The Buckeye Trail
“Everyday Trail Heroes”
Sharing the work and the people behind a fourteen hundred mile trail.
I met Aidan Reagh, the Marketing Coordinator for the Buckeye Trail Association, at the OOREC conference in Athens. We talked about the Buckeye Trail, the people who care for it, and the sheer amount of unseen work required to keep a fourteen hundred mile trail connected across Ohio. That first conversation set everything in motion. A few months later, I was invited to Trail Fest to speak about photography and meet more of the volunteers who hold this trail together. Since then, I’ve photographed headshots for the organization, partnered with them as their contracted photographer, and continue to serve on committees as this project grows.
Portraits of Adventure exists to tell real human stories, and the Buckeye Trail has an entire community of them. These are people who give their time to a trail that connects towns, neighborhoods, farmland, forests, and river corridors. Some repaint faded blazes. Some clear debris after storms. Some show up at local events to help people learn that a long distance trail is right in their backyard. Most of the effort is quiet and easy to overlook, but without it, access to the trail changes quickly.
The Buckeye Trail Association has woven this portrait series into their outreach because it helps them show the real people behind the trail. They use the images and stories throughout their biggest annual fundraising campaign, on their website, in their magazine The Trailblazer, and across social media. The video we created together has become a tool for engagement, helping them share the work of their volunteers with donors, hikers, and anyone curious about the trail.
These portraits give the trail a face. They highlight the people who keep the Buckeye Trail open, cared for, and worth returning to. They show the culture that makes this trail possible. The Buckeye Trail
People are the story. Make them visible.
Employees, community members, customers, they’re the ones who give your work meaning.
Gallery
Meg Dailey
Shawnee Wilderness, OH | March, 2026
Meg Daly walked into the interview and said "oh, good luck" before I even got started. She's thirteen.
She is the reason her dad Jesse is out here at all. She dragged him hiking when she was young, and he went along with it. Then she decided she wanted to hike the Appalachian Trail and dragged him onto that too. We’re used to hearing this story go the other way around, parents dragging their kids into activities.
She finished two years of schoolwork in three semesters so they could leave on time. Jesse got injured halfway through the first year and they had to come back. You can bet the first thing Meg asked when they got home was how to go back and finish. They got 1,000 miles the first year and 1,200 the second. She was eleven when they started.
Coming out when school allows, Meg now helps maintain a section of the Buckeye Trail. Her two jobs are swamping (clearing logs after her dad cuts them) and painting blazes. Sometimes she shows up to school with blue paint on her hands. Nobody there knows she does this except her National Junior Honor Society advisor, because she uses the hours, but she said she'd keep doing this even if she didn't get the hours for it.
When I asked if she was teaching anyone what she knows, she said she didn't think anybody wanted to learn from a thirteen-year-old. Her dad immediately listed the people she'd taught. Including a guy who complained at Trail Fest about a section being in rough shape, then came to a work party and ended up taking tips from Meg on how to fix it.
Meg has found a community she wasn’t expecting outside of school, other people who enjoy hiking and want to help maintain the trails they enjoy. She wants to hike the rest of the Buckeye Trail in time, but for now has work to get back to.
Kim Love-Ottobre
Zoar, OH | March, 2026
Kim took over as Trail Town Coordinator on what she calls a cold call. The position had been sitting vacant for a couple of years and a manual didn’t come with it. Six years later she's still in it, and she's already thinking about who comes after her, keeping detailed notes, working on succession, making sure the next person doesn't have to start from scratch the way she did.
Kim doesn’t report miles on the trail, or maintenance logs. She stewards something else, relationships. A Trail Town is a community that has formally recognized the Buckeye Trail as an asset, health, recreation, and economic draw. Kim's work is building and maintaining that relationship between the BTA and the towns. She attends Rotary meetings, participates in parades, attends village council meetings, all to make sure the people who live where the trail runs actually know the trail runs through their town. Her work is not often at the forefront when thinking about a multi-use trail, though it carries just as much weight.
When a town reaches out about becoming a Trail Town, Kim researches them before anything else. She'll look up the size, check whether they meet the requirements, and go back and read community meeting minutes to get a sense of who they are. The dedication ceremony, the proclamation, the ribbon, the official welcome, is the visible moment. The months of coordination with local government and small businesses is her work.
Kim is clear-eyed about the limits of a volunteer position. It runs on available time, and available time is always constrained. What she wants, if the resources were there, is simple: more time to show up. More capacity to be present in the towns, to attend the meetings, to keep the connections from going quiet.
She knows she won't do this forever. She's making sure the next person is left better prepared to take over.
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.
Christina Bergman
Piqua, OH | April, 2026
Holding the St. Mary’s section of the Buckeye Trail together since 2024, Christina knows every corner, but didn’t discover them until later in life.
Looking to the sky, a tear ran down her face. Despite asking me not to make her cry, she couldn't hold back when I asked her whether she thought it was inevitable that she found hiking.
The story we know describes medical situations as those that force a person inside, in Christina’s version, it did the opposite. Maybe it’s moments like these that guide us to what we really want from life. She figured if she was going to sit at home in pain waiting on surgeries, she might as well be in pain somewhere worth it. When the thing we’re dreading never arrives, we get on with life. Which is exactly what she did. Something about being in nature just released it, she said.
The Appalachian Trail is where this hiking craze started for Chirstina. Back in 2021 she found herself on the triple crown section where mountains came into her view for the first time ever. After returning to Ohio, she knew she wanted to hike more of the AT, which is how she discovered the Buckeye Trail. 876 miles later, she thought she’d only do a year of it, but in 2024 the title of Section Supervisor started to follow her name.
Building a crew has been a joy for Christina, and a devoted one she has. One drives over an hour to help clear downed trees. If you've hiked her section and seen a downed tree cut and marked with a J, that's him.
Sometimes she’s rallying support from the town for additional parking spaces at the trail head, other times she’s coordinating funding and organizing work parties to clean up sections. Currently, she has her eye set on repairing a bridge that’s weathered too many storms.
Although she is the only one in the family who hikes, there’s no lack of support. Last Easter Sunday she drove to Peebles to finish a section that had been on her list for a year and a half. Her husband dropped her off, went and got breakfast, met her at mile four, picked her up at mile eight.
She still wants to do the full AT, and now Colorado is on the list for her 45th birthday.
Matthew Edmonds
Cambridge, OH | March, 2026
No appointments, Matthew just walks in. At least that’s how he was approaching his outreach today. We met up in the town of Cambridge Ohio so I could learn his story and capture his portrait. I got into town about an hour early to find a good location, something that could represent the other small trail towns the Buckeye Trail runs through. I was fortunate that Matthew’s schedule dictated we start early, before store fronts and offices opened for the day where he could get his canvasing done.
It’s interesting how a past experience can shape an activity and your feelings towards it for the rest of your life - that is until you challenge yourself to try again. On his first day on the Buckeye trail out of Cincinnati, Matthew wore an old pair of Army boots for 12.5 miles. Twelve and a half miles of hiking in parade boots. Hiking for him in his past life meant ruck marches in Dress blues for parades, and funerals at Arlington National Cemetery. Astonishingly, he wanted to keep hiking after a first experience that left his feet looking unrecognizable.
Matthew is driven to accomplish, and hiking would help him lose the weight he’d put on since his military days. That is 60 miles a week at his peak, all with the Buckeye Trail under each step. 16 years of volunteering in, he’s been compiling complete logistics data on the trail, mapping areas available for primitive camping, surface types, and how many volunteers are needed to sustain. He has a 10,000 member goal on a poster he’s created to help explain the gap.
His section is the Wilderness loop, and it’s remote with a register of sometimes only 8 entries. He doesn't read that as a problem, he knows the importance of maintaining a great trail whether it’s for 8 or 800. Carved into hillsides with mattocks and pulaskis, pruned, and a blue blaze consistently marking the trail..
He buys his maintenance gear from Goodwill so he doesn't risk the real stuff. He also knows to leave his nice gear at home for these trips.
He is not a hiker who stops for flowers. He said something about John Muir and sauntering and then said: “I am out to conquer.” He described his volunteer work as being Mickey Mouse in Fantasia, the magician orchestrating everything into something larger. He knows this sounds egotistical, it’s just how he thinks about it.
What he wants for the BTA is specific, nothing short of aspirational. Land acquisition without waiting on grant cycles. Ten thousand members, which he knows will make people faint. An officer corps for the wilderness chapter. Add, fix, tweak, multiply, or amplify what's already working.
Matthew will tell you he's out there because it just needs to be done, he’s one very driven person. He's on indefinite standby, waiting to be activated.
Richard Morgan
Caldwell, OH | October, 2025
Richard didn’t grow up dreaming about hiking the Buckeye Trail. He didn’t even start hiking seriously until his early fifties. What pulled him in wasn’t some big life shift. It was curiosity. He just kept wanting to see what was around the next curve, and before he knew it, he’d walked thousands of miles across Ohio. He talks about it like it’s nothing. “I’m just walking,” he’ll say. But seven thousand miles is not nothing.
His section tells a different story about the work. Richard spends countless hours clipping briars, clearing branches, repainting blazes, and cutting out downed trees after storms. It’s the kind of work hikers rarely notice because it’s done right. They pass through in seconds without knowing how long he was out there keeping the path clear. He doesn’t complain about it. He just shrugs and keeps going.
The trail has handed him strange little moments along the way. A logbook entry thanking him for a well kept stretch. A random hiker who becomes a partner for twenty six mile days. A blimp hangar tour because he happened to walk by at the perfect time. That’s how Richard talks about the trail. Not dramatic. Not poetic. Just real. Just a life built out of small miles, steady work, and a curiosity that never really stopped.
Vicki Proctor
Great Miami River Recreation Area, Dayton, OH | September, 2025
Vicki talks about the trail the way someone talks about a place they’ve spent a lot of quiet hours in. There’s no big speech behind it, just a clear sense of what the work actually looks like. She knows her section well enough to picture exactly what happens if nobody shows up for a few weeks. Branches start leaning in, weeds take over, the path closes itself off. It’s the kind of knowledge you only get from being out there often enough to see those changes happen in real time.
What stands out is her practicality. She doesn’t make the work sound heroic. It’s clipping, clearing, checking on things, and doing it regularly so hikers don’t feel abandoned out there. She thinks about the people who pass through, section hikers, thru hikers, and how different their experience is when the trail feels cared for instead of forgotten.
Vicki’s perspective comes from years of showing up, even when no one sees it. She understands how quickly a trail can disappear without steady hands on it, and she steps into that gap without needing recognition. Being with her makes it clear that stewardship isn’t a grand idea. It’s slow, patient work, and she’s someone who’s learned to keep at it.
Cindy Sommers
Ash Cave, Hocking Hills, OH | October, 2025
Cindy likes to joke that she is “not a speaker,” but her work carries a steady voice across the Buckeye Trail. As chair of the Central Ohio chapter, most of what she does happens far from the public eye. She is the person reading every email, answering questions as they come in, tracking event registrations, checking weather, and making sure each hike has the right details in place. It is quiet work, but without it, the community would drift. The newsletter would not go out, people would not know what was happening, and engagement would slip away.
Her own story with the trail began the same way she hopes others will find theirs: through a simple introduction. She remembers not being able to hike long days, not understanding how big the community was until she showed up at Trail Fest and felt the scale of it. That memory shapes how she plans things now. Her new project, Scioto Saturdays, breaks a full section into six shorter hikes so beginners can take the trail in smaller steps. Finish one section, she says, and people fall in love. Then they get involved.
Cindy’s work may be administrative, but its outcome is physical. It shows up as new hikers, new volunteers, and new reasons for people to care about the trail.
Raman Ras
Skok Meadow Trail, OH | October 2025
Raman has a calm way of moving through the world. When you talk with him out on the trail, it feels like he’s already settled into whatever the day is going to give him. No rush. No big declarations. Just a steady presence and a genuine curiosity for the spaces he walks through.
He talks about hiking the same way most people talk about their daily routines. It’s not something he performs. It’s something he returns to. A way to clear the noise and check back in with himself. You can tell he’s someone who notices the small shifts in things: how the light hits the water, when the wind changes, when the trail bends in a way you didn’t expect. He doesn’t make these moments sound dramatic. He just observes them, and somehow that simplicity makes them feel more real.
Raman’s connection to the trail feels personal in a quiet way. He’s not chasing miles or trying to prove anything. He just likes being out there, putting one foot in front of the other, letting the landscape open up however it wants. Spending time with him reminds you that adventure doesn’t need to be loud or extreme. Sometimes it’s just a person who knows how to listen to the world around them and keeps showing up for it.
Diane Wright
Great Miami River Recreation Area, Dayton, OH | September, 2025
Diane’s section of the Buckeye Trail looks simple at first. It follows paved bike paths, sidewalks, and small towns rather than deep forest. But that surface level view hides the work she carries, which is almost entirely human. Diane maintains relationships the way others maintain footbeds and bridges. She stays in touch with park staff, hiking groups, partner organizations, and the constant flow of people who discover the trail for the first time in her section. For her, a well kept trail is as much about connection as it is about terrain.
As an ambassador, she loves watching someone realize that adventure is waiting right outside their door. Hikers stop at her booth, or join a holiday walk through a small town lit with luminaries, and say, “How did I not know this was here?” She has seen those same people return, posting that they are 40 miles in, then 200, then volunteering at Trail Fest because the trail changed something in them.
The Buckeye Trail changed Diane, too. A ten mile COVID walk with her husband shifted how she sees herself and the world. Now she gives that same opening to others, guiding them, welcoming them, and quietly shaping their first steps on a trail that reshaped her own life.