AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Summer is in full swing, and that means peak hiking season in much of the country. But hikers may run into wilder experiences than expected - downed trees blocking the way or washed out trails. That's because of steep staffing and budget cuts to the U.S. Forest Service. Jeff Kish has seen the impact. He directs the Pacific Northwest Trail Association, and his crews maintain a long-distance trail that stretches 1,000 miles from Washington to Montana. Jeff, welcome to the program.
JEFF KISH: Hi, Ayesha. Thanks for having me.
RASCOE: Is this year different from other years? Is this something that has been, you know, lagging for a long time? Or are you seeing, like, a market difference?
KISH: There's been an underinvestment in trail maintenance for a very long time, so that's not new. But what we're seeing this year is significantly different than what I've seen in my entire career. We're seeing massive funding cuts, massive staffing cuts at the federal agencies, and that's impacting the work that we can do. Whereas, in the past, we've been trying to keep up with maintenance needs as they come up. This year, we're just trying to prioritize just the most important sections of trail, and we know that we're not going to be able to keep up.
RASCOE: And so what do you guys do? I mean, what does trail maintenance entail?
KISH: Yeah, so usually we work primarily with the conservation corps, which hires youth and young adults from trail side communities. And they're doing things like cutting back brush from the trail, repairing tread damage, making sure that erosion is being addressed, cutting up logs that have fallen across the trail and keep people from being able to hike them safely. Pretty much everything that keeps that corridor open and enjoyable and keeps access to the public land available.
RASCOE: And one of the place these federal funding cuts have already hit is the Forest Service's stock animal program, and we're talking about, like, mules and horses there. Can you tell us more about that? How does that impact trails?
KISH: So we do work in some very remote locations. And yeah, the Forest Service and other organizations have pack programs where we've got horses and mules. And we load up all of our supplies and tools, food, things like that on the mules, and that allows our crews to get into the project quickly and efficiently.
RASCOE: Is that program still up and running, or it's just a lot less so?
KISH: Well, we started the year with about 35,000 employees at the Forest Service, and the secretary of agriculture just announced that there have been over 15,000 positions eliminated this year. That's a 42% cut to the agency. One of the things that we saw when those cuts were being made is that we have this pack program at Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, and most of the people who know how to take care of those animals and can take them out into the field to do their work were eliminated. So we had all of these animals stuck at a ranch, and there's big questions about who's going to take care of them and what the future of that program's going to be.
RASCOE: Oh, wow. How does climate change complicate all of this? - the trail and conservation work that your organization does.
KISH: Yeah, climate change has had serious impacts on the work that we do and then also the experiences that people have out on trails like ours. When we have these big wildfires, it closes the trail during the burn. But what we usually find when we can get back in there is hundreds or thousands of trees have fallen across the trail, and we go in there, and we cut them off the trail. But usually, it's several years before we can really get ahead of what's happening because there's a lot of dead standing trees, and every winter, more come down.
RASCOE: For people who haven't been to this part of the country before and haven't seen it, what is the scenery like?
KISH: Well, the Pacific Northwest Trail crosses seven national forests and three national parks. It crosses numerous mountain ranges between the Continental Divide and the Pacific Ocean. The landscape is just dominated by mountains and glaciers and old-growth forests. The trail was originally envisioned like a drop of rain that lands on the Continental Divide and finds its way out to the Pacific Ocean. And the experience that people have in our trail is like that, you know, finding this natural flow and becoming part of the environment.
RASCOE: Why is maintaining these trails so important to you personally?
KISH: Well, I fell in love with long-distance trails by completing an end-to-end hike of the Pacific Crest Trail in 2012 and then also an end-to-end hike on the Pacific Northwest Trail in 2014. And I think it just had a profound impact on the course of my life. And I want to be able to make sure that other people get to have the kinds of experiences that I had for generations to come.
These trails are not just a strip of dirt. They're whole corridors that protect a natural experience and set aside land to just be land and to be habitat, and to not be developed, mined, logged or mangled in any other way. People think about places like the Amazon, and they know that it's important to have places like that in the world, regardless of whether or not they're going to go there. We have land that's equally spectacular up here in the northwest, and these trails not only provide a recreation experience, but they help preserve that.
RASCOE: That's Jeff Kish, executive director of the Pacific Northwest Trail Association. Thank you so much for joining us.
KISH: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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