Sometime around April 2012, I found myself browsing the internet in search of a job. I was in Anchorage, Alaska, about one year removed from my graduation from college with a degree I had no plans of using. Alaska was basically the full-extent of my post-college plan. I had spent the past two summers there, and it was where I thought I wanted to live after graduating. A year into that plan, for various reasons, I was looking for an escape plan.
So, there I found myself, browsing job sites for seasonal work and really anything I could find. Something led me to the AmeriCorps website and I began to look through options in multiple states using “Environmental” as my only filter. When I reached Colorado, a state that I’d never been to and knew little about, I discovered a couple postings from an organization called the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps. Following the link to their website, I discovered that RMYC was a Steamboat Springs based non-profit conservation corps. I didn’t know much about conservation corps or Colorado, but I knew that I loved hiking and I loved mountains and doing trail work in Colorado would likely allow me to experience a bit of both of those. And if nothing else it was something that could get me back down to the lower 48 and delay my need for a new career plan for a few months.
After interviewing and being offered a position, I was told I would be placed on something called a CFI crew. A Colorado Fourteener Initiative crew was a crew that would spend the majority of their season on a single 14,000-foot peak in Colorado, doing trail work at the behest of this other organization, CFI. I didn’t know what to make of this at the time, being an ignorant East Coaster with little knowledge of mountain beyond Western North Carolina and Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. But it sounded pretty cool, so I hastily accepted.
Summer began, and I flew into the Yampa airport and was shuttled up to Steamboat to meet my crew. It was a bit overwhelming at first. It felt a bit more like the first day of summer camp than I would have liked, but I started getting acquainted with my crew and liked them all well enough. After all the ice-breaker business was over with, the next day we set out south for Minturn and our first project. The following four weeks we spent split between the Holy Cross Wilderness and the Flat Tops Wilderness doing trail work primarily focused on rock work, as we’d been told that our upcoming CFI project would be all rock work and we needed to prepare.
It took some getting used to. Our first project had us building a stone stair case straight up a rock face when none of us even knew how to set rocks on more friendly surfaces. Dealing with that stress, one crew member quitting, another suffering a pretty serious thumb injury, and just getting used to RMYC’s 24/7 model where you spend the entire season with your crew, weekends included; it was a lot.
Then we got to our main project: ten weeks on North Maroon Peak building a major trail reroute to replace an older, unsustainable route. I loved every bit of this project, but at the time I didn’t quite realize that it was completely changing my life.
That summer with RMYC and CFI set the foundation for what I would later want to make my career, what I would want to completely shape my life around. My love for mountains was intensified to obsession, my interest in rock work and becoming better and better at it was born, and conservation became my calling.
Six years later, I’ve been a CFI employee for the past three summers and am now a project manager on the Mount Elbert east ridge reroute project with an RMYC crew working with me and the rest of my crew. Helping these younger trail workers learn about rock work and the alpine in general has been a great experience so far. I don’t know if I’m doing as good of a job as my CFI manager did when I was with RMYC, but I’m doing the best I can and feel like they’re all learning well. I’m already thinking about some of them as possible future CFI employees and hope they might find that path as rewarding as I have.
RMYC, and conservation corps in general, are truly amazing programs that can absolutely change people’s lives and help create wonderful stewards of the alpine and the environment in general.
