Sensible traveler Destinations Where they went Travel gear Student travelRocky but rewarding
By Diane Daniel, Globe Correspondent, 09/29/02
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Sensible traveler Destinations Where they went Travel gear Student travel |
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Hudson, 45, of Lebanon, Maine, has become a devotee of the Appalachian Mountain Club's volunteer trail maintenance trips (www.outdoors.org). The AMC has a staff trail crew, but also uses volunteers to maintain its 1,400 miles of trails. Some maintenance is less strenuous, but Hudson has managed to luck into "rock work" each year.
"It's really difficult, challenging, dirty work. That's one of the reasons I like it. I don't do anything like that on a day-to-day basis," said Hudson, a registered nurse who works in home health care.
Hudson, who is married with three children and who just became a grandmother, goes with an all-female crew. (Most of the trail groups are coed.) The trips, which run Sunday night to Friday, cost $115 for food and lodging.
Hudson's trip started with six volunteers and three crew leaders who are part of the AMC trail maintenance staff — "really rugged young people," Hudson said. They started from the Camp Dodge Volunteer Center near the AMC headquarters at Pinkham Notch. Monday was a day trip, to get accustomed to the work.
"They put the crews wherever the necessity is. They show you what it is you're going to be doing. It's pretty basic stuff, though I didn't get the nuance of the use of the pick mattock until this year. It's like a pick at one end and a shovel-looking thing [the mattock] on the other end."
The volunteers ranged in age from 30s to 60s. The oldest two complained about the strenuousness of the work, Hudson said. AMC literature warns participants that the work could be difficult.
On Tuesday, the volunteers (minus one defector) hiked up into the woods carrying not only their personal gear and tents but also shared food for the next few days — and the tools, which weigh several pounds each, in their hands. To get to their campsite, they "had to bushwhack in off the trail." After each use of the trail, they would cover any signs they had been there. "If you were on the trail hiking, you wouldn't even know there was anyone up there. We don't want anyone using our trail," Hudson said.
Each summer, Hudson has "vacationed" in a different area. This year her group was sent to the area above Jackson, N.H., on the Wildcat River Trail. The "quarrying" work, as it is called, was to put rocks in the place of rotting logs that had served as "water bars" for trail drainage. The water hits the rocks first and disperses instead of washing out the trail.
But first, the rocks have to be found. "You have to pop them out of their hiding places," Hudson said. "You have to walk around with a rock bar or pick mattock, and everything's grown up and covered with dirt, pine needles, and lots of roots. You put the tools in the ground until you hear a chink. Then you figure out how big the rock is, but you can't really tell until you dig around it. You evaluate if it's what you need."
If it is, then tools are used to pull it out and hoist it over to where it's needed. "It's all about muscle, tools, and technique," she said.
Last year Hudson brought her 20-year-old daughter. "She wanted to leave after the first day. But I told her hang in there, and she did."
One reason Hudson volunteers is to better appreciate "what kind of work goes into the trails. I've hiked all my life, and I'd always taken the trails for granted. Things like rock staircases. Go to Tuckerman's Ravine, and there's these huge rocks inside the ravine. It looks like these big naturally occurring steps, but they're not. They were put there. That's all manual labor."
Hudson says her vacation snapshots of rock staircases and water bars don't exactly wow her friends. "It's funny. You put so much sweat into it. But you can't really appreciate it unless you've done it."
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