Goat Rocks Wilderness
When I was in my twenties, I spent a few years working as an intern for the Student Conservation Association. My first internship started when I was about a month out of college - it was 2009 and as an Environmental Studies major, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do as a career. I’d moved home after graduation and one day while browsing for jobs I came across the SCA. I scrolled through the pages of internships in cool places across the country - I was qualified (I mean, internship) and I could go anywhere. I can’t remember what all I applied for, but my first interview was for an internship at Lake Clark National Park in Alaska. I left on my birthday and flew to Anchorage, Alaska. In Anchorage I met up with another park employee who took me grocery shopping - where I was going, there was no grocery store. Lake Clark NP is accessible only by small plane. There are no roads. Ok - I could write all day about my time in Lake Clark, and maybe I will eventually! But I’m really here to talk about a couple years later - I’d finished my internship at Lake Clark, moved to southern CA to work on a crew in the desert (I’ve written about that here), spent a summer working with high schoolers in Joshua Tree National Park, and then I got a call asking if I’d be interested in joining a crew working on the Pacific Crest Trail. They’d lost a member and needed another person. I didn’t think about it for long, I just said yes.
My first hitch with the trail crew we worked on the PCT in the Goat Rocks. We base camped at the top of the lift at White Pass Ski Resort and every morning, loaded up with our tools and hiked down the trail to areas that needed attention - as I remember we were mostly putting in check steps, both rock and log. Check steps serve the purpose of repairing a trail that has been ditched out by water damage. As the trail sinks, people tend to start making new trail braids to avoid walking in a ditch. Check steps are kind of like dirt dams. Put one in the trail and back fill it with dirt to raise the trail and also help protect from further water damage.
We got rained on a fair amount, which was not very enjoyable. But for the most part it was rewarding work in an extremely beautiful landscape. Check steps were always my favorite thing to do in trail work. For rocks steps we had to search for a nice rock, not too far from where we needed it, and then with the help of a rock bar and another person, move it to the trail. Log check steps were easier in some ways, though it did mean that there needed to be a somewhat freshly logged-out tree available. My favorite part was limbing the tree and then de-barking, smelling the fresh pine while I worked.
My crew when on to work the trail from WA to CA. Another favorite location was Killen Meadows, at the base of Mount Adams. We also worked a section in the Gorge, and finished out our season in the fall with work in southern CA. San Bernardino and Lake Arrowhead. Trail crew was rugged - it was hard, dirty work. We lived and worked outside - even our days off were often spent camping. We almost never separated from each other, since we only had two vehicles and the work was always in different locations. There were parts that I didn’t love about it, but honestly, they’re hard to remember.
All of that to say, check out my map of the Goat Rocks Wilderness. It’s a magical place.
