Trail crews often serve as the only eyes and ears in the backcountry. Crews are often the first to report a wildfire or to begin the search for a missing person. The same crews fix safety hazards to prevent tragedies. Worker shortages place a heavier burden on crew leaders like Mr. Fickler, especially in parks like Yosemite, which has only about 25 permanent employees on its trail staff for over 750 miles. About four million annual visits are made to Yosemite.
Well-kept trails protect the nation’s fragile natural resources by shepherding visitors to certain areas while keeping other areas untrammeled. But crowdsourced apps like AllTrails and Strava, where anyone can record an off-trail route, can contribute to the degradation of the surrounding terrain. After the 2018 release of “Free Solo,” the Academy Award-winning documentary film set in Yosemite, visitors tramped off trail to get a closer view of El Capitan. A warren of improvised routes resulted, damaging the landscape and creating dangers for users.
Money can certainly help address the trail problems on federal lands, but that seems, like willing workers, in short supply. The National Park Service, which oversees 85 million acres, faces $23 billion in deferred maintenance, and since 2011, the agency has cut nearly one in five jobs from its operation staff, even though visitation rose and four new national parks have been authorized. At the U.S. Forest Service, which manages an additional 193 million acres, 45 percent of its permanent employees have left since 2021.
The bipartisan Great American Outdoors Act, signed by President Donald Trump in 2020, sought to address trail funding shortfalls, yet four years after its passage, the Forest Service estimates that it still lacks even one full-time trail worker in more than one-third of its districts, and 410 full-time trail jobs remain unfilled.
Federal funding is important. So is reversing the nation’s declining civic health.
What we really need is a national commitment to environmental stewardship to protect our wild places and assure that it is possible for people — young and old, mobile and physically challenged — to visit them and move through them safely. But what we have seen is a national shift inward, into our phones, our basements, our political tribes. We need to aspire to something more.
