Trail Crews and Rangers: Women Working the Parks

When most people read Christine Byl’s Dirt Work, they learn about axes and rock bars and chain saws, some of the tools needed to maintain and build trails in the backcountry. They learn about what these tools can make, the water bars and rock checks, the bridges and ditches, the retaining walls and backwoods staircases. And they learn about where these trails matter, in Byl’s case Montana’s Glacier National Park and Alaska’s Denali. Most importantly, they learn about the people who make these trails, including Byl herself, a weak-armed philosophy student turned “traildog,” who explores her physical as well as emotional strength in a workingman’s world.

Years ago, at 21, I wanted to be, like Byl, that tough-as-nails trail girl with that heavy-labor job. And because I worked summers for a national park in Colorado when the federal government began hiring women to work trails, my dream wasn’t just dust. As a park dispatcher who had already put in two seasons working entrance gates, I had some seniority and clout, and I knew most of the supervisors responsible for hiring. But though I trained hard to get in shape, hiking on my days off and swimming a mile at the Y before showing up for my shift on dispatch, three other women were hired on Rocky Mountain National Park’s first all-women’s trail crew.

I was hired, instead, to work as the first and only woman backcountry ranger in the park’s remote North Fork subdistrict, a position I was thrilled to get and kept for three seasons. I loved patrolling miles through high-altitude terrain and working from a backcountry cabin of which Thoreau would have approved. I loved the varied work of the ranger—the visitor contact and fire-grate cleaning, the sign routing and firefighting, the search for lost hikers. I even learned to accept the part of the job that made me uncomfortable from the start, the backcountry police work that involved writing up visitors for illegal camping and illegal campfires and dogs in the backcountry.

Over the years I had forgotten about wanting the trails job so much, but as I was reading Dirt Work, I felt not just more educated about a world I didn’t get to live in, but disappointed that I’d missed it, and then enlightened as I figured out what I’d missed.

First, Byl shows how the world of trail building is the world of the artist, a world where creating trails where there had been obstacles and doing it with care and thoroughness and intensity, no matter the cost, is everything.

The parts I love best are choosing a tree for stringers and dropping it from sky to ground, the first twenty minutes of peeling off bark, and making and notching the joints. Still, my proudest turnpike is that first one, when, invisible and naïve, I devoted myself to the least-skilled, most backbreaking labor, and at the end of the week, staring down that length of corridor, I couldn’t name a better thing I’d ever done.

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It’s a world where seeing a project to its end matters, where the tools you use are as familiar as lovers:

A well-used wooden axe handle is smooth, almost soft, having absorbed the oil of hands. To properly care for a wooden handle over its life, use sandpaper on cracks that may cause splinters or blisters. Rub the handle with linseed or neatsfoot oil when it feels dry. Treated as such with the care you’d give a friend, an axe becomes a thing you can also rely on.

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And it’s a world where talent and skill are noticed:

I eventually got very good at swinging an axe... “Wow,” said one middle-aged volunteer to his friend. “She can chop.” He could not have known what a long, tortured pageant his tiny comment gestured...