This story was originally published by WyoFile and is republished here by permission.
Monica Elliot joined the U.S. Forest Service last year when she was hired to work on a backcountry trail crew based in Pinedale. Clinching the job felt big, she said.
“I found so much value and love and purpose in trail work and working with the outdoors,” she said. “So having this permanent seasonal gig was kind of like the entryway into having a career out of it.”
Then came Feb. 14, when a wave of federal-employee layoffs swept the nation, resulting in chaos and uncertainty at agencies like the Forest Service. Elliot was among employees with so-called permanent seasonal positions, a categorization that was axed wholesale. She was suddenly out of a summer gig.
“It was a huge bummer,” Elliot said.
She spent a couple months casting about for work until her fortunes reversed once more. Friends of the Bridger-Teton, a nonprofit that helps the Bridger-Teton National Forest manage growing crowds with initiatives like volunteer ambassadors, created what it dubbed the “Forest Corps” in response to the federal layoffs. The team was designed explicitly to help the agency on summer-season field projects.
And Elliot was tapped as the crew lead and program manager — a job that combined her passions for trail and nonprofit work.
“Which worked out really well for me,” she said.
In the months since, the Forest Corps has acted as an auxiliary crew for the 3.4 million acre Bridger-Teton National Forest. The five-woman team has communicated with each of the vast forest’s six districts to identify a high-impact project it can assist on.
The crew used handsaws to help clear dozens of trees from heavily used trails in the Pinedale District’s Bridger Wilderness. They painted front-country picnic tables, installed a puncheon trail over marshy terrain in the Blackrock District, cleared deadfall and opened up 15 miles of trail in the Pack Creek burn area near Togwotee Pass.
“So with the way the schedule worked out, each district basically got us for one big project,” she said.
One one hand, it’s only five people. But for national forest district offices that were already stretched thin before the federal government further shrunk staff, the Forest Corps has been welcome help.
“They’ve been really happy so far,” Elliot said. “Just any help is really nice for them.”
Temporary band-aid
Without entrance gates or crowd counters, it’s difficult to pin down exact visitation numbers on Wyoming’s 9 million acres of national forest, but managers agree visitation has mushroomed in recent years.
While the growth has fueled issues like improper human waste disposal, user-created roads, wildlife conflicts and vegetation damage, the federal agency that oversees the lands has faced limited budgets and staff. Since the 1990s, the Forest Service has experienced a major reduction in staffing across nearly all types of jobs.
That’s where Friends of the Bridger-Teton comes in. The nonprofit aims to assist the agency in managing visitor impacts in the huge — and hugely popular — destination of the Bridger-Teton National Forest. Until this year, however, initiatives were fueled more by volunteers — such as ambassadors who educate campers on things like extinguishing campfires and securing food from bears.
Seeing the Forest Service further hobbled by the February job cuts and frozen funds spurred the nonprofit to do more, Friends of the Bridger-Teton Executive Director Scott Kosiba said.
“We recognize that staff capacity within the Bridger-Teton National Forest is really limited this year, particularly with field staff,” Kosiba said. The Forest Corps was born from the desire to assist.
The Bridger-Teton National Forest fired roughly 40 employees across western Wyoming, the Jackson Hole News&Guide reported, though some of those positions were later reinstated.
The Friends nonprofit launched a specific fundraising campaign that has raised more than $50,000 to fund the Forest Corps initiative. Partners like Trout Unlimited and the Wyoming Wilderness Association have chipped in, and the bulk of funds have come from private donors, Kosiba said.
They are still raising money for the program, which is estimated to total $180,000.
Friends of the Bridger-Teton hired five women who all formerly worked for the federal agency, and the team has collaborated with district officials on projects the federal agencies need more capacity to complete.
Projects, or “hitches,” have ranged from quotidian to rugged, Elliot said. The Greys River District had been storing new frontcountry signs for that it didn’t have the manpower to install, so the Forest Corps helped put them up. On the other end of the spectrum, the crew ventured deep into the Wyoming Range in the Big Piney District to clear deadfall from trails in stunning and seldom-visited terrain.
It’s been a great experience to serve on an all-female crew that’s providing tangible relief, Elliot said. But she warned against the presumption that this approach is a silver bullet.
“It’s not a solution,” Elliot said. “It’s just a band-aid. All of us would have been working for the Forest Service had it not been for the cuts. So there’s really no new numbers being added.”
Kosiba echoed that. Even though he can see the Forest Corps becoming a lasting initiative of the nonprofit, he said, “there is no reality where private industry or a nonprofit can or should step into the role of the federal government or dedicated civil service.”
Drop in the bucket
When the Forest Corps assisted a three-person crew on the Continental Divide Trail in the Pack Creek Burn area, the support was invaluable, said Jackson Ranger District trail crew leader Erica Baker.
“Together, the crew cleared more than 250 downed trees across 20 miles of trail, installed 12 new posts to assist visitor navigation, and completed over a mile of [vegetation clearing],” Baker said, calling their contributions “essential” to maintaining the nationally significant trail.
“With such a small trail crew, this level of trail recovery would not have been possible without Forest Corps,” she said.
Though the corps is assisting on high-priority projects, Kosiba said, it’s a small dent given the significant backlog of work to be done on the forest.
“The work that this crew is going to be able to do this summer is really a drop in the bucket,” Kosiba said.
With staff reductions and the Forest Corps crew spread thin across the Bridger-Teton’s vast federal lands, the public will still encounter unfortunate impacts on access and maintenance on Wyoming’s public lands, he said.
Meantime, the uncertainty continues for federal workers whipsawed by layoffs and subsequent reinstatements. The latest twist came last week, when the U.S. Supreme Court removed a block on reductions in force planned across most federal agencies. Now, employees and observers anticipate further cuts.
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