Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods

A lively and lyrical account of one woman's unlikely apprenticeship on a national-park trail crew and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work.

Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal "traildog" maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from "the real world" before going on to graduate school. She came to find out that work in the woods on a trail crew was more demanding, more rewarding-more real-than she ever imagined.

During her first season, Byl embraces the backbreaking difficulty of the work, learning how to clear trees, move boulders, and build stairs in the backcountry. Her first mentors are the colorful characters with whom she works-the packers, sawyers, and traildogs from all walks of life-along with the tools in her hands: axe, shovel, chainsaw, rock bar. As she invests herself deeply in new work, the mountains, rivers, animals, and weather become teachers as well. While Byl expected that her tenure at the parks would be temporary, she ends up turning this summer gig into a decades-long job, moving from Montana to Alaska, breaking expectations-including her own-that she would follow a "professional" career path.

Returning season after season, she eventually leads her own crews, mentoring other trail dogs along the way. In Dirt Work, Byl probes common assumptions about the division between mental and physical labor, "women's work" and "men's work," white collars and blue collars. The supposedly simple work of digging holes, dropping trees, and blasting snowdrifts in fact offers her an education of the hands and the head, as well as membership in an utterly unique subculture. Dirt Work is a contemplative but unsentimental look at the pleasures of labor, the challenges of apprenticeship, and the way a place becomes a home.

"This chronicle of years spent as a 'traildog' — a seasonal worker doing the underappreciated, backbreaking work of maintaining wilderness trails — first in Montana's Glacier National Park, and later in Alaska's Denali National Park — blends beauty and crudeness, grit and grace. Successfully articulating the satisfaction of physical labor and the camaraderie of the people who do it, Byl organizes the book around her beloved tools, starting with whimsical descriptions of each and using her experience to launch stories about how she learned to do the myriad unseen jobs that keep park trails navigable. Byl is just as likely to be sentimental about backhoes and boots as about the gorgeous vistas of Alaska, but her most obvious love is for the people who work the trails with her, whose taciturn behavior, practical jokes, and machismo she must navigate, whose internal culture she learns as she becomes a part of the team, and whose mentorship is invaluable. With language that is lyrical despite the earthiness of its subject, Byl turns the words of work into found poetry ('brake on, choke on, pull, pull, fire'), offering a bridge for readers to those 'who would not speak like this themselves' — a beautiful memoir of muscle and metal. Agent: Janet Silver, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

"Here is a love story that encompasses wild country, skillful labor, hand tools, crusty workmates, and lingo formal and foul. As a woman, and a small one at that, the author must persuade the males on her crews that she can more than hold her own at hiking, trail-building, and swearing. She begins by convincing the man who becomes her husband, and ends by convincing the reader. You'll find plenty to relish here, in a narrative that's gritty, witty, and wise." Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Conservationist Manifesto

"This chronicle of years spent as a 'traildog'...blends beauty and crudeness, grit and grace....With language that is lyrical despite the earthiness of its subject, Byl turns the words of work into found poetry...a beautiful memoir of muscle and metal." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

"A beguiling journey of self-discovery." Kirkus Reviews

"Christine Byl has been summering on trail crews for more than a decade and a half. A first-rate storyteller, she details the techniques and tools, and the spirit of fellowship and feel of the woods. If you love getting into the back country, or even if you're an armchair backpacker as I am now at age eighty, you'll love Dirt Work.” William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky and The Nature of Generosity

"Every denizen of wild places from Laotse to St. Francis to Rachel Carson to black bears to field mice has depended upon trails. But rarely have we considered the people, tools, or toil that lay our favorite trails down. Dirt Work is a spectacular correction of this omission. Imbued with a tough-minded, ribald reverence for honest labor that brings to mind a female Gary Snyder or Wendell Berry (if you can imagine that!), Christine Byl does epic justice to the whole-bodied satisfactions that come of staying out in the weather, staying alert, and working one’s ass off for others with love, tenacity and skill." David James Duncan, author of The River Why and Sun House

“Byl’s is not a world of groomed nature, inert tools, or nostalgic rituals, but a vibrant landscape inhabited by people and animals and layered by idea and history. She means this book as a love song, she writes, and it is, not only from her to her fellow laborers, but from the mind to the body, the hand to the tool, the human to the wild.” Sherry Simpson, author of The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska

Christine Byl took a seasonal job with the National Park Service as a “trail dog” in Montana’s Glacier National Park, maintaining trails for the millions of visitors it draws every year. This college graduate arrived with little experience or muscle, but she quickly learned how to clear trees, move boulders, and build stairs in the back country. In addition to the colorful characters with whom she worked, her primary tutors were the tools in her hands: the axes, shovels, and chainsaws. Byl expected that her tenure at the parks would be temporary, but she found the work more fulfilling than any job she’d ever had and worked her way up to lead her own trail crews and run a small business, mentoring other young trail dogs along the way. Dirt Work is a contemplative but unsentimental look at the pleasures of labor, our place in nature, and learning to thrive as a woman in a "man’s job."

Christine Byl lives in Healy, Alaska, where she and her husband run a trail-design and construction business. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Alaska-Anchorage in 2005, and her prose has appeared in many literary magazines, journals, and anthologies. Byl lives off the grid with two old sled dogs in a yurt on a few acres of tundra just north of Denali National Park. When she isn’t working outside or writing, she loves reading, homestead projects, wilderness adventures, and anything that happens in the snow.

Introduction

What We Carry

Axe

Chapter 1: North Fork: River

Rock Bar

Chapter 2: Sperry: Alpine

Chainsaw

Chapter 3: Middle Fork: Forest

Boat

Chapter 4: Cordova: Town

Skid Steer

Chapter 5: Denali: Park

Shovel

Chapter 6: Denali: Home

Afterword

Traildogs’ Index

Acknowledgments

Works Consulted