Firings, frozen funds create uncertainty for trail groups

Each year, the Washington Trails Association marshals a large volunteer force to clear trails on public land, both with single-day work parties and multiday trips deep in the backcountry.

Making that work happen takes a lot of planning and coordination with whatever agency manages the land – often, the U.S. Forest Service.

Now, with their summer schedule for backcountry response trips set to go live, the organization is finding that many of the people with whom they work are out of a job.

Kindra Ramos, chief programs officer for WTA, said the firings vary by forest, but that people with whom the group works in the Okanogan-Wenatchee and the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie national forests have been let go, and that news about others is still rolling in.

“Each new person hits hard,” Ramos said. “These are folks that we’ve worked with for years. … They have sort of the expertise and longevity that we really need to do thoughtful planning work.”

Groups across the Northwest that work with the Forest Service on trails and other projects are scrambling to get a clear picture of who’s been let go and who remains at the agency.

They’ve been learning that many of the people who work in the field have been fired, leaving behind a skeleton crew to manage massive swaths of public land.

The firings raise questions about how the agency will manage its lands once visitation picks up in the warmer months. But it also raises questions about whether groups like WTA that help them manage the lands need to reconfigure their work schedules for the summer.

The groups are also wondering what if any support they can expect from the Forest Service – such as packers and strings of pack animals to carry gear on long hitches in protected wilderness areas, where no mechanized equipment is allowed.

Then there’s the money.

Many groups rely at least in part on cost-share agreements with the Forest Service or federal grants to pay for their work, and they’re finding that the money is tied up due to the Trump administration’s attempts to freeze federal grant spending. The Bob Marshall Wilderness Foundation in Montana said in a Facebook post on Thursday that more than half of its anticipated funding is frozen.

Ryan Ghelfi, executive director of the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation, which sends crews on long backcountry hitches in wilderness areas between Boise and Missoula, said his group gets between 50% and 60% of its funding from the federal government.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” Ghelfi said.

The Forest Service has provided little detail. Media contacts at individual national forests have been sending inquiries up the chain of command, ultimately to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service.

A USDA spokesperson said in a statement this week that about 2,000 probationary Forest Service employees were let go, and that none of them were “operational firefighters.” Union sources and others have maintained that the total number of firings may be more like 3,400 people across the agency.

Probationary employees are those who have started a job within the past year or two, depending on how they got the job. But it doesn’t mean the firings only affected people who were new to the agency. In some cases, it’s meant the loss of longtime seasonal employees who recently took permanent jobs, triggering a probationary period.

Numbers for individual forests have been hard to come by, but sources who work closely with the agency have said recreation staffs – which manage trails, campgrounds and other amenities for the public – have been hit hard on several forests.

Those programs had already been knocked back by budget cuts. Last fall, the Forest Service paused the hiring of all nonfire temporary seasonal employees, a decision that axed about 2,400 positions nationwide across several programs, including recreation.

“We were already scrambling to figure out how we were going to deal with that gap,” Ramos said. “Now it’s so much worse.”

Even before that decision, the agency had long struggled to maintain its vast network of trails across the country. Some trails go years or decades without any serious maintenance. In the meantime, downed trees, erosion and overgrown brush can make them tough to navigate at best or entirely impassable at worst.

Conservation groups and volunteers have a long history of stepping in to help, and they get a lot of work done. WTA often busts up so much brush that they uncover trails that had all but disappeared, as they did with the Slate Creek Trail in the Salmo-Priest Wilderness in northeast Washington last year.

Ghelfi said the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation, which works on trails across five national forests in central Idaho and western Montana, cleared 8,500 trees from trails last year.

But it’s not as simple as sending a bunch of volunteers down a trail with a sharp tool. The groups get approval for the projects from the Forest Service and work closely with the agency to figure out what trails need attention and when they should go.

Some projects are planned out far in advance. Ghelfi said his crews for the summer are already hired, and their eight-day hitches are already all planned and OK’d by the Forest Service.

But even the best-laid plans of some groups have been called into question. Ramos said WTA has a rough schedule for the year, and that its long backcountry trips are lined up. They’re putting out the volunteer schedule for the backcountry trips this weekend with some minor concern that they might have to make changes.

Melanie Vining, the executive director of the Idaho Trails Association, said her group is combing through its own schedule to see if there are any plans they might need to change.

“It’s just kind of a case-by-case basis,” Vining said.

Her group’s crews sometimes work on a trail after a Forest Service crew has already been there, allowing them to get deeper into the woods than they could otherwise.

“They clear a trail in June and we’re able to get volunteers in that much farther and work on the next stretch of trail in July,” Vining said.

Kathy Young, the public lands chair for the Back Country Horsemen of Washington, said she’s been on the phone a lot over the past week trying to figure out how the firings will impact her group.

So far, it seems her group’s plans for several work parties around the state are in good shape for this summer.

But she’s concerned about their ability to plan for next year, with frontline staff now missing from some of the forests they work on.

“What we’re looking at for future projects is we don’t know if we’ll have people to talk to,” Young said.

She’s also concerned about the fate of packers and their animals.

Pack strings are crucial for hauling gear deep into wilderness areas, where federal protections prohibit the use of any form of vehicle. The Forest Service maintains its own pack stock in several places, and packers care for them and sometimes join volunteer trips to help carry tools, food, tents and other gear.

“It’s really the only way to get tools and equipment into wilderness,” Young said.

Packers from outside the Forest Service fill gaps on some projects, including members of the Back Country Horsemen, but there’s not an unlimited supply of well-trained pack strings.

“The animals are professionals,” Young said. “You can’t build a pack-string overnight.”

Ghelfi said the loss of Forest Service packers occurred to him earlier this week.

His group doesn’t use packers for every trip, but does when they have volunteers who can’t hike heavy loads into the backcountry. He’s not going to cross any trip off the list yet, thinking he might be able to find a non-Forest Service packer who can help.

That’s how he’s approaching all the upheaval – trudge forward, try to get the work done.

“My folks know there’s some uncertainty,” he said. “But I’m optimistic things will kind of work themselves out over the next couple of months.”