Get to Know our Recreation Ranger
What was your path to becoming a Recreation Ranger?
In the winter of 2024, I was ski patrolling at Stowe and I was looking for employment opportunities that would bring me back to Maine. My girlfriend sent me a link to the job application and it seemed interesting enough to apply. I’d never heard of the High Peaks Alliance and I was interested in learning more about it. The more I learned, the more enamored I became with the mission of Alliance. I was lucky enough to be selected after a couple of interviews and it’s been a rewarding ride ever since.
What drew you to the High Peaks?
I was first introduced to Maine and the High Peaks region when I thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail back in 2019. I came through here and was just blown away by the scenery and the mountains, lakes, and forests here as well as the friendliness of the people. After the trail, I spent some time in Washington and Colorado before returning in 2021 to lead trail crews for the Maine Appalachian Trail Club.
In the winters I worked at Saddleback and fell in love with the tight-knit community on the mountain. Although it took some getting used to after skiing several seasons in the Cascades, Saddleback made up for the comparatively low snowfall with its mom-and-pop vibe and fanatically devoted fan base.
Memorable Moment
Could you walk us through a particularly memorable stewardship project that you’ve managed?
During my first season with the Maine Appalachian Trail Club, I was leading our trail crew in building a pretty technical stone staircase right near the Height of Land on the AT, right down Route 17. Immediately trail south, like you’re going down towards Bemis.
It was very steep terrain and was suffering a lot from runoff and erosion on the steep slope. There was a fair amount of rock there, but not a whole lot, so you had to get pretty creative with what we were using for stairs. There were times when there wasn’t a whole lot of soil on the slope to set rocks into to form the staircase. We had a pretty tough time constraint to deal with as well. That was probably the hardest my crew worked ever that whole season, and I was proud of what we accomplished.
One of the cool things about doing trail work on the AT, especially up here at a popular hiking destination, is you know what you’ve put in the ground is going to be stepped on by thousands and thousands of people. It’s humbling and it also gives you the motivation to work hard because it has to withstand all that traffic in addition to the wild weather that we get up here.
Teachable Moment
What lesser-known aspects of recreation management do you wish more people understood?
The sheer amount of hard work that goes into recreation management, specifically involving trail maintenance. A lot of your trails are maintained by hand without machinery. So many people don’t know this. I encountered this countless times on the Appalachian Trail when I was leading trail crews.
People were just blown away that these big staircases, retaining walls, drains, and water bars were hand-built. It’s an insane amount of work and it takes time too. People have this perception that when you make a trail, you just basically flag a line through the woods and slap the ground a little bit with tools and that’s that.
There’s so much more involved than that. There’s establishing the correct grade, establishing erosion management features, and avoiding ecologically sensitive areas. There’s so much thought placed into creating trails and maintaining them is so much work.
I think a lot of people don’t know about all the organizations that do this. They just don’t know they exist. Like the Conservation Corps, for example, most people think that was just something that happened during the New Deal and just disappeared after World War II. But there’s conservation corps that still exist and there’s a whole lot of them. Sadly, so many high school kids and college students don’t know about these opportunities. It’s important to get the word out and offer meaningful and adventurous service opportunities for our country’s youth.
Season by Season
How do seasonal changes influence your approach to recreation management?
Maine is truly a four-season state. Unlike other places I’ve worked in the past, particularly down south in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, you experience REAL winter up here.
You try to crank out as much work as possible in the summertime, taking advantage of the abundant daylight and comfortable temperatures. You want to capitalize on getting in as much fieldwork as you can. That advantage we have of the amount of daylight in the summer this far north turns into a disadvantage when you get closer to winter. As you know, darkness comes early in mountainous areas of high latitude in the shoulder seasons and winters.
With the winters being as harsh as they are this far north, much of my work is pushed into the office where I’m working on project planning for next year, grant applications for projects we have coming up, and making sure all of our ducks are in a row going into the next trail season.
Adapting for the Future
What role does community feedback play in your trail management decisions?
Having crowdsourced data is critical for effective trail management. Members of the public are typically the first to report big blowdowns, litter, graffiti, and kiosk vandalism, and because we’re not on these trails every single day, having input from the public is key. It’s important to have easy ways for trail users to contact the trail managers and that can be as simple as a sign on the kiosk.
I have found at other trails throughout the country that it isn’t always clear who to report issues to. If you’re getting more and more feedback from a certain trail, it can be indicative of the amount of use that trail gets, and you can kind of gauge where everyone’s going without even having technology such as trail counters to document that.
What’s great about having feedback from the community is if they reach out to us, we’ll thank them, address the problem, and have an opportunity to recruit a volunteer. If that person cares enough about the trail to report issues, there’s a good chance they care enough about the trail to volunteer. It can allow trail managers to have an easy avenue of volunteer recruitment.
How do you adapt trail maintenance techniques for the unique terrain of the High Peaks?
Our terrain in the High Peaks is some of the most rugged in New England. Our section of the Appalachian Trail is one of the most rugged sections of the entire trail, second only to the Whites. Our trails often don’t lay on the most sustainable routes up these very steep pitches, and consequently, water from rainfall erodes these trails that go straight up and down our mountains.
We have to build features to mitigate erosion. Those are typically stone staircases for steep pitches, water bars to shed water off the trails, and drains to guide runoff to where you want it to go. For flatter sections of trail that go through wet spots, we’ll put in bog bridging or stepping stones because if you don’t, hikers will find their own way and take drastic measures to keep their feet dry, and that creates networks of social trails that result in more resource damage.
As storms become more violent and frequent as a result of climate change, we have to be on top of making sure that our trails are sustainable for the future.
What emerging recreational trends do you see affecting the High Peaks region?
Like most other mountain communities in the country, we’re starting to see a lot more visitors following 2020 and the pandemic. Not only does that affect our recreational spaces, but also the housing markets of nearby communities. We’re starting to see a lot more visitors spillover from the Whites in New Hampshire.
On numerous occasions when I was managing campsites in the Bigelows, people were saying that this was their first time in Maine. They decided to check out our mountains because the Whites were so hammered with traffic. They weren’t getting the outdoor wilderness experience they were looking for in the Whites that much anymore, and how they find that in Maine, and how they’ll probably keep coming in the future.
Unfortunately, a lot of our trail infrastructure is not ready for the White Mountains level of traffic. That traffic will come, but we have time to prepare for it. These next several years will be an important time for us to not only gauge what our needs are on our trails, and our trailheads but also to go ahead and take action to make our trails sustainable, and create trailheads that can accommodate the expected increase in visitors.
What improvements or projects are you most excited about implementing?
Going into the summer of 2025, we’re going to be operating our first-ever paid trail crew on behalf of the High Peaks Initiative, the High Peaks Conservation Ranger Corps program. In addition to being a paid trail crew, it will additionally serve as a workforce development program. It’ll also involve a year-round trail specialist position which is something that’s not very common in the trails industry.
It’s going to be cool to get this crew out there. We anticipate them having pretty minimal trail work experience so we’ll be introducing them to trail maintenance concepts and terminology and doctrine of how we manage trails in New England and Western Maine.
As someone who was introduced to this industry through working in trail crews, it’s going to be rewarding to be able to give that same experience to others and play a part in forging what will hopefully be a lifelong pursuit in recreation management and conservation.
Adventure Starts Here
Is there a volunteer component?
We’re also going to implement a very organized and robust volunteer Ranger Corps network that’s going to be trained and equipped by partnered organizations within the High Peaks Initiative. Having some sort of banner to rally behind for volunteers, like the Ranger Corps, fosters a sense of belonging to a team which is even more fun when you’re contributing to projects in areas that you are passionate about.
Volunteers will have specific roles within the volunteer branch of the Corps and be assigned to certain groups based on either geography or tier of difficulty of projects they’re willing to do. I’m excited to see where that goes and to breed a little bit of fanaticism in outdoor stewardship in Western Maine.
How can people get involved?
Individuals who are interested in volunteering can reach out to my email, [email protected] or you can go to the volunteer tab on our website.
It’s important to know that volunteering with the High Peaks Conservation Ranger Corps won’t only involve projects for the High Peaks Alliance. You could be working on projects for Rangeley Lakes Heritage Trust or the Bureau of Parks and Lands. You could find yourself all over the High Peaks region.
