Portraits of Adventure / BTA / Valerie Gardner
Valerie Gardner
Finley State Park, OH
April 2026
Biology class helped Valerie find the Buckeye Trail. She needed service hours and a friend suggested reaching out to see if the BTA had anything going. In 2020, they sent her down to a property in southern Ohio for a few nights where she camped, helped build a privy, and pulled multiflora rose for three days. She had so much fun she kept coming back. Last year she logged 60 hours of volunteer time, 2,400 service hours in total for the year.
Valerie is aggressive, when she sees something needing done, she tackles it head on regardless of it being in her wheelhouse or not. That's how she started the marketing and social media group when the BTA had no marketing infrastructure, which became the Trail Promotions Committee. That's how she ended up on the board of trustees, chairing membership, co-founding the Lake Plains chapter, and sitting on the scholarship committee. She didn't set out to do all of it, but she continued to rise to the occasion.
Her work isn't trail maintenance in the physical sense, she's not swamping logs or painting blazes. What she does is keep the people connected to the trail and to each other. Checking in on volunteers, welcoming new members, making sure no one feels like they're doing trail work alone. Her argument is that the trail doesn't disappear if the infrastructure work stops, but it starts to feel unreliable.
She grew up coming to Finley State Park, camping with her family, catching catfish out of the lake with a net. She says that early time outside got her interested in biology to begin with, led her to the degree, and eventually led her back here. As much as she can, she kayaks the same lake, taking it all in.
Valerie called Finley a secret state park, then caught herself and said it's sort of like the Buckeye Trail that way… Once people find it, they're hooked, but most people don't know it exists, which is where she comes in.
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