MAXWELL LEE

There’s nothing quite like living in the woods for a month to make you reevaluate the way you view the world. The summer before my senior year of high school, I volunteered on an Appalachian Mountain Club trail crew trip in the White Mountains. Although I did not have any prior experience with living in the backcountry for longer than a week and had never done any trail crew, I approached it very much with the mentality of “how tough can it be?” Even before that time, I really enjoyed spending time outside, with trail running and biking being two of my biggest hobbies.

The answer? Real tough.

I highly enjoyed bonding with the other participants on my trip, and the hiking conditions and scenery was unparalleled. However, something about the blandness of the work did not appeal to me, and by Tuesday of the first week I was already scheming up ways to be excused from the following three weeks that would not make me look like someone who could not handle the work. Continuous thunderstorms that flooded our camp and soaked through all of my gear and clothes did nothing for the negative feedback loop my mind was falling prey to.

Somehow, I was able to persist through the monotony, and made it to Thursday without expressing my discontent with the trip and the tasks we were completing. The end of the week, when we would be hiking back out to base camp to spend the weekend, was in sight. This would be the time to reevaluate my own place in trail crew and determine whether or not I was cut out for three more weeks of what, at that point, was something I did not understand why people could volunteer for.

At 5:00 on Thursday, we set down our tools and retreated to camp to cook out final trail dinner for the week and began prepping camp for departure early the following morning. I breathed a sigh of relief – I had made it! Whatever happened over the weekend, the accomplishment of persisting through one week of arduous work was satisfaction enough for me. Milling around after dinner, a few other people on my trip including one leader were tempting the idea of hiking up to summit nearby Mount Hight, probably a mile round trip. As our camp was already so close and I was in surprisingly good spirits, I immediately hopped on board with this excursion. The half mile hike passed by quickly, and before I knew it we rounded the corner out of the wooded trail and were smacked in the face with a small rock scramble up the side of this unobscured mound of stone. Scurrying up the mound was barely and obstacle, and I didn’t even pause or take the time to look around me until I crested the peak. The summit, completely bald, provided crystal clear views of the surrounding mountains, ranging from west New Hampshire all the way into Maine.

We watched the sun set over Mount Washington, a sunset that is forever burned into my mind. When it was time to leave, I was sure that we did not spend enough time on that summer. Hiking back to our camp, I reflected on the past week of work that I had spent the last week convincing myself that I had hated. Did I really hate it that much?

The answer, as you could probably guess, is no. I disliked the idea of participating in trail crew more than I actually disliked it (in fact, I think I genuinely enjoyed the work, as it was physically rewarding and I genuinely felt that I was giving back to the community). The next three weeks passed by in the blink of an eye, and before I knew it I was saying goodbye to my trail crew family, the family that I would not have had if I called it quits after the first week of psyching myself out of trail crew.

If I had left that trail crew after one week, I would have missed out on so many experiences, including meeting many motivated researchers and hikers, that have defined the ways I have matured over the past few years.

 I shadowed an ecology researcher for a few days of the trip, helping investigate how wildflower communities are migrating up mountains due to changing temperatures. Participating on this study opened my eyes to how engaging and enjoyable field ecology can be, guiding my post graduate job search and setting the stage for a pragmatic decision-making process.

Interacting with so many thru-hikers while repairing trails provided me insights into why other people enjoyed the environment, which I used to develop my own environmental ethic, largely relating to preserving the environment so humans could enjoy it without sacrificing the vitality of other organisms.

Forcing myself to complete four weeks of unstimulating manual labor provided the mental fortitude I have used to brute force problems encountered in research and survive through two summers of full-time farming, which I love but do admit that the work is not the most engaging. Similar to trail crew, work days were long, physically demanding and, for lack of a better word, monotonous. I was a part of a small but tight knit crew that made the summer much more enjoyable. However, most of the confidence I had to persist through this experience I had gained from the trail crew trip.

Patience is something I learned to exercise from conducting trail crew, as if I had given up on the crew after a week instead of letting it play out who knows where I would be now. I currently view the world through a lens of patience, making sure to approach everything, but especially new experiences, with an open mind and a mindset to not preemptively come to conclusions.

This experience has manifested in many ways. Many of the past research projects I have conducted have been abrasive at first, due to long, unpredictable hours and often simple, repetitive tasks. Getting used to life at college took a while, as I didn’t really hit my stride until sophomore year. However, due to the patience I gained from trail crew and other connections between trail crew and these events (outdoors aspects being the largest factor), I was able to persist through these too.

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