A Conversation With the Smokies’ Trailmaster

Tobias Miller first arrived in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 2002. 

After working on trail crews during high school and college, he was convinced that a National Park Service career was the way to go, and the Smokies offered him a full-time, permanent job supervising trails on the North Carolina side of the park. Miller was eventually promoted to his current position—trails, roads and auto shop branch manager—in which he manages the Smokies’ entire 850 miles of trail and 384 miles of road.

The park has more than a thousand miles of roads and trails combined—what is involved in managing them all? 

I spend a lot of time looking forward to projects that are upcoming. The Great American Outdoors Act put a lot of potential new projects in the hopper. So, a lot of it is administrative, trying to put that big picture vision path forward for the division. In some ways the middle of the season, if everything’s going good with personnel, is actually the smoothest time because so much of my fall and winter are dealing with the winter ops, snow removal. We have to do 24-7 snow removal on the Spur in Tennessee. We have a lot less staffing at that point—it’s just down to the permanents. You’re doing a lot of planning and compliance. During the season it’s more just trying to keep all of the staff going in the right direction.

How have the challenges and demands of your job changed as the park’s popularity has increased?

You’re less efficient because of what you would imagine—we are dealing with the same challenges the public is, as far as traffic, parking, all that stuff. I guess that is the challenge with being loved to death with so much use. Because I’m just involved with so much traffic management with the ‘road side’ of the house, I’m more involved with that now, as far as ‘how does the park move forward with some ideas to manage how many people are in the park?’ 

Has that increased popularity affected the way you maintain roads and trails? 

I think that it forces us, like anyone, to try to be more efficient with our time. One thing, the park has, I think, been successful in is notifying the public ahead of time and then closing things to get the work done. When I first started working in the park, I remember at first conversations were like, “Okay we need to close this trail to get this work done.” The response was, “Do what? You can’t do that.” And, now it’s not really even a question mark anymore. I think everybody realizes that, to make the gains that are needed and for it to be safe for the public and the employees, that’s what you need to do.

Of all the projects you’ve worked on over the years, which are you most proud of?

Big picture, I think it was building the Trails Forever Program. Before it existed, we really were struggling with just doing routine maintenance around the park in the trails program, and there were many high-use trails that were just destroyed. And there really wasn’t a mechanism of, ‘what are we gonna do about it?’ And so the Trails Forever Program was a response to that. It was one of those things that you dream about and think, ‘I don’t know if this is possible.’ At this point it’s like, ‘Did this really happen?’ Basically, we created a third trail crew that didn’t exist. It’s funded through an endowment. And it specifically works on major rehabilitation. When they’re done, it’s just so cool to see so many people enjoying them and using them and it being more sustainable. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.