Restoring access to nature one trail at a time

Patrick Beck and Craig Fish are on a mission to open nature’s stunning beauty for more people to enjoy.

The outdoorsmen spend their days working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and their weekends building and restoring a network of hiking trails around the Bay Area and Northern California with precision engineering and backbreaking labor.

"I have been backpacking, camping and using wilderness trails ever since I was in my early teens," said Fish, who is an environmental analyst in the Lab’s Environmental, Health & Safety Directorate. "Improving and providing new trails provides access to natural wilderness areas that helps strengthen our communities."

The men are members of Volunteers for Outdoor California (V-O-Cal), a nonprofit volunteer workforce that’s committed to large-scale trail maintenance and construction projects, habitat restoration and related land stewardship activities on public lands in partnership with public agencies and other nonprofit organizations.

V-O-Cal’s work spans a huge swath of territory from Monterey to Sonoma counties and from the Pacific Coast to the San Joaquin Valley. Up to 250 volunteers work on a single weekend-long trail project, starting with setting up camp on Friday night and finishing Sunday afternoon. Volunteers do not focus on the same park area each weekend; instead they move around and work with a broad range of city, county, state and regional parks, as well as wilderness areas.

"It’s hard work, but it’s also a lot of fun," said Beck, who is an electrical engineer in the Lab’s National Security Engineering Division. "It gives me a lot of satisfaction to build and restore trails that many people are going to use."

When he began volunteering in 2010, Beck said his first project was to blaze a trail at Corona Heights Park in San Francisco’s Castro and Corona Heights neighborhoods. He and his mates were building a new hiking trail on a very steep hill on the park’s north side to increase public access.

"We were building a new trail on a completely overgrown hillside with poison oak and thorny shrubs," he said. "It was tough manual labor using a variety of hand tools."

The building of a new trail begins when park district employees clear trees and brush in designated routes. V-O-Cal volunteers arrive to cut a fresh notch out of hillside to start the new trail, clearing weeds and topsoil down to packed earth. The newly formed trail is widened to about 3 to 4 feet. Volunteers spend 75 percent of their time maintaining existing trails and 25 percent of their time building new ones.

"What we are doing is completely resurfacing the tread of the trail," Beck said. "It’s a two-day project. We camp out Friday night, work all day on Saturday and labor until mid-afternoon Sunday."

As a crew leader, Beck does a walkthrough of his assigned trail section on Friday in preparation for managing up to 12 volunteers the next day. His job is to keep the project on schedule, make sure his crew understands how to use the hand tools safely and effectively, and get down and dirty with them to build the trails.

"Most of the tasks are challenging and require crew leaders to have some technical expertise," he said.

Fish, who introduced Beck to the organization, is part of the V-O-Cal Planning Team, which develops and selects projects for volunteers to work on. The team also sets policy and solves operational issues.

"My focus is on identifying and developing new leaders in the organization," said Fish, who began volunteering in 2008. "I am a volunteer project leader,  which includes pulling together and managing a project team that handles all aspects of our projects such as the trails at Sycamore Grove Park in Livermore."

Fish’s duties also include choosing new trail alignments, identifying the hand tools needed, selecting a menu for the volunteers and preparing food for the weekend. Additionally, he is a certified crew leader who is responsible for the training and safety of volunteers.

"The aspect of this work that I love the most is working together with engaged, motivated and diverse folks from all around the Bay Area," he said.

However, one of the hardest parts of the job is dealing with rocks, roots and steep unconsolidated slopes while building and maintaining trails, Fish said.

"Sometimes, you don’t get as much done by the end of the day, and you feel the fatigue throughout your entire body," he said. "But by the same token, there is some satisfaction to having been on a tough crew that was able to accomplish challenging trail alignments." 

Fish and Beck have worked on trails located at Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park, Henry Coe State Park, Las Trampas Regional Wilderness, Lake Chabot Regional Park, John McLaren Park, Redwood Regional Park, Brushy Peak Regional Preserve, Pleasanton Ridge Regional Park, Moore Creek Regional Park, Sugarloaf State Park and Skyline Regional Park.

For Fish, helping to restore trails to improve mankind’s enjoyment of Mother Nature has been a lifelong dream.

"Hiking a granite staircase or beautifully engineered switchback as a teen, I would think to myself: ‘Who the heck came all the way out here with tools and materials to build this incredible trail?’" he said. "Fast forward to recent years when V-O-Cal came to Livermore and improved a trail at Brushy Peak. I read about it in Newsline and thought it was my chance to finally find out about these people and make a contribution."

V-O-Cal offers many volunteering opportunities at varying levels, including camp work and trail work that’s satisfying for people of all abilities.

To volunteer for trail projects at Sycamore Grove Park or other places serviced by V-O-Cal, contact Fish at fish2 [at] llnl.gov (fish2[at]llnl[dot]gov) or visit the V-O-Cal website.