A Conversation with the Smokies Trail Rehab Supervisor

Josh Shapiro came to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2009 as a Trails Forever crew member, swiftly earning a promotion to crew leader. Since 2015, he’s supervised the whole program.

Trails Forever, a partnership between the park and Friends of the Smokies, funds a permanent, highly skilled crew to rehabilitate high-use trails in the Smokies. So far, the program has contributed more than $2 million to fully rehabilitate Abrams Falls, Trillium Gap, Rainbow Falls, Alum Cave, Chimney Tops and Forney Ridge trails, and the crew is now working on an overhaul of Ramsey Cascades Trail.

How did you get involved with a career in trail work?

I went to college for environmental science, and then after college I moved out West and worked for a conservation corps and did that for about seven years. It’s mixed conservation work—you have trail work, you have forestry work, any other kind of conservation work like wildlife fences. I liked all of it. I just always found trail work to be the most interesting. I applied to the Smokies in 2009 and when I had my interview my supervisor explained there was this new crew, Trails Forever, and it just sounded like the experience that I had, I’d like to invest in that crew.

What does your job as Trails Forever crew supervisor entail?

Right now I’m fortunate enough to have three permanent staff on the crew, but everyone else at this point is a seasonal employee. So with all the hiring and then whichever trail that management asks us to rehabilitate next, there’s just a lot of planning. We’ll go out and assess the trail and locate all the trail deficiencies and come up with numbers on how long we think it’s going to take, how many people we’re going to need, what kind of material. Another aspect of the job is the compliance that needs to happen to make the project move forward. After I make a plan for the trail, I meet with resource management and somebody from resource management, sometimes a few people, will walk the trail with me and we’ll look everything over just to make sure there’s no endangered or rare species and that we’re not going to affect any of the area in a negative way.

When rehabilitating a trail, what are you trying to achieve?

When we do these projects, we want to improve the trail so it’s safer and more sustainable, and another big goal that we have is overall we want to protect park resources. So we want the trail good enough to where people aren’t going to create social trails. If there’s sections of the trails that aren’t working correctly, people are going to walk around it and trample vegetation. Sometimes that can get pretty substantial—not just a little path but large areas that are completely trampled from large groups of people walking around it and just hanging out. If we can get a safe, sustainable, defined trail, that’s our goal.

The area surrounding the current project at Ramsey Cascades Trail got hit with significant flooding in July 2022. How has that impacted the project timeline?

It did quite a bit of damage up on the trail. There was a two-hour period in the second week of July that saw 8.5 inches of rain, so the damage to the trail was pretty brutal. It took out both of the footlogs that are on the trail and then it pretty much wiped out a 150-foot section about 3 miles up through a section of trail right along the creek. It’s going to take a while to repair those things. Once Greenbriar Road got taken out, we haven’t been able to work on Ramsey since. That was early August. We ended up losing about 3.5 months of work this year. Right now we’re still thinking we can finish by November 2023. When we start up again in May we’ll just have to have a larger workforce. With the missed time and the added work that we weren’t planning for, I guess we’ll see how that all plays out.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.