by Elizabeth Miller on
THE GILA BACK COUNTRY HORSEMEN organization has been clearing trails for more than 20 years. Melissa Green has been out there for 18 of them. She began with the U.S. Forest Service, then moved on to coordinating volunteer crews for trail workdays—or weeks, as the case may be. Green watched the federal program for trail work disintegrate and was afraid of seeing the Gila Wilderness with no one to maintain its trails. So around 2017, she pitched local nonprofits on hiring her to coordinate and grow their trail efforts, a bid that’s landed her with Back Country Horsemen—even though she declines to ride a horse—coordinating about 150 volunteers throughout the year. They also update trail conditions in the rapidly changing Gila on gilatrailsinfo.org.
I couldn’t just walk away from the Gila Wilderness. Gila Back Country Horsemen had a small crew, they were doing great work, and we’ve just taken it from there.
The horse packers bring in tools—because the Gila is so big—and log the trails. Any log that’s lying across the trail so you can’t just walk down the trail, we’re removing.
I’m bringing in hikers. We’ll take out the high branches that would maybe hit the horses, dig tread if it’s hard to find. If the water is kind of eroding it, then we’ll dig drains for the water to go off. Then we build cairns, and sometimes trail blazes, to kind of delineate where the trail is.
The cairns and trail blazes are kind of crux in the Gila, because it doesn’t get a lot of use. Even if we dug tread, the tread would just regrow with lack of use.
The trails already had significant deferred maintenance, or there’s fires and floods. Even if it was a more high-traffic one, a fire or flood can do a fair bit of damage.
When high-intensity fires burn mixed conifer, you’re going to have a lot of dead trees that come down. Sometimes you log your way in, and you log your way back out, because the trees are coming down that fast.
A lot of our volunteers are in their seventies and sometimes eighties, so they’re my heroes.
The Gila feels very remote—lots of solitude. You have to have your backcountry skills together, because yeah, you’re out there.