We’ve posted our 2015 Public Lands Stewards Positions.

Public Lands Stewards is a program for young adults, ages 21-29, interested in public lands / natural resources management careers. If you’re a backpacker, thru-hiker, skier, mountain biker, naturalist and/or general lover of all things outdoors, this might be the opportunity you’re looking for.

The program is supported by AmeriCorps, The Corps Network and agency partners.

Participants spend 17 weeks (June 15-October 9, 2015) working individually and/or teams on wilderness, trail and/or environmental restoration projects in Washington and Oregon. Our ideal candidates have experience working and living outside, are physically fit to handle the rigor of the positions, enjoy working and engaging with people and are motivated to do their best.

Currently, we have wilderness ranger positions available on the Okanogan Wenatchee National Forest and refuge technician positions on the Conboy National Wildlife Refuge. Plus, a Cascade Mountain School Education Intern position.

Participants earn a modest living stipend and an AmeriCorps education award while learning new skills and building professional connections. Plus, they get to live/work in some of the most beautiful places in the lower 48. And there’s no doubt about it, you will work hard: some positions involve hiking 10-20 miles/day while carrying a 50 lb. backpack!

If you’re interested in learning more, read the full position descriptions at the bottom of our jobs page. And don’t delay, these opportunities will fill quickly!

Editor’s note: Public Lands Steward, Kari Nielsen, comments on the idea of trails in wilderness areas. Read on to see what her season as a wilderness ranger on the Okanogan Wenatchee National Forest has led her to believe about their place in wilderness:

Tucked amidst the calendars and layered notes-to-self, a square comic is pinned to a carpeted divider in the Cle Elum Ranger Station. The image depicts a ranger carrying a pack overloaded with bundles of gear that must have been purchased at an army surplus store in the 1950s. Teetering under the weight, the ranger is sucking for air when he comes to a sign that reads “Hard Part  —   3 miles ahead.” Two day hikers are smiling at the ranger. “Wow, you have the best job!” they say in the caption.

Similar conversations often take place when I am wearing a Forest Service uniform and carrying a long handled spade shovel on my pack. But the observation that I have a neat job is often coupled with the question, “So, what do you do?”

I silently wonder why someone would say I have a great job while simultaneously not knowing what I do for “work” besides hike, but I roll with it and have a well-rehearsed response: “Oh, I talk to people about the area, remove illegal fire rings, sometimes dig toilets, clean up trash, log out small trees.” Then, yes, add, “Yeah, it’s a great job.”

Though I don’t pack the army surplus store weight that the suffering comic strip ranger carries, I share his sentiment that sometimes people have a skewed idea of what rangers actually “do.” Besides the fun things, like throwing rocks from illegal fire rings into lakes, I also bury irresponsible people’s poop and pack out toilet paper flowers that are draped over moss. Which is not so fun. But even encountering an illegal fire ring, which can be fun to dismantle, is met with a moment of frustration. This because I have to unclip the shovel from my pack and ask a variation of, “Seriously?” to myself, which can also be vocalized as, “Really?” or, “Come on.”

The same can be said of excessive cairns. I understand that it can be cool to see how high you can balance a stack of rocks before they fall. I also understand that cairns have a function. On the slabs of granite bedrock leading up to Robin Lake, for instance, they act as guideposts across rock that reminds me only of the Adirondacks and the Whites of the Northeast. But on the route leading from Tuck Lake to Robin Lake, hikers have built so many cairns that the route has become more like a paved road with too many streetlights overhead. Following cairns is meant to be a step up from following a trail. You reach a stack of rocks, then must stop and search for the next guidepost. Rather than turning your nose to the ground, as you might on a trail through dense woods, you must look up. When your eyes finally find rest on the next cairn, you feel excitement, then safety. Someone else has been this way before. It’s a subtle way for people to communicate in the wilderness. “You are on the right path,” say the cairns.

But not between Tuck and Robin Lakes. There, the cairns shout, “Hey! Over here! Over here! Keep coming, you’re almost there. Right on! Yeah, you’re on the right path!” You get the idea.

When I first followed this highway to Robin Lake, clouds were hanging low and shrouded the granite slabs in fog. At first, heading south from Tuck Lake, I had to decide which of the braided dirt paths to follow through the heather. Then I came to the cairns. At times, even in thick fog, I could see seven or eight tilted stacks of rocks at a time. I thought, “Really?” and, “Come on.”

Tuck and Robin Lakes are in a high-use area of Alpine Lakes Wilderness. Tuck is less than five miles from a popular trailhead, and it’s beautiful. Maps depict the route between the lakes as a dotted line. A route, not a trail. But what I saw in the cairns between the two lakes was a kind of handrail. This is a wilderness area, I said to myself. Which means that human presence is kept to a minimum, welcomed, yes, in the forms of occasional cairns, signs at junctions, some trails. But wilderness also affords opportunities for solitude. And, honestly, if you want solitude in Alpine Lakes, you have to leave the trail. This summer, I have received questions like, “Why isn’t there a trail from A to B?” I answer with a combination of “the Forest can only maintain so many miles of trail” and “because wilderness needs to allow for cross-country travel as well. If everything was marked out for you, it wouldn’t be much of a wilderness anymore.”

With cold and damp hands, I pushed on the supportive stones at the base of a cairn. The rocks above the base slipped down like a splayed stack of cards. The frustration at the public’s need to spoon-feed the route to fellow hikers turned to excitement as I sought out new victims. Maybe I was just carrying out some useless campaign that will only be reversed when people find all of those scattered stones and decide that it’s fun to balance them on top of each other again. Or maybe I was reading too much Ed Abbey. Nevertheless, I started kicking the tops of the cairns, so the rocks would scatter across the bedrock. For the next mile and a half, I took down dozens of cairns I had deemed “excessive.” Don’t worry, I left plenty standing so people could find their way across that granite and through the fog to Robin Lake (the map, after all, does depict that dotted line). But they’d have to look up if they wanted to get there.

The nerve they have – we go to great ends to make these manicured treads to walk on, and they just disregard every notion of social acceptability and clomp willy-nilly wherever they please. Paths through the delicate marshy grasses, tracks straight up loose gravel slopes dislodging plants that could barely grasp the incline anyway, and worst of all, piles of feces scattered everywhere in between. The nerve they have- to have so little regard for this amazing environment that I work in and want to protect.

Let me step back from my rant for a second, and give a quick lesson in hiking ethics.

There are many topics I could cover, but here are two biggies:

Don’t be the classic SBC. SBC is slang for us in the biz for a “switchback cutter.” When the grade gets steep, trail (and road) builders form switchbacks, a series of Zs that criss-cross across the slope. These switchbacks keep you from exhausting yourself by walking straight uphill, and protect the trail and surrounding plants from pitting erosion by allowing ample opportunities for water to run off and find its own merry way down the slope. The SBC is the type that thinks they are so strong and fast that they can’t do anything so weak as to walk across a hill, and they decide to have a go at heading straight up the hill. As they make the Zs into a number 1, they slip and slide their feet, displacing dirt and plants and making a great path for the next storm to exhibit its erosional fortitude.

Deal with your poop. It has been shown numerous times that burying your waste a few inches below the ground accelerates its reunion with the earth. Plus, then I don’t have to see and smell it as I hike. Simple as that, I don’t think I have to explain this any further.

Well, even with all the education, signs and literature explaining these principles, deer everywhere choose to poop where they want, and walk where they want. Nobody wants to have their workplace disrespected, but every day I see deer feces out in the open, or deer tracks B-lined for the top of a slope. They seem to have no concept of sharing this beautiful wilderness, instead they seem content to just hop around eating plants and deteriorating the ecosystem they call home. They may think their big round eyes and wobbly ears lull us into accepting their errant ways, but I am done accepting their incompliance.

Come on deer, we are all a team here and there is not much wilderness left in this country, lets take care of it.

Rachel Clark is part of the VetsWork program expansion to the Mark Twain National Forest in Missouri.

I hail from a small town in central Tennessee where I spent my childhood enjoying the outdoors and our natural environment. After graduating from high school, I enlisted in the U.S. Army as an Air Traffic Controller in order to expand my worldview. The opportunity granted me many wonderful experiences beginning with my first assignment at Ft. Bragg, N.C. and included numerous deployments  from the California desert to the Gulf Coast and even briefly to upstate New York. I then traveled to the Republic of South Korea for a year where I watched the September 11^th attacks from a small field camp sitting on the North Korean border. During this time, I met my wonderful husband, Leo, who I have now been married to for fourteen years.

Shortly after returning to Ft. Bragg in 2002, my unit received its first combat deployment where I served in Operation Enduring Freedom in Kandahar, Afghanistan in support of the 82^nd Airborne Division. It was there that I received more of an education than ever before. I had never seen such poverty and hopelessness in a society and it truly allowed me to appreciate all I was so fortunate to have.

After completing my five-year active duty enlistment, I used my army skills and experience as a military air traffic controller to work as a civilian in Northern Kuwait at Camp Udari, where all units entered Iraq subsequent to the invasion. During these two years, from 2004 until early 2006 I watched the war from only 80 kilometers away and assisted each aviation unit in their final preparations and training before entering combat in Iraq. We also received each unit upon completion of their combat rotation and facilitated their return to the United States. When I, myself, returned to the United States, my husband and I purchased an RV park at the Northern edge of the Missouri Ozark Mountains at the confluence of the Gasconade River and the Little Piney Creek. Here we operated a seasonal campground for three years, including many of the features found in many other private and public parks such as walking and riding trails, a swimming pool, river access with a boat ramp and even a small camp store. This ended with a record flood in the spring of 2008, in which briefly I thought there would be no future for me working outdoors and with our natural environment.

I returned to school in 2010 to pursue a Bachelors of Science in Biology with a minor in Chemistry and I now expect to graduate in the spring of 2015. Having learned about the VetsWork AmeriCorps Program and Mount Adam’s Institute, I applied for and have begun the most exciting internship with the U.S. National Forrest Service here in Missouri. Thus far, the prospect has been enlightening and the opportunities appear endless. My exposure to wonderful people and mentors has already begun helping me apply my previous experiences and education to the goals of the U.S. Forest Service and I expect is only the first step in fulfilling my ambitions to influence the future of our environment for the sake of our children, including my own son and daughter who are turning two and six this year. I envision this chance will allow me to find a place where I can work towards environmental sustainability and appropriate stewardship, something for which I am extremely passionate. I am proud to have the opportunity to continue serving my country in a new capacity thanks to the Mt. Adams Institute and the VetsWork AmeriCorps  program.