Trail Tales: Highlights from the 2024 Season
By Michael McDaniel (he/him), Field Technical Specialist
The 2024 field season unfolded as another fantastic chapter in the Continental Divide Trail’s ongoing story. In my role as Technical Specialist, I had the privilege of shepherding projects from initial vision to on the ground completion. Each project felt like its own adventure, bringing together volunteers, partners, and our team in unique ways. We watched our plans turn into actual trail work and big ideas turn into reality one mile at a time.
A major highlight from this season has been the Herman Gulch volunteer event in partnership with Montbello’s Environmental Learning for Kids (E.L.K.). In this project, we coordinated heavily with multiple organizations, like the Clear Creek County trail crew, the Forest Service, Colorado Parks & Wildlife, and E.L.K.; as well as volunteers for the CDTC, CDTC staff, and a visit from a former CDTC employee who now represents Great Outdoors Colorado. I love this level of collaboration the most, and it brought me so much joy to interact and engage with so many talented, hard-working individuals.
CDTC staff and ELK volunteers install a rock underdrain along the popular Herman Gulch Trail.
Together, we accomplished so much. We designed and successfully constructed a Rock Underdrain, a somewhat obscure trail feature that was new to all parties. With the youth from E.L.K., we played cards while weathering a massive storm one night. The rain and the wind howled, lightning struck, as we huddled happily and safely under the cook tent: laughing, singing, carrying on to our absurd game of Uno. I am so appreciative of the trust we received in creating this project, and it showed with how much we accomplished and how well received it was by our participants (several of whom had never been overnight, backcountry camping).
We worked with several new partners this year, too. Volunteers for the Outdoors Colorado and New Mexico Volunteers for the Outdoors both joined with us to put on some excellent projects. In Colorado we spent an entire week crosscutting in the Weminuche, and it only rained once! In New Mexico, we spent several days reestablishing and clarifying a bemusing section of trail through cattle country. Both projects saw the support of excellent crew chefs – the meals were truly amazing! One night, in New Mexico, we all stayed up together, laughing and giggling, around the campfire. It was lovely. (Insert photo:
After a long day of work on the CDT-San Pedro Parks project, volunteers hang out around a campfire.
I’ve gleaned many new skills this year, from installing kiosks to felling trees with crosscuts. I have felt the privilege of moving between many different agencies and forests within a season, experiencing mentorship from many people and places, while deepening my relationship to the Continental Divide landscape. My community is now one that intersects innumerable people, places, trails, corridors, groups, and organizations; and for this, I am so grateful. I am deeply appreciative of the opportunity to build personal connections with a place so vast as the Divide, and respect so much all that it has offered me.
Everyday, I get to feel the satisfaction of having done something: mostly, of contributing something, however small, to our world. It is a privilege to feel this in one’s work, and so I practice gratitude. And it comes with a feeling – that I am not alone but inexorably tied to others: who make my work possible, who work alongside me, lift me up, benefit from my efforts, and contribute in ways from which I will benefit. I see that conservation is not an isolated journey but a collective caring. That when I show up, another shows up. That I am one in a long line before me, and that I will not be the last. Just as in nature everything is connected, so too is the effort of conserving nature. Ultimately, this is my biggest reflection of the season: that we need each other just as profoundly as we need the natural world itself.
Stay tuned for the 2025 CDTC Field Season – Volunteer Project sign-ups will go live on February 3, 2025, for CDTC members and February 10, 2025, for the general public.
