Maintaining the path to ‘Ahhhs’

Yosemite National Park — BIG NOISE FROM THE FALLS TODAY. THE MOUNTAIN snowmelt roars to earth in titanic volumes while far below, hikers blink in the mist, gaping skyward. Except for one guy.

He’s wearing a ranger uniform. Now follow his downcast eyes and you find a 5-foot wall of stacked granite rocks at the trail’s edge. Here we are on the path to Yosemite Falls, the most heavily trafficked trail in California’s most-visited national park, and he’s lavishing his attention on the dirt and pebbles underfoot?

He is. And smiling.

“This,” says Tim Ludington, “was laid by one of our best men. Been at it for 25 years. It’s not perfect. But it’s way strong, and functional, and in that aesthetic of being rustic.”

Most of us see a trail as a path between points A and B, and after a few steps, we stop seeing it at all. But some people live for trail work, devote decades to drainage and the mastery of masonry, and find transcendence amid the boulders and buckthorn. Ludington, a 29-year ranger and now foreman for trails and roads throughout the park, is one of them.

“Not one of these rocks is square or flat,” he says, still admiring the work of trail crew supervisor Erin Anders. “But the way he made those irregularities contact each other ... “

Unable to find words to match the granite, Ludington leaves the sentence hanging. There are dozens up here like him, tending to about 800 miles of trails, most blazed by Native Americans, shepherds, Army troops and 19th century toll-trail entrepreneurs before any ranger arrived. And every year, right about now, these trail people form into crews and scatter across these mountains and valleys, about 100 men and women, often sleeping in tents and counting on mule teams to bring their provisions.

This year, the park will spend about $550,000 on trail maintenance, supplemented by growing support from the private, nonprofit Yosemite Fund. That group has donated about $11 million toward the $12.6-million series of Yosemite Falls trail-and-environs improvements due for completion late this year. When that job is done, a new trail loop will include more information, offer more places to sit, and make the bridge nearest the falls wheelchair accessible. Paths like this are our yellow-brick roads through the natural world -- which, I’m pretty sure, makes these trail crews the man behind the curtain.

Once you accept the vocation, says 36-year-old Stephen Lynds, who’s been working trails here for 13 years, “you’re always a trail worker. Kicking rocks off. Checking out the drainage. Looking at somebody else’s walls.”

Like a Sierran Sisyphus, you’re forever pushing rocks -- in Yosemite’s case, granite. To break, move and stack them, you use “stone boats” (sleds for rocks, basically), Bobcats, mules, jackhammers, shovels, chain saws, whatever it takes. You work closely with mules for days without a shower. You may hike nine miles to work before the heavy lifting begins. You may step on a snake, or clear 100 tree trunks from a single mile of trail.

Instead of using mortar, you do dry masonry, relying on guile and gravity to puzzle pieces that weigh 168 pounds per cubic foot into a wall. If you put it together too smoothly, some veteran will sniff that your rocks look “too pretty.”

Rocks fall, sometimes on you, sometimes on other people, and every few years you may have to dig out the corpse of a buried hiker, or tiptoe through tons of teetering new rockfall, or rappel a cliff to plant path-clearing dynamite charges.

And then, passing civilians afoot in the backcountry, you may be mistaken for a chain-gang convict. For all this you’ll earn as much as $20 per hour, or less than half that as a California Conservation Corps crew member.

So stay humble, civilians, the next time you manage to cover 10 miles in three hours. First, you’re marching on the aching backs of an unseen army. Second, your sweat and the trail crew’s won’t matter a bit if an upslope boulder or two shakes loose. The park service has recorded more than 500 rockslides in Yosemite over the last 150 years. One day in November 1980, a single rockfall took out 45 switchbacks on the Yosemite Falls trail, killed three people and put seven more in the hospital.

To find a crew able and willing to face all this, you don’t hire a bunch of guys off a Merced street corner. Instead, each spring and summer, dozens of CCC workers, ages 18 to 26, arrive to help park service staffers with trails and other jobs. The most promising corps workers get invited back to join the park service’s pool of seasonal trail crew workers. The standout seasonal workers in turn can vie for a chance at a permanent position, but there are only about 20 of those.

So the work is backbreaking and perilous, the pay modest, the odds of advancement slim. But on a spring day ...

“It’s a dream job. It’s very addictive work,” says Michael Shenton, who started in 1981 and is still at it.

Now we leave the valley floor and join Jose Lopez, the park’s acting trails supervisor, on the boulder-strewn John Muir Trail. Ahead waits Vernal Falls and more roar. Lopez narrates every step. That boulder? Came down in the January slide that dumped 600 tons of granite across the trail. Took eight days to clear. This rock? Left over from the slide that forced closure of the Sierra Point Trail about 25 years ago.

Then, rounding a bend, he confronts an intruder: a knee-high rock, 120 pounds or so, freshly planted before us like a munchkin toll-taker. The civilian hikers sidle past. Lopez frowns and inspects.

“Something happened here,” he says. “When I was here Monday, all of this was intact.”

He’ll be back. No rest for the man behind the curtain.

To e-mail Christopher Reynolds or to read his previous Wild West columns, go to latimes.com/chrisreynolds.