June 2018.
I was hard at work brushing in a herd path when a stranger with a beard appeared and offered me a brownie.
I had only been working as a summit steward for a couple weeks, and my body was still highly displeased with the situation. My arms demanded I put down a heavy branch I lugged to a herd path, and my legs begged me to sit down. Spruce twigs dug at my skin, and my palms were a permanent shade of dirt that I couldn’t wash off.
I threw the branch over an eroded section of trail, and stood back to survey my work. My branch seemed futile among the trampled mazes of brown that ran through the plants.
I had been warned that Iroquois might be in rough shape.
Iroquois is technically an “trailess” summit, which means that it is one of the 46 high peaks that does not have a marked trail maintained by DEC. However, hundreds of people hike it each year and the result is the formation of a herd path leading to the summit. Much of this herd path is contained to single trail, but this changes when it reaches a steep, rocky section.
At the base of the steep rocks, it branches out in a maze. Veins of pseudo-trails mark areas where plants had been trampled to death, and soil is exposed like a fish out of water. The soil will inevitably be dragged off the mountain bit-by-bit with every drop of rain, gust of wind, and hiker’s boot.
Ideally, hikers would all follow a single path to the summit, one that made use of durable surfaces like exposed rock. The damage would be limited to a single trail, and minimized by diverting footsteps onto hard rock, instead of loose soil and fragile plants.
My goal was to make the path that went up the rocks obvious by blocking off the plethora of options that cut through the alpine. I would need dead and downed branches to block the herd paths – easier said than done.
I knew these branches existed from previous attempts to block in the same paths, but hikers had removed them and tossed them off into the thick sea of stunted balsam known as the Krummholz.
To retrieve these branches while causing minimal damage to the fragile ecosystem (and myself) took some planning.
I’ll outline the basic process below:
Step 1: Shoes off – socks are much more forgiving than aggressively treaded boots to the mosses and herbaceous plants that grow beneath the balsam boughs.
Step 2: Pick the best route and never go the same way twice – Even in socks I stepped on rock and old stumps as much as possible, and tried to never step on the same patch of moss.
Step 3: Go to war with the Krummholz. These trees are thick and sharp. They push you back like a trampoline and rip at your skin like a cheese grater. If lucky enough to make it to the branch alive, you now have to dislodge it from the relentless grip of the krummholz matt as the branches all cling ferociously to each other like ultra-magnetic velcro.
Step 4: Wonder how the hell you’re supposed to get back through the impenetrable wall of daggers with a dagger-laden branch.
Step 5: Perform a miracle.
If successful, you emerge from battle wounded, but alive, and with a piece of brushing that will help save precious soil and threatened plants.
I was completely engaged in the process when the bearded dude showed up.
He greeted me before I could even get my “how’s it going” out, and was now pulling a suspicious foil-wrapped item out of his pack and waving it in my direction.
Brilliant, I thought, I had just been half-murdered by a tree and now I had to fend off a stranger with a foot-long beard aggressively trying to give me a brownie.
He seemed to notice my unease.
“Oh I’m Chuck, don’t worry, Wade made these brownies, I used to be a Summit Steward.”
The words fell in a rush out of his mouth, and he kept going at lightning speed.
“I was going to be a summit steward this year, but then I had to back out.”
I was still trying to figure out who Wade was. The name sounded familiar, where had I heard it?
“Wade’s awesome. I can’t believe he made these brownies. I wasn’t going to come up to Iroquois today but then I heard that you were going to be here instead of Algonquin so I just came over. I might go over Algonquin and Wright, I still haven’t decided yet.”
Of course! I had met Wade briefly a week before, he used to be a summit steward and I had frantically asked him for advice on collecting data for Mountain Birdwatch. He now did something for DEC that I had yet to understand.
“Aw, man, look at those clouds! Those are incredible, oh my God. These might be the best clouds I’ve ever seen in my life, I need to take a picture of this.”
I was relieved to know that this person was probably not trying to give me a drugged brownie.
“God I love it up here, I really need to move here. What’s your name again?”
That was the first time I met Chuck, and wouldn’t be the last.
At that moment a woman came clambering up the steep section. She stepped directly on soil and plants, through my brushing-in-progress, and then grabbed hold of every scrap of vegetation within reach to pull herself up a rock.
Still new to the summit steward gig, I struggled to hide my panic.
It was immediately clear that she was terrified of heights.
I did my best to explain what I was doing and why, and how rare and fragile the alpine plants are, and what happens when they get stepped on. How sad it is to see the hundred year old rel….
She looked at me with fire in her eyes and informed me that she was
“Just trying not to fall off the Goddamn Mountain”
I watched in horror as she practically ripped a bilberry plant out of the ground to pull herself up over a ledge, and sat down shaking on a rock.
Perhaps I should have addressed how scared she was before launching into the plants.
Chuck gave me a knowing look, then turned to the woman in question.
“If you’re scared coming up, you’re gonna be scared going down. If I were you, I would stop here and go back down now, it only gets steeper, and frankly, if you can’t make it up without killing the plants you should turn around.”
It worked. After a few more exchanges, the woman was still grumpy, but on her way back down the trail, this time being a little more mindful of the plants.
I gladly accepted the brownie – still a little suspicious – but Chuck did appear to be a summit steward, and I was thankful he had been there to help diffuse the situation.
I learned an important stewarding lesson that day. The goal of our interactions is to educate hikers to prevent future impacts, and that can’t happen when someone is physically exhausted, hungry, cold … or afraid they are going to fall off the Goddamn mountain.
It is better to let an impact go, in order to have a more positive interaction with the hiker and prevent repeated impacts in the future.
