Patrolling isn’t that hard. An eight hour day of hiking the trails and either clearing blowdown trees with ax or chainsaw, or grubbing out ditches with a hoe generally gets old pretty quick. So you would think. Spending that much time with one other person (we go out in pairs each day) leads to endless interesting talk. One day firefighting is discussed. The next, the classic film The Big Lebowski. Still another, religion and most of its intricacies. Oh yeah, we do some work too.
Blowdowns can range from a few saplings to be worked through with clippers (affectionately called clippies), old birch that an ax can handle, or a hundred-year old beech that a chainsaw must tackle. Once the tree is chopped into manageable sizes, they are thrown off the trail, and hikers can continue through unhindered by logs in their path.
As simple as it sounds, this is a very important job. For one, it lets the new crew members get acquainted with the trail, and gets them into shape (although they should all be, I was certainly out of breath on more than a few hikes). Also, when encountered with a blowdown, many hikers just beat their own path around. When a harmless bushwhack becomes a bootleg trail that’s hard to distinguish from the actual path, erosion and other damages can occur.
There’s only eight of us and over a hundred miles of trail, but we cover almost all of it in a few weeks, cleaning drainages and cutting away fallen trees. There’s nothing like swinging an ax and cutting through your first blowdown, or running up a section of Owls Head, eager to hit the next drainage. And of course, what my crew mate told me as we lunched up on Castle Ridge still rings true as ever:
“Can you believe we get paid to do this?”
- Benzo
