Trails in transformation

*Listen to the audio documentary.

Where can we go to be transformed? A change of scenery and a change of pace can help. And we can find both on backcountry trails within national forests.

On a cloudy summer day, a backcountry trail crew was hard at work on one such trail, the JMT, which is shorthand for the John Muir Trail. Through 200 miles of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, the JMT meanders mostly within wilderness areas and often follows the same route as the longer Pacific Crest Trail.

At work on this section of the trail, on the Inyo National Forest, were a few U.S. Forest Service employees, but mostly a crew from the California Conservation Corps – the oldest and longest running state conservation Corps in the country. The crews remaining in the wilderness for five and a half months with a backcountry cook and resupply support from Forest Service pack stock.

To encounter the rhythm of a cross saw, discover how to bake a vegan chocolate cake in the backcountry, and enter the soundscape of transformative trail work on the Inyo National Forest, listen to the audio documentary.

Where this page came from

This page was imported from USDA Forest Service. Published by the USDA Forest Service and, as a work of the United States government, in the public domain; pictures credited elsewhere are left out.

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