Outdoorism

I was climbing at the popular Las Conchas trailhead in Santa Fe National Forest when my curiosity was piqued by two 45-foot beams on a truck near the highway. When I saw what they were for, I had to document the way these huge beams were being moved into the backcountry:

The bridge builders were from Reineke Construction, spending their weekend doing more of what they love, building better trails. Mark Reineke was kind enough to answer some of my questions about their work.

What do you think the benefits of your volunteer work will be?

As avid mountain bikers and owners of a small business, we have very tangible connections to the benefits of our work –- great trails to use. On the less tangible side, we want to enhance each person’s outdoor recreation experience through increased access via sustainable, well-designed and constructed, safe trail systems and trail access points. Volunteer work gives us a chance to give back to land owners (in this case, the U.S. Forest Service, who manages these public lands on behalf of all taxpayers) and helps protect and maintain the trails we enjoy using. We believe that volunteering encourages a spirit of “good will” and shows a commitment by mountain bikers to give back, thus, hopefully demonstrating that we are good stewards of these precious resources.

What other motivations do you have to volunteer your time & effort?

First and foremost, it is a lot of fun to see the physical improvements take place and to hear from other trail users how much they enjoy the fruits of our labor. In addition, our company’s vision is to create and continuously improve a self-sustaining, small business, focused on high quality services provided through cooperative, partnering relationships with its clients. Working both as small business owners and as volunteers, we show that we are serious about these cooperative, partnering principles.

What do you recommend to others who are inspired by you to volunteer?

Try it, you’ll like it!” In fact, you might get hooked. Call your local forest service office, open space office, or city/county land owner’s office and ask to speak to their volunteer coordinator about upcoming projects. Also, we encourage folks to contact IMBA (http://www.imba.com/) to get involved with a local mountain biking group – many have trail maintenance groups.

Who else can we thank for the vastly improved bridges?

We want to provide credits to several key folks for the bridge building projects we have done in the Jemez District of the U.S. Forest Service. First, Phyllis Martinez of the USFS is the visionary and the person who made all this possible. Without her, these projects never would have happened. Secondly, Joe Hancock and his team of horses, Jake and Chester, made it possible to move the 45-foot long beams and tons of concrete to the construction sites without adversely impacting the natural resources along the East Fork of the Jemez River (a wild and scenic river). Lastly, Reineke Construction, a member of the Professional Trail Builders Association, offers its thanks to the many volunteers who helped build 7 (soon to be &8;) bridges to make this trail accessible to more of the using public.

Outdoorists value the outdoors highly, so we naturally pursue an outdoor life. What are the options? As I meet and talk to outdoorists, I want to map those options out for others. To take a first step in that direction, I created a new Lifemaps page to contain my maps, and sketched out the first for the Weekend Warrior, which is the path I have chosen for much of my life. I look forward to seeing how they evolve, and incorporating any comments from outdoorists.

My first dog taught me something that I hope to apply now to my outdoor life. I’d like to treat the outdoors as a whole the way I learned to treat my first dog.

I dropped out of college after my first semester, hoping to snowboard more. It was really my first attempt at an outdoor life, and not a bad one. Gracious employers allowed me to keep my part time job at the University of Wyoming while I slacked off of school. That gave me a little time, and very little money.

When spring break approached I found myself with no lift ticket money, and not eager to compete with my more responsible peers in the lift lines anyway. I didn’t know Sarah well, but when she argued that mountain biking in Utah was way cheaper than snowboarding, and she would drive, I agreed to go with her for a week. I still had some accounting difficulties, so I moved my belongings from my basement apartment into my van and reapportioned my rent money to mountain biking in Moab.

We started the party in Sarah’s truck about 10 miles out of town. At 30 miles we hit a snowbank, rolled, and totaled her truck. Later that day I found myself sitting in my van with a cold wind blowing outside, facing my first night without heat. I made two decisions while I shivered. First, I would go back to school in the fall and major in something impressive like physics. Second, I would go to the pound and get a dog big enough to warm up the bed in the back of the van.

The dog I chose weighed about a hundred pounds. His former name was Rasta. They thought he might be a Great Dane / Yellow Lab mix. He looked as lonely as I felt. I rechristened him Schrödinger after the famous physicist and loaded him in my van, his sinewy legs shaking with fear and uncertainty. We drove into the hills, and he relaxed. When I ran with him on his leash a little ways, he bounded with glee and licked my face. When I let him off, he ran in joyous circles around me. I took him on a mountain bike ride, and he ran full steam ahead of me. In horror I watched him speed toward a cattle guard with no hint of restraint. He seemed to feel the world had become a perfect place for him, with a new companion and complete freedom. I thought the cattle gaurd would bring his happiness to an abrupt end, but somehow he curled up into a ball and rolled when he hit it. He lay on the ground a moment, then rose, then started running back to me as if to warn me of the danger. This time he cleared the gaurd in one inspired leap.

Dinger was like that every time we went outside together. His enthusiasm was infectious. Of course my renewed academic ambitions didn’t always allow for time outdoors with him, and my own enthusiasm for life waned during these periods as well. Dinger eventually died of cancer in my Dad’s care during a backpacking trip in the Rocky Mountains while I was going to school in Chicago. Reflecting on his death, I reached this conclusion: to provide a good life for your dog is to provide a good life for yourself.

I had absorbed a common belief in our culture that caring for something or someone else is always a personal sacrifice. My personal (Schrö)Dinger’s Law is the disproof of that belief: taking care of something or someone you value can be better than trying to just take care of yourself. When the pursuit of my own perceived interests at the time didn’t nourish me, the pursuit of Dinger’s did. My company in the outdoors never failed to make him happy. Why did it take so long to realize that it did the same for me?

As an outdoorist, I’d like to apply Dinger’s Law even more broadly. I suspect that if I act to take better care of the outdoors, my life will improve as a result. I have come to value the outdoors highly, but still I’ve been mostly an outdoor consumer, concerned with what I can get out of it. It may be folly to think that I can give anything back to Nature, but I want to see what happens if I try. Perhaps Dinger’s Law will be a founding principle of Outdoorism.