Washington volunteers step up as recreation areas face staffing, budget cuts

MOUNT SI NATURAL RESOURCES CONSERVATION AREA, Wash. – On a spring weekday, Cedarcrest High School students Max Nelson and Monte Dams spent what should have been fourth period on the trail to Teneriffe Falls. But don’t get the impression that the teenagers were skipping school. Instead, they’re trimming away underbrush growing over the popular trail in the shadow of Mount Si.

The six-hour commitment is their third trail work party of the season, which they signed up for to fulfill a community service requirement. Their decision on where to volunteer, meanwhile, was driven by current events. While the friends initially planned to donate their time to an animal shelter, the flurry of decisions by the White House to reduce staffing levels and freeze budgets at the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service motivated them to pick up hand tools rather than play with cats and dogs.

“This just seemed that it could be more impactful, something that needed us more,” said Dams, taking a break from cutting back branches and digging drainage ditches.

That sentiment seemed to be widely shared ahead of National Trails Day on June 7, as Washington outdoor recreation organizations report an uptick of interest in volunteering to steward public lands in the wake of the sudden hits to them. Nelson, Dams and the six other people who showed up on a sunny Thursday in early May attended one of 33 trail work events the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust will host this year, up from just seven last year. With more events on the calendar, the trust anticipates 550 volunteers – an eightfold increase from last year – will fan out across the Mountains to Sound Greenway National Heritage Area, which stretches nearly 100 miles from Seattle to Ellensburg.

But the trust’s decision to open the floodgates for volunteers this year also highlights the conundrum facing Washington. While state residents are passionate and enthusiastic donors of their time and sweat, the professional crew leaders who manage their efforts insist that volunteer labor alone can’t replace well-functioning and adequately funded public lands agencies.

“There’s no substitute for the resources and capacity of the federal government that we all pay for,” said Betsy Robblee, conservation and advocacy director for the Mountaineers, a nonprofit organization that offers outdoor conservation and education activities. “We simply can’t fill the gap, nor should we be expected to.”

Birthing a volunteer culture

Thirty years ago, the U.S. Forest Service, an agency within the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was also facing budget cuts. While less extreme than the current scenario, in which elected leadership in Washington, D.C., seeks to dismantle large swaths of the federal government, the early 1990s were still a crunch time. As lucrative logging on national forests slowed down, there was less funding available for USFS crews to conduct trail maintenance, indirectly leading to Washington’s passionate volunteering culture.

During that period, Greg Ball was executive director of the fledgling Washington Trails Association. At the time, Volunteers for Outdoor Washington was the only group doing organized trail work other than state or federal employees. In 1993, Ball convinced Forest Service staff that volunteers could pick up some of the slack. The need was coast to coast: The American Hiking Society hosted the inaugural National Trails Day that year.

At first, Forest Service employees had to supervise volunteers, a requirement that today would hamper trail work at scale. But over time, the federal agency and local partners like WTA, Back Country Horsemen of Washington and later Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust developed a strong working relationship. Nowadays, experienced crew leaders oversee teams of volunteers that build bridges, reroute trails and install elevated walkways called turnpikes across Washington’s national forests – all with the Forest Service’s confidence that crews will follow the specifications in the agency’s trail handbook.

Over three decades, this effort has multiplied leaps and bounds, tapping into a seemingly endless enthusiasm by Washington residents to roll up their sleeves and grab a pickax. Nearly all of the 100-plus work parties this year located within a few hours of Seattle are full and the organization’s weeklong volunteer vacations fill up almost immediately. Last year, WTA logged more than 150,000 hours of trail work spread among 3,400 volunteers, work valued at some $4.7 million, according to the nonprofit’s 2024 annual report.

“Our volunteers come out for a multitude of reasons: to pitch in, learn new skills or find camaraderie,” said Kindra Ramos, WTA’s chief program officer. “What I hear time and again is the sense of satisfaction in what you can accomplish in a day and the power of what you can do when you come together.”

The same year that WTA initially pitched volunteer trail crews to the Forest Service, Mike Stenger was spending his first summer overseeing young people picking up shovels through the national Student Conservation Association. Today, he’s the trust’s recreation projects manager, and previously directed the WTA’s trails program, which makes him one of the state’s most seasoned trail specialists.

While hiking a mile uphill to meet the trail work party on Teneriffe, Stenger recalled how much has changed in three decades. Back then, he said, “a lot less was getting done – and a lot of lands like this didn’t have trails on them.”

Mount Si and the adjacent peak Mount Teneriffe, for example, became part of an expanded Department of Natural Resources conservation area in 1987. Public land farther up the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River falls under the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.

These areas, just an hour or so from downtown Seattle, are now crisscrossed with professionally built trails, paved trailhead parking lots and amenities like bathrooms where there were once overgrown boot paths and old logging roads. But from the outset, neither the state nor the federal government have had the capacity to manage all of this infrastructure on their own. Since the 1990s, staffed conservation and recreation nonprofits like Mountains to Sound and WTA – as well as the state-run Washington Conservation Corps – have been part of the equation.

“If we’re going to build new trails, we need to have a plan for keeping them up as well,” Stenger said.

The “new” Mount Si Trail was built in the 1970s or 1980s, and has been extensively rebuilt twice, in 1993 and 2006. That most recent effort entailed 13,000 volunteer hours. (The much steeper Old Mount Si Trail has been around for the better part of a century.) The new Mailbox Peak Trail debuted in 2014 after significant volunteer labor (it also has an older, rougher counterpart). An additional 5,000 hours of volunteer work went into rehabilitating the Rattlesnake Ledge Trail in 2021 so it can withstand foot traffic that is much heavier than the trail was designed for.

These projects are all on state land, which is so far faring better than its federal counterparts. The two-year state budget recently passed by legislators in Olympia will fund maintenance backlogs at the state’s three land management agencies – DNR, Washington State Parks and Department of Fish and Wildlife – with $7.5 million each per year, down from $10 million per agency annually. Legislators also approved a 50% increase in Discover Pass fees from $30 to $45 annually, effective Oct. 1, which could provide additional revenue.

“All of this is affected by swings in funding,” Stenger said. “If state revenues drop, then they aren’t as willing to embark on new projects, or it’s hard to pay for maintenance.”

Frozen funds, reduced staff

Those swings are most acute at the federal level, where the Trump administration’s January decision to freeze federal funding is presenting a challenge to trail maintenance bigger than any downed tree a group of volunteers has ever had to saw out. Although federal judges have ruled the freeze was illegal, Sen. Patty Murray claims that the administration continues to withhold at least $430 billion in funds.

There are also reductions in staffing. Robblee, who testified before Congress in May about the impacts of White House decisions on outdoor recreation, has tallied that approximately 500 Forest Service staff members in Oregon and Washington have taken deferred resignation offers, part of an estimated 25% of Forest Service staff nationally who have left the job. In the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, she estimates that 70% of recreation and trail staffers have left.

“The deferred resignation program recently closed, and we are currently reviewing and finalizing the numbers,” a USDA spokesperson wrote via email.

As the calendar pages flip closer to high summer, that impasse is filtering down to Evergreen State trail projects. Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust is scheduled to rebuild the Denny Creek Trail west of Snoqualmie Pass beginning in August. Under the terms of these federal-nonprofit arrangements, the Forest Service covers 80% of the cost and the partner brings in 20%. For the trust, that entails $40,000 – which can include in-kind volunteer labor. But the Forest Service’s $160,000 share is in jeopardy. Stenger gives the odds of the trail project starting as 50-50. If the coin flip comes up negative, a volunteer opportunity will be squandered.

The state and federal budget situation has seen the trust’s paid trail staff drop from six to four this year, although it is leaning into the volunteer model this year as an experiment – in a way that helps accommodate some of the insatiable demand for booked-solid WTA events.

Still, Stenger said, “We’re in triage mode.”

As a result, volunteers like those for the trust are picking up basic tasks, like scrubbing graffiti tags off a bathroom at the Camp Brown Day Use Area, something the Forest Service normally would have done.

“We’re able to accomplish Band-Aids because we have less money, too,” he said. “We’re not trying to replace the agency.”