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Volunteers maintain, create outdoor paths
May 21, 2006
 By Georgette Weir
Poughkeepsie Journal

Denise Vitale is a petite woman from Cragsmoor in Ulster County, who on weekends likes to take a break from her work as an educator/trainer in the field of equity compensation administration to "fly" 1,000-pound rocks through the woods and into position as steps, retaining walls, and water crossings on hiking trails.

She uses only cables, a winch, a pry bar, her muscles and the muscles of some like-minded volunteers who together comprise the West Hudson North Trail Crew of the New York/New Jersey Trail Conference. The crew, one of nine fielded by the nonprofit conference, takes on projects at Minnewaska State Park Preserve, Schunemunk State Park, and other public trails areas in Ulster and Orange Counties.

She is one of the 1,000-plus citizen volunteers who build and maintain nearly 1,700 miles of hiking trails in some 130 parks and designated wilderness areas and preserves from New York's Catskill Mountains to Staten Island's Greenbelt and the Delaware Water Gap.

Al Poelzl of LaGrangeville is an 82-year-old retired carpenter who enjoys strapping clippers, loppers, bow saw and chainsaw onto his homemade backpack and heading off onto the trails of Fahnestock State Park to clear them of fallen trees and overspreading shrubs for the hikers who will come.

Aaron Benjamin, 18, of Armonk, swung pick and shovel to help build a new trail along the Wappinger Creek from the Village of Wappingers Falls to the hamlet of New Hamburg. He now volunteers on trails at Bear Mountain State Park.

Variety of work done

The work these volunteers do ranges from garden-style pruning of rampant blueberries and rhododendron to the extreme sport of building bridges and mountain stairways. Hundreds more volunteers help with other trails-related tasks, such as hiking with global positioning system units to gather mapping information, monitoring endangered or invasive species along trails, or publishing Trail Conference maps and hiking guides.

The Trail Conference is a volunteer-directed public service organization and is the major voice for the hiking community in our region. It includes 10,000 individual members and 100 hiking and outdoor-oriented groups, with a combined membership estimated at 150,000 people. Trail Conference volunteers have been making public lands accessible to the public via foot trails, maps and guidebooks since 1920.

"More than 90 percent of the state's park land is backcountry," Executive Director Edward Goodell said. "Those lands are acquired with public funds but, often, the only way the public can enjoy those lands is by trails. Usually, it's volunteers, working with parks personnel, who build those trails, keep them maintained, and map them. A lot of people don't realize that."

"The end result," he added, "those hiking trails are low-cost to the public and low-impact to the environment."

In recent years, open space in the public domain has increased in both New York and New Jersey as state and local governments and nonprofits preserve green space in the face of intense development. Dollars for park staff and facilities don't always keep pace. Together, these trends have led many park and community officials to turn to the Trail Conference for help.

The organization added 300 miles of trails to its responsibilities in the past five years.

"We receive more requests for assistance to build and maintain foot trails than ever before," Goodell said.

Georgette Weir is a writer and editor for the New York/New Jersey Trail Conference. She is a voluntary trail maintainer for two miles of the Blueberry Run Trail at the Minnewaska State Park Preserve.