The Work You Don’t See on the Trail
Environmental portrait photography and the people behind access
I’ve been spending the past several months photographing and interviewing volunteers along the Buckeye Trail Association, trying to get a better understanding of what it actually takes to maintain a trail that stretches across the state. At a glance, it seems simple enough—clear the path, mark the route, keep it passable—but the more time I’ve spent with people doing the work, the more I’ve realized how much sits just below the surface.
There’s a constant layer of coordination that most people never see. It’s not just physical labor on the trail, it’s conversations between organizations, relationships that need to be maintained, and decisions that affect how the trail moves through different communities. In some sections, that means working with multiple groups at once just to make sure everything connects in a way that feels seamless to someone walking through it. When you’re out there, you don’t notice any of that. You follow the path, you trust the markings, and you keep moving forward without really questioning how it all came together. I assumed that would be the focus of most of these conversations. The logistics, the effort, the systems behind it all. And those things do come up. But what caught me off guard was how often the conversation shifted somewhere else entirely.
Again and again, people started talking about other people. Not in a broad or abstract way, but in very specific moments—someone stopping by a booth and realizing the trail was closer than they thought, or someone joining a short group hike and coming back later having gone farther than they expected. There’s a pattern to those stories, and it’s not about the work itself as much as it is about what the work allows to happen. The trail becomes something people step into, sometimes without planning to. And the role of the people maintaining it starts to feel a little different because of that.
It’s not just about keeping something intact. It’s about making sure that when someone shows up—whether they meant to or not—they can keep going. That they don’t get turned around by unclear signage, or feel like they’re in the wrong place, or miss something that was right in front of them. A lot of the effort seems to go toward removing those small points of friction that would otherwise stop someone early. What stood out to me is that none of this is framed as outreach or recruitment. No one talks about it like they’re trying to bring people in
It’s quieter than that, It feels more like a sense of responsibility that develops over time. Someone spends enough time on the trail to understand it, and somewhere along the way, that understanding turns into a willingness to help someone else find their footing in it. Not in a formal way, just in passing conversations, small interactions, or decisions that make the experience a little clearer for the next person. I didn’t expect that to be such a consistent thread.
I think I assumed the motivation would lean more heavily toward protection—preserving the land, maintaining ecosystems, making sure the trail exists for the long term. That’s all part of it, and it’s important, but it doesn’t seem to stand alone. It’s tied closely to something else that’s harder to define but shows up just as often. A desire to share it. Not in a way that feels promotional or intentional, but in a way that comes from personal experience. People spend time in these places, they find something in it that matters to them, and then they put time back into it so someone else has the chance to find their own version of that experience. It’s made me think differently about what access actually means.
It’s easy to think of access as something structural—whether a trail exists, whether it’s open, whether there’s a place to park. But there’s another layer to it that’s less visible and maybe just as important. It’s whether someone feels like they can step into that space without hesitation, whether the path makes sense as they move through it, and whether there’s enough clarity and continuity that they don’t second guess themselves along the way. That kind of work doesn’t stand out, and it doesn’t translate easily into something you can point to or isolate. But it’s there.
It shows up in the way someone keeps walking instead of turning around, or decides to come back, or tells someone else about the place they found. And the more I pay attention to it, the more I realize that a lot of what feels like a personal experience outdoors is actually supported by people thinking about someone they may never meet. I’m still trying to understand what that means for the way I photograph it. Or maybe just how I notice it when I’m there.
