. We work under a volunteer agreement with the Forest Service: the district's trail crew (three paid people for several hundred miles of trail, which tells you why volunteers exist) tells us what needs doing, lends us tools when we're short, and signs off on our work. We've been at it since 1994. This page is for our members, for people who want to join, and for anybody who's ever wondered who cleared that log off the trail.

We are not experts. We're teachers and nurses and a retired plumber and two college kids and a woman who runs a bakery and gets up at 3 a.m. on Fridays so she can be on the trail at 8 on Saturday. What we have is training, decent tools, a good working relationship with the district, and a certain stubbornness about drainage.

Trail work is done with a small number of hand tools, most of them older than anybody on the crew, and all of them dangerous if you're careless. Here's what's in the truck and what it's for.

Everything gets cleaned, dried and put back sharp at the end of the day. A dull tool is a dangerous tool because you swing it harder. Dana checks handles for cracks before every work day; a Pulaski head coming off mid-swing is the accident everybody's heard of and nobody wants to see.

8:00 a.m., trailhead. Sign the volunteer sheet (this is what covers you under the Forest Service agreement if you get hurt, so sign it). Safety talk: what we're doing today, where, what the hazards are, who's the first-aider, where the first-aid kit is, where the nearest phone is (usually the ranger station, a half hour away; nobody on the crew has a cell phone that works up there, and that's likely to stay true for a while). Tools handed out. Hard hats on.

8:30, the walk in. Anywhere from fifteen minutes to an hour and a half to the work site. Tools are carried on the downhill side, blade forward and down, with a good gap between people. If you trip, you throw the tool away from you and everyone else. We practice this. It looks silly. It's not.

9:30 to noon, work. A typical day is some mix of: clearing blowdown (bucking logs into pieces we can roll off the trail), brushing, cleaning out existing drains, building new water bars where the trail's washing out, and re-establishing tread where it's slumped downhill. We work in pairs or threes, at least a tool's length apart, and Dana or a crew lead walks the line checking work and checking people.

Noon, lunch. Sitting on whatever we just built. This is the best part of the day and the reason half the crew comes back.

12:45 to 3:00, more work. Usually the finishing: shaping and tamping, cleaning up the cut brush (scattered off-trail, cut side down, so it doesn't look like a brush pile), and a walk-through with the worst critic on the crew (Dana) to see whether water is actually going to go where we told it to.

3:00, tools counted, walk out. Tools counted again at the truck. We have never lost one. We have come close.

4:00 or so, the tailgate. The bakery woman brings the day-old bread. Somebody brings apples. We sit on the tailgate and argue about whether the water bar at the second switchback is at the right angle. It usually is. It's always been Dana's.

Bring: water (two quarts minimum, three in warm weather), lunch, long pants, long sleeves, boots with ankle support and a real sole, leather work gloves, rain gear, and eye protection if you have your own; we have loaner safety glasses and hard hats. Don't bring: shorts, sneakers, the dog (sorry), or a hangover.

Almost everything that goes wrong with a trail is water. A trail is a groove in a hillside, and a groove is what water looks for. If water runs down the trail instead of across it, it takes the dirt with it, the trail gets deeper, more water runs down it, and in a few seasons you have a rocky ditch that hikers walk beside instead of on, which makes a second trail, which becomes a second ditch. Most of what we do is convince water to leave the trail as soon as possible.

Outslope. The first line of defense. The tread (the surface you walk on) should tilt very slightly downhill, a few percent, so water sheets off the edge instead of collecting. When we re-establish tread with the McLeod, that's what we're shaping.

Water bars. A water bar is a barrier set into the trail at an angle, usually a peeled log or a line of rocks, that catches water running down the tread and turns it off the downhill side. The angle matters: around 30 to 45 degrees off the line of the trail, so the water turns but doesn't stop and pool. The bar is set into a trench so its top is just above the tread on the uphill side, with a drain dug out on the downhill end so the water has somewhere to go. Rock bars last longer than log bars; log bars are faster to build. Both need cleaning every year, because they fill with leaves and silt, and a full water bar is just a bump.

Drain dips and grade reversals. The newer thinking, which the district likes and so do we: instead of a barrier, reshape a short section of the trail into a shallow dip that drains to the side, with a little rise past it. Hikers barely notice it. Horses don't trip on it. Nothing to rot. Where we build new tread, we build these; where the old trail is already dug in, we build bars.

Culverts and puncheon. Where a small stream crosses, sometimes a rock-lined channel under the trail. Where the trail crosses a wet spot that can't be drained, a low boardwalk called puncheon. We've built two sections of puncheon in five years, and both took the whole crew most of a weekend.

The test is simple: after we build a drain, we pour a canteen of water on the trail above it and watch where it goes. If it goes off the trail, we're done. If it goes down the trail, we're not.

Five years, no serious injuries. We'd like to keep it that way. The rules:

1. Hard hat, gloves and eye protection any time tools are in use or trees are being cut. Long pants and boots always.
2. A tool's length, plus a step. Nobody swings a tool with anyone inside that circle. Before you swing, look. Say "swinging" if someone's close.
3. Tools carried downhill side, blade down. Handed, never tossed. Set down blade-down where nobody will step on them; a Pulaski lying in the grass edge-up is a trap.
4. Chainsaws: certified sawyers only, full gear, a swamper (helper) who stays clear, and everyone else two tree-lengths back. Crosscut: certified, two people, and the same clearance.
5. Blowdown is under tension. A tree lying across the trail is bent, pinned, or both, and when you cut it, it moves, sometimes fast. The sawyers read the log before they cut it. Everybody else stays back until they say.
6. Drink water before you're thirsty. We stop every hour whether or not anyone wants to.
7. Tell the crew lead about anything. Bad knee, bee allergy, blister, feeling dizzy. We'd rather send you to sit in the shade than carry you out.
8. First aid. At least one person on every work day holds a current first-aid card, and the kit goes to the work site, not the truck. The emergency plan, including the drive to the nearest phone, is on the sign-in clipboard every time.
9. Weather. Lightning means tools down and everyone off the ridge. We don't work in high wind because of falling limbs. We've called work days at 10 a.m. and gone for pancakes. Pancakes are also trail work, in a sense.

All Saturdays. Meet at the trailhead at 8:00 a.m. sharp; we'll wait until 8:15 for stragglers and then we're walking. Carpool information goes out by e-mail and phone tree the Wednesday before. Rain doesn't cancel; lightning does.

Winter is the off season; the trails are under snow and so are we. We start again in late April with the spring damage survey, when we walk every mile we've adopted and write down what the winter did.

Show up. That's most of it. E-mail Dana first so we know to expect you and can tell you where the trailhead is, and then come to a work day. Your first day you'll be paired with someone who's done it, you'll get the safety talk, and you'll spend the day on a McLeod or loppers, not a saw. Most people know by lunch whether it's for them.

What we need from you: you're 16 or older (under 18 with a parent along), you can walk a few miles with a tool and a pack, and you'll do what the crew lead says about safety without an argument. What we don't need: experience. We'll teach you. We taught everyone here.

If you'd like to do more, the district offers the first-aid class twice a year and the chainsaw and crosscut certification classes about once a year, and volunteers can take them. Ask Dana. We're always short of sawyers.

There is no fee and no dues. The Forest Service provides the agreement, the loaner tools and hard hats, and the occasional case of doughnuts from the district ranger, who is a good person and knows the way to a crew's heart.

Trails don't maintain themselves, and there's less money for them every year than there was the year before. In our district, three paid people are responsible for more trail than they could walk in a season, never mind fix. Without volunteers, the trails that get kept up are the ones near the highway, and the rest go slowly back to brush and gullies until somebody decides they're not trails anymore. We've watched it happen to one. We don't want to watch it happen to ours.

There's the practical side: a drained trail doesn't erode, a brushed trail doesn't get people lost, a cleared trail doesn't send hikers around the log and into the wildflowers. A good trail concentrates the traffic on one narrow strip of ground and leaves the rest alone. That's the whole idea of a trail.

And there's the other side, which is harder to put in a paragraph. You spend a Saturday building a rock water bar with three people you'd never have met, and it's ugly work and your back hurts, and then you pour the canteen on it and the water turns and goes off the hill exactly where you told it to. And that water bar will be there, doing that, for twenty years. Hikers will step over it and never see it. That's fine. We know.

Come out. Bring gloves.