In this episode of Where Two Deserts Meet, we hit the trail with Trail Crew Member Dalton Moore and PSAR Coordinator Anna Marini. With their help, we explore what it takes to construct and maintain the trails for you to enjoy and discuss the ins and outs of staying safe while doing it.

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Ian: Where Two Deserts Meet is an official podcast of Joshua Tree National Park. Joshua Tree National Park acknowledges the Serrano, Cahuilla, Mojave, and Chemehuevi people as the original stewards of the land on which the park now sits. We are grateful to have the opportunity to work with the indigenous people in this place. We pay our respects to the people past, present, and emerging who have been here since time in.

Donovan: Hi, I'm Donovan.

Ian: And I'm Ian.

Donovan: And we're both park rangers here at Joshua Tree National Park, where two deserts meet is a podcast where we investigate topics that often require a bit more detail, and sometimes the help of an expert in the field to gain perspective.

Ian: Donovan, you know, if we're going to do an episode about trails in Joshua Tree, we must address that one question, the one that everyone deep down wants to know.

Donovan: Where are the bathrooms in the park?

Ian: Okay. That's very important. But no, what is our favorite hike?

Donovan: Oh, right. Because the ranger's favorite hike is likely secretly the best hike in the park?

Ian: I can totally see how one could imagine that someone who worked here would've come to an eye-opening epiphany of the absolute best trail. But funny enough, it's the opposite. With my years spent here, I've realized every trail has something to offer and the one I'm headed to on any given day is just the one I'm in the mood for. It's as simple as that.

Donovan: And sometimes that mood can depend on what the weather is. A hike that might be my favorite at the time in the winter could be my worst nightmare in the summer.

Ian: Ooh, yeah. Truly, it's just logistically complicated to have a single favorite. No matter how I get asked it. I struggle to find answer.

Donovan: And not to mention that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. I've had a visitor come into the center and tell me that the trail that they hiked was so beautiful that they cried. But at the same time, not even five minutes later, another visitor came in who hiked the same trail and informed me that it was a big waste of time for them. Sometimes we like different things and that's okay,

Ian: And sometimes what I want is just to see everything that is possibly available in a list form, because I must know every possible option before deciding.

Donovan: Well, that's a way to do it, and that's why we have those lists available in the visitor centers and our park website and the NPS official app. Once someone has their trail selected, that's where Ian and I come in at the visitor centers providing tips on how to have a good time on those trails. Usually mentioning that if you want a more secluded hiking experience, starting the trail early is the way to go.

Ian: Speaking of getting up early, I'm reminded of some of the behind the scenes work that goes into making these. It all happens early in the morning with our trails crew. We should talk to trail crew member Dalton Moore.

Donovan: That's funny that you thought of trail crew because when I think of getting up early, I think of the heat safety signs that our preventative search and rescue program puts out. Anna Marini, the coordinator of the preventative search and rescue program would be a great person to talk to also.

Ian: You know what? Let's just talk to them both. Yeah, let's do it.

Dalton: My name is Dalton Moore and I work on the trail crew in Joshua Tree.

Donovan: Dalton is just one of the many trail crew members here at Joshua Tree National Park. They play a critical role in building and maintaining the hundreds of miles of trails in the park. But what does an average workday look like for a trails crew member?

Dalton: An average workday for a trail crew member begins at 6:00 AM, showing up, ready to go with your food, your water, and any comfort items you may need in your backpack. We'll do a morning briefing. We just talk about the day really quickly, and then crews will load up into trucks and drive to their project sites where they could be doing a variety of different things. Usually ends up being dry stone masonry, where we're building trail structures. Crews will then spend the next eight hours or so out in the field where they'll, they'll shape rock, they'll construct structures, they'll drill rock, and they'll eat lunch out in the field. They'll eat snacks out in the field. They'll drink water. They'll do all their normal things, and then they will probably leave the field around three o'clock or so with a goal of getting back to the office by four thirty.

Ian: The projects the trail crew works on can take months, even years of planning and hard physical labor. Depending on where they're working in the park, the crew will utilize the resources around them to create a more natural look to the trail and have less impact. While Joshua Tree might not have giant sequoias or other dense vegetation to help construct trails, we do have a few key resources that play a role in our trail.

Dalton: In Joshua Tree, projects usually consist of building trail structures out of stone. Normally this is stone that is quarried out in the field and they are building steps, water bars, or retaining walls on the trails. In other parks, you could be building these structures out of logs, but since we're in the desert, we don't how many trees but we have a lot of boulder piles. We usually try and query up those boulder piles to make structures about five years before projects. We collect the data on them and that the data consists of what we want to do in these areas or where we see erosion happening or resource damage happening. And we submit the, data of those project site locations to the resources department and they go out in the field and they assess and they usually let us know where is okay to quarry from and where we should hold off.

Ian: Our monzogranite boulders often being known for their durability but when a trail gets thousands of visitors a day, it can see quite a bit of wear and tear trails along Park Boulevard, especially high usage because that's where most of the awesome Joshua Trees and big old boulders can be found within the park. This includes some of the most asked about trails in the park; Barker Dam and Hidden Valley. They can see over hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. This means that the trail crew not only helps build new trails but maintains the existing one. Biggest thing tends to be erosion from rain and wind. But then we also see a lot of social trails that happen since we're in the desert and we don't have defined trail corridors. It can be kind of hard to navigate sometimes. So there's a lot of big webs that get created. We try to lessen those number of webs by keeping people on the trails and creating more obvious paths.

Donovan: Unfortunately, the trails crew aren't the only humans building trails within the park, often done unintentionally, the creation of social trails is a huge concern for park management. Some social trails can be caused by park visitors trying to access points of interest, rock climbing routes, and sometimes by someone simply getting turned around on a trail. Some of these social trail areas that have been around for quite some time have been developed into established paths such as the rock climbing, access routes to Hall of horrors, or the Oyster Bar. And before we go on, know, sadly you will not find an actual oyster bar there, but just some cool rocks that might resemble some oysters. However, social trails can cause more issues than one would think. Social trails often lead to the destruction of delicate ecosystems, trample desert, vegetation, and habitat. They can often become so defined that they resemble the actual trail, often leading people astray. Some of the maintenance that our trails crew does is helping fix the wear and tear from these social trails and natural erosion.

Dalton: Erosion on the trails tends to look like trenching of the trail, which then leads to water channeling down the trail and furthering the erosion. So you get these trails that are really big trenches, essentially, and they're not very pleasant to walk on because it's not a level surface, it's kind of slippery. And so a lot of times what we do is we build stone steps in those trenches that encourages sheet erosion and makes the a durable surface for hikers to walk. We keep trails easy to follow by doing a couple things. I would say the first thing that we do is we prune the vegetation that's growing into the trail. In trails, we call that brushing. We brush out the trails and that makes it so that there's a clear line of sight of where you should walk. The other way that we kind of do that on some of our washer trails or trails that are in large sandy areas is we use signage. And a lot of times what that signage looks like is a trailhead sign at the beginning of the trail so you know where you are and then we use directional arrows. Also that lets you know whether to go straight or make a left or make a right. And, we try to use signage only when necessary or when it's obvious that people are getting lost or at the start of social trails.

Ian: Some of the signs that you're on the right path might not be noticeable at first, but often tune into our common sense of what appears to be the easiest path. As mentioned earlier, most of the trails on Park Boulevard have giant boulders to help signify where to go. But in other areas of the park, such as Pinto Basin Road and the Cottonwood area, vegetation pruning, roc