Juneau’s Peterson Lake trail is known for being a bit wet. It winds through muskeg to a lake, where a U.S. Forest Service cabin hosts overnight visitors.
“The trail over time has just gotten soggier and soggier,” Trail Mix, Inc. Director Meghan Tabacek said.
Trail Mix is Juneau’s trail maintenance nonprofit. While making her way down the part of the trail that her crews have been tending to, Tabacek pointed to some of the changes they’ve made.
“The great thing about this job is there's always no shortage of trails that need love,” she said.
The trail can be slow going on a rainy day — or most days in Juneau — with deep pools of rain and mud in between tree roots. There are sections of wood planks that have eroded and rotted in the 10 years since they were installed. Trail Mix has been replacing those with gravel.
Peterson Lake Trail is one of many that Trail Mix’s trail crews have spent countless hours improving for Juneau residents. Now, the work may be on pause due to federal funding and job cuts.
Two Southeast Alaska trail maintenance nonprofit wants to hire fired Forest Service staff to make a new trail crew — if they can raise enough money to pay them.
The plan would allow skilled trail workers to continue their work this summer, after half of the U.S. Forest Service trail crews were fired last month by the Trump administration.
In the past, the organization partnered with Forest Service trail crews and had two of its own crews funded by the federal government dedicated to working on Tongass National Forest trails.
In the recent federal firings, Juneau’s Forest Service crews were halved. And Trail Mix isn’t planning on being reimbursed for its work on Forest Service trails.
Tabacek wants to keep those fired employees’ trail work skills in Juneau, and she said Trail Mix can be a landing place for those who lost their jobs.
Still, she said, those jobs should be reinstated.
“This is not an ideal situation for us, for anyone,” she said. “We understand and we know that the best place for federal workers is to continue being with the Forest Service.”
Tabacek said, as she understands it, the Forest Service is planning to keep all remaining trail crews on cabin maintenance, leaving Trail Mix to maintain Juneau’s 250 miles of trail.
But the organization’s remaining funding sources are funding city trails, not national forest ones.
So Trail Mix is campaigning to fundraise $170,000 dollars — enough to hire five trail crew staff for the season. As of Thursday, community members have donated just under $12,000. Tabacek said she knows they have a long way to go, but she’s optimistic.
Nearly 90% of Juneau residents use the trails throughout the year, according to a 2016 City and Borough of Juneau survey.
The Forest Service firings also left Sitka’s beloved trails in a dire state. Their entire trail maintenance crew was fired, according to Sitka Trail Works Executive Director Ben Hughey. .
“That means that no one is doing technical trail maintenance in Sitka,” he said. “There's no backup crews. There’s no one to fill in.”
Hughey said the organization helps build trails through heavy-excavation but they don’t have a crew dedicated to technical trail work with hand tools. That was what the Forest Service did. So they’re also raising money to hire a crew made up of fired Forest Service staff.
“It's a stopgap measure, because we don't -- we can't wait for Congress, because we're going to suffer locally if we just try to wait.” he said.
Sitka Trail Works has raised more than two-thirds of the $160,000 they need to hire the Forest Service workers who were fired for the summer. Hughey says Sitka’s trails are a vital part of everyday life for residents.
“Hundreds of people are out every day on the trail system in some way or another,” he said. “It's how people go hunting, often starting off a trail and then branching off into the backcountry. It’s how we harvest food, berries and mushrooms.”
The Forest Service hasn’t released a plan for how the work that was done by fired staff will be maintained.
Out on the Christopher Trail near Gold Creek, Gooshdeihéen Ricardo Worl surveys the work he and his Trail Mix crew did last summer. He said the Tongass is an especially challenging place to build trails.
“Southeast Alaska is both a beautiful and a really unforgiving and challenging place to build and maintain trail,” he said.
He’s an avid trail user in Juneau who’s worked on trails with Trail Mix for the past two summers.
But Worl said that hard work isn’t always noticeable to the people who regularly use the trails.
“You know it's done right when people don't notice it,” he said. “When you can go about your daily life like, ‘Oh, let's go into a cabin this weekend,’ and not have to second guess it.”
Worl grew up in Juneau — hiking, biking and skiing local trails — and he said they are an integral part of Juneau’s community and culture.
And trail work, he said, is essential. He hopes residents will step up to support it.
