Long before joining komoot as a senior Quality Assurance Engineer, I was already obsessed with hiking trails and the state they were in. Trail View is one of my favorite komoot features for that reason – I’m in love with the green dots on the map that show exactly what the trail looks like, and even more interested in if it’s built and maintained well. Allow me to explain this weird obsession. I graduated in the 2008 recession, and decided to postpone a soul-destroying job hunt in favor of a 3 month adventure building trails in some of the USA’s most renowned national parks. I found an organization that allowed me to work as a conservation volunteer, saved up money from odd-jobs to get me there, and set off.
Part of my volunteer stint included work with the United States National Parks Service (NPS), the body responsible for maintaining 1000’s of kilometers of trails within the States’ conservation areas. In an effort to keep the trails safe, and in line with strict conservation protocols, the service relies on strong, willing and able bodies to maintain said trails. Building the trails so many of us take for granted made me look at trails – regardless of where I happen to be walking or trail running – differently.
Here’s a walk through of my experience on one of the projects I remember fondly: The Grand Canyon Rock Work project.
Tuesday, 7 July
I’m posted outside of one of the dorm buildings with a 75l backpack, a 35l daypack, containers for at least 2 gallons of water and a single person tent – everything you need for an eight-day posting in a remote wilderness camp. A white van with a trailer pulls up to the curb and a few sleepy volunteers spill out to stretch or go to the toilet while I load up my stuff.
On the two-hour drive to the Grand Canyon, we pick up two coolers filled to the brim with 8 days’ worth of food for our group of international volunteers. At camp, we get set up, prepare our equipment for the following day and get a mandatory safety meeting so we’re all on the same page. We get the plan of action for tomorrow, and after a simple meal, we all head to bed early.
Wednesday, 8 July
Our group leader wakes us up with a weird primal scream. This act of weirdness puts a smile on our drowsy faces as we chug down cereal and instant coffee at dawn. As the sun rises we make our lunch packs, load up on water, electrolytes and trail mix, and are ready to hit the trail.
After a short drive we reach Yaki point, the trailhead for the Kaibab trail on the Grand Canyon’s Southern Rim. It’s the second most popular trail leading down to Phantom Ranch, the only accommodation at the bottom of the canyon if camping is not your thing. It’s heavily used by the NPS mule wranglers to bring supplies down to the lodge, which is why we’re called in. After years of heavy mule traffic, the trail has eroded. The steep pathway has become a tripping hazard and we’re tasked with making steps out of the red rock surrounding the trail.
The NPS makes it very clear to keep the trails at Grand Canyon authentic. This means not using concrete, reinforced steel, chemical concoctions or other modern-day solutions such as epoxy. Instead we rely on traditional, labor intensive methods, spending our days working in small task-oriented groups.
One group scouts for usable rocks, and when I say rocks I mean cow-sized boulders found a few meters uphill of the trail. A splicing task force chisels them into usable sized bricks (dimensions similar to a carry-on approved suitcase) using only hammers and chisels, before another team rolls them onto the trail using fulcrums and gravity. Meanwhile there’s a group gathering “micro crush” – little pebbles or debris used as an alternative to concrete, which is used as a leveled bed for the rock steps. These will be used as liner rocks to form the trail boundary. Clearly demarcating the path ensures people stay on-trail, preventing further erosion. It also prevents people from straying accidentally, increasing their risk of danger in the wilderness.
With the boundary rocks in place, smaller stones are gathered as rubble to reinforce or fill-in the flat bits of trail where mule traffic has caused potholes. It’s pretty tough work.
Around 5pm we gather our tools and start the hike back up to the rim of the canyon. We stretch, do a headcount, assign people to kitchen duty and agree on the menu. We’re lucky to have port-o-potties but there are no shower facilities. We’re caked in dry sweat and red dust from the day, but physical exertion means we happily climb into our sleeping bags around 9pm without thinking twice about hygiene.
This schedule is repeated over 8 consecutive days; chiseling boulders and piling up micro crush, before we gradually maneuver it all into position, and the parts begin to resemble the trail we set out to build.
Rereading my old blogs about this experience and how much manual labor went into these paths, it’s not surprising I look at trails differently now!
Words and photos by Willem Dauwen
Willem Dauwen is on komoot’s quality assurance team, helping to ensure new features work properly before we share them with you. He’s a keen trail runner and in between runs he also spends time enjoying Belgium’s green spaces with his young family.