A Conversation With the Chief of Trail Volunteers

For the past three years, Adam Monroe has been the guy in charge of wrangling the 250 volunteers who help with trails and facilities maintenance in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park each year. 

The position is an outgrowth of his longtime love for the national parks and hands-on work in beautiful places. Before taking his current position, Monroe spent three years as a trail crew member in the Smokies and another six years before that as a seasonal professional trail crew leader working at National Park Service units all around the country. 

What do you love about trail work? 

I initially really liked that seasonal lifestyle. But what’s continued throughout all of it is really being hands-on in the field, getting to work in these beautiful places, and then also being able to work with like-minded people. It’s not an easy career path, to get into an actual full-time position with the Park Service, so the people that you end up working around really want to be there. That extends to the volunteers I work with now. They’re people who really want to be here. They really want to work for the national parks. 

What does your job involve on a day-to-day basis?

Basically, the job is planning work projects that volunteers can be a part of, and then actually getting out and leading those projects. I also spend a lot of time recruiting, so reaching out to universities up and down the East Coast that want to bring a work crew down for an alternative spring break or fall break. When we’re doing the projects I’m on the ground giving instructions and working right alongside volunteers doing the work.

What is the Trails Forever program? 

In 2008, my supervisor, who was the trail supervisor at the time, teamed up with Friends of the Smokies, and his idea was to create a program to tackle some of the most challenging trail projects in the park—the trails that get the most visitation and need the most improvement. An endowment was set aside 10 years ago with Friends of the Smokies, and they were able to pull the interest off that each year, to fund a consistent, intensive Park Service crew to tackle these big signature projects like Chimney Tops Trail Project, the Alum Cave Project, and last year and this coming year the Trillium Gap Trail. These are really significant heavy wholesale improvements of the most popular trails. I’m included as the volunteer coordinator. During the summer I’m working at least one day a week on the Trails Forever signature project. 

Why are volunteers important to these efforts?

It’s a volume issue. Even though now we have a great professional staff, most are a seasonal workforce, so that’s max about six months out of the year. Programs like Adopt-a-Trail allow volunteers to contribute the whole year round and just kind of help be eyes and ears in the backcountry when we can’t be in all those places at one time. It’s using those numbers to help the whole cause. With big projects, I guess I could say you could always use more people. When you’re doing this kind of heavy-duty work in remote locations, you don’t have the advantage of machinery and equipment, so really it’s people. We have to use as many people as we can. 

Most people don’t think too hard about how the trails they walk on came to be. What do you think they might find surprising about the process? 

I think they might not assume that we do everything by hand. The huge projects, the construction-heavy projects where you’re building a foot log or bridge crossing, these are things that we really are doing by hand and by using livestock to move material around. So instead of an excavator or something like that, we’re using mules. Some of the stone work that the Park Service crew does, I can’t imagine people understand that’s done by hand. But it really is.