A time-lapse composite from Canyonlands National Park in Utah, taken over two hours in July 2023.Credit…Photo Illustration by Natacha de Mahieu

As dawn broke on a fall day in 2020 over the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park, a crew of young men and women labored to fix a precarious footbridge below Wapama Falls — at 1,400 feet, one of the tallest waterfalls in the park. Several park visitors were swept off the bridge to their deaths in recent years during periods of high water.

Using pulleys and their combined strength, they struggled to maneuver a 400-pound granite slab into place on a new bridge abutment to support the span. Just as a crew member yelled across the ravine for more slack on the rope, a hiker strolled around the bend and stopped, seemingly dumbfounded. He tilted his head, covered with a wide-brimmed hat, to get a better look.
“What are you all doing out here?” he yelled.

The crew members were among thousands of mostly youthful workers who labor to maintain the trails that thread through America’s public lands. It’s hard, sweaty work, and there aren’t enough workers to do all that’s needed in these treasured and sacred spaces. The trails they manage usher visitors to such places as the cascading waterfalls of Alabama’s Talladega National Forest, the rolling Allegheny Mountains and the lush, lake-filled landscapes of Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin. The National Park Service recorded 325.5 million visits to its parks last year, up 4 percent over the previous year and the second busiest year on record. But the 236,000 miles of trails that wend their way through the parks, forests and deserts are often neglected and are certainly undervalued. That poses dangers to hikers and impedes access to the wonders that can be found on public lands.

These trails are testaments to the sheer human effort of generations of stewards who tended to them, often without pay. But fewer and fewer people are willing to do this hard work, either for money or for the satisfaction of donating their time and elbow grease. “We only get to hire half the staff we’re actually hiring for” because there aren’t enough applicants, said Remo Fickler, a grizzled 23-year National Park Service veteran and trail crew supervisor in Yosemite, lamenting the decline. To us, this indifference points to a problem of meaning, evinced by a worsening epidemic of loneliness, generational declines in civic engagement and a dwindling commitment to stewardship as honorable public service.

Indigenous tribes for centuries cultivated and maintained intricate trail networks before federal agencies claimed them. Trails proliferated during the 19th century as more people visited the nascent parks, and the miles grew rapidly in the 20th century with the support of the National Park Service, the Civilian Conservation Corps and the National Trails System Act.

But America’s trails don’t care for themselves, and during World War II, many fell into disrepair as attention was directed to the war and recovery. Afterward, the park service refocused and repaired and modernized its trails. Still, water, gravity and use by humans and horses and, in some areas, bikes and off-road vehicles are perpetually wearing on them, creating serious safety hazards for visitors. Injuries occur frequently, and deaths from slips and falls happen every year. In Yosemite, for example, 16 people have died from slips and falls (not in climbing accidents) since 2007.

Trail crews often serve as the only eyes and ears in the backcountry. Crews are often the first to report a wildfire or to begin the search for a missing person. The same crews fix safety hazards to prevent tragedies. Worker shortages place a heavier burden on crew leaders like Mr. Fickler, especially in parks like Yosemite, which has only about 25 permanent employees on its trail staff for over 750 miles. About four million annual visits are made to Yosemite.

Well-kept trails protect the nation’s fragile natural resources by shepherding visitors to certain areas while keeping other areas untrammeled. But crowdsourced apps like AllTrails and Strava, where anyone can record an off-trail route, can contribute to the degradation of the surrounding terrain. After the 2018 release of “Free Solo,” the Academy Award-winning documentary film set in Yosemite, visitors tramped off trail to get a closer view of El Capitan. A warren of improvised routes resulted, damaging the landscape and creating dangers for users.

Money can certainly help address the trail problems on federal lands, but that seems, like willing workers, in short supply. The National Park Service, which oversees 85 million acres, faces $23 billion in deferred maintenance, and since 2011, the agency has cut nearly one in five jobs from its operation staff, even though visitation rose and four new national parks have been authorized. At the U.S. Forest Service, which manages an additional 193 million acres, 45 percent of its permanent employees have left since 2021.

The bipartisan Great American Outdoors Act, signed by President Donald Trump in 2020, sought to address trail funding shortfalls, yet four years after its passage, the Forest Service estimates that it still lacks even one full-time trail worker in more than one-third of its districts, and 410 full-time trail jobs remain unfilled.

Federal funding is important. So is reversing the nation’s declining civic health. What we really need is a national commitment to environmental stewardship to protect our wild places and assure that it is possible for people — young and old, mobile and physically challenged — to visit them and move through them safely. But what we have seen is a national shift inward, into our phones, our basements, our political tribes. We need to aspire to something more.

Franklin Roosevelt touched on this idea in 1933 when he spoke about the formation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, created in the Depression to employ young men to improve America’s public lands, forests and parks. “What is being accomplished,” he said, “will conserve our natural resources, create future national wealth and prove of moral and spiritual value.”

Trail crew jobs, whether paid or volunteer, can be experiential models for how to counteract America’s lonely shift inward. Working on public lands provides the setting to learn and embody the values of long-term stewardship and communal obligation in a specific place, for a specific civic purpose.

“On trail crews, people value you for the things that really matter,” Darian Gumper, a young woman with six years of experience on trail crews, told us. “Are you a hard worker? Do you look out for the community? There’s no way to hide it out here.”

By Justin Farrell and Steven Ring
Dr. Farrell is a professor of sociology at the School of the Environment at Yale and the author of “Billionaire Wilderness.” Mr. Ring, a former trail worker at Yosemite National Park, is a graduate student at Yale.