Greetings from the Adirondacks. I’ve got two weeks under my belt as a backcountry steward now, and let me tell you, I’ve had quite the introduction to the area. I thought Ellenville was the middle of nowhere, but North Creek takes it to another dimension. The town is comprised of just one single road, and the whole thing is probably less than a mile long. If you took Canal Street in Ellenville and surrounded it with trees, you might get something similar. My fellow stewards and I live right on the main drag, fifty feet from a little café that sells croissants. I hardly dared hope for such luxuries up here, and with all the hard work I’ve been doing, it’s been such a treat.

Every day, I’m assigned a trail to patrol, so in the simplest of terms, I’m being paid to hike. But I clean up the trail as I go, I clip back the encroaching branches and replace missing trail markers with my little tool belt. I even regularly break out the hand saw when there are bigger trees fallen across the path. I won’t lie, it’s pretty grueling, but I’ve found the work fiercely refreshing. I spent the last year attending college through a screen, my brain swimming in this intangible electronic ether, but now, my body is engaged all day in conjunction with my mind. Each step, each smack of the hammer is a calculation, and it’s more rooted in reality than any class I attended last semester.

For the past week, I’ve been working with the other steward in my area, Ben, and together we’ve encountered some strange sights. In our survey of all the roadside campsites, we found one fire pit where someone had burned about two dozen full cans of Friskies cat food. Just writing about it, the thought of the smell makes me gag. It was so unbearable that we tied the trash bag to the top of the car, just so we wouldn’t have to breathe it in on the drive to the dumpster. We backpacked for two nights in the backcountry checking up on some lean-tos and found so much discarded food and camping gear that we had to carry it out in big bags balanced on our heads.

That’s the job at its nastiest, but most of the time it’s downright pleasant. Ben and I were tasked with finding a hidden campsite rumored to be on the far side of a lake, so we spent half a day out in a canoe, paddling with the loons for work. We did find the secret site if you were wondering, it was an idyllic little spot, soon to be officially marked on the map.

On a nice stretch of trail that’s well-maintained, that’s when we can really relax. Ben has a degree in biology, and he’s told me all sorts of cool facts about the wildlife. For instance, did you know that a woodpecker’s tongue curls up behind their brain and acts as a shock absorber for all that pecking? I think that’s so cool. Even at night, the forest is alive. The bullfrogs rumble like freight trains, and one night we had the screams of a fisher to lull us to sleep.

We haven’t seen much in the way of people on the trails, but it’s still early in the season. We did meet one man carrying a handgun and a massive machete who went down to the lake with his guitar to “play the sun to bed.” He certainly had us on edge, but we did our best to act professional. I’m still easing into the job, and I’m covered in scrapes and bug bites to show for it, but in the past two weeks, I’ve genuinely had fun.