Note: Learn more about Sitka Trailworks’ “Save a Tongass Trail Crew.”
When the Forest Service fired the entire cabin and trail crew for the Sitka Ranger District in February, many people may have thought that it wasn’t a tough loss, as they were only seasonal workers.
But the cabin and trail crew – like many jobs in the Forest Service – is a different kind of seasonal work.
“These guys come back year after year because they have this permanent status in a seasonal position where they don’t have to apply again,” said Ben Hughey, executive director of Sitka Trailworks. “And that means that the Ranger District invests in their training, and they usually bring quite a bit of skills to the job.”
Sitka Trailworks is a local nonprofit which supports the Forest Service with public outreach programs – like trail and cabin surveys – and with volunteer work parties to assist with local trail maintenance.
Hughey admits the unskilled-but-energetic crews that Trailworks puts in the field are no replacement for the recently-fired Forest Service team.
“The trail crew leader had a background in construction as a contractor, and so he was out there milling lumber in the back country and building bridges,” said Hughey. “There’s a beautiful new bridge on Salmon Lake that was completely constructed by this crew. They do small structure construction, building new outhouses. They’re skilled arborists, cutting down hazard trees, overhanging scary stuff that I wouldn’t touch. And explosives. So getting the even more hazardous obstacles out of the way of our trails or cabins sometimes takes really technical work that we as Sitka Trailworks can’t just take volunteers out and do.”
But what Trailworks can do is raise money. And in just a couple of weeks they’ve raised $106,000 in donations. The purpose is straightforward: To put as many of the Forest Service crew back to work as possible, for as long as possible, maintaining the federally-owned resources around Sitka that residents enjoy – and pay for with both taxes and user fees.
Hughey says putting displaced workers back to work is in the DNA of Sitka Trailworks.
“Sitka Trailworks was founded when the pulp mill closed in the 90s, to keep families in town, to provide job opportunities, doing something that gives back to the community,” said Hughey. “And so we’re going to do that again. These are folks in need of jobs, and we’re going to create opportunities and put them back to work, doing, doing what they love and doing what the community needs.”
But it’s only a stopgap. $100,000 raised in a couple of weeks is significant, but it’s not a long-term solution. The Forest Service – and US citizens – have made a considerable investment in public lands over the years, which no amount of nonprofit fundraising can match.
“The Sitka Ranger District has several support staff for these crews,” he said. “They have multiple boats. They have access to airplanes, a huge shop and tools and resources that we really can’t fundraise for locally. The capacity in our community with everybody chipping in just doesn’t get to the the amount that the Forest Service invests in these public lands. So we’re pushing as hard as we can to get one season.”
Hughey says the ultimate goal is to preserve the public’s access to resources that would otherwise suffer if the expertise and skills of the Sitka Ranger District’s trail and cabin crew were eliminated along with their jobs.
