The Washington State Hiking Podcast

What Impact will Federal Staff and Budget Cuts have on Washington Hiking this year with Jeff Kish (Part 1)

• Jennie Thwing Flaming and Craig Romano • Episode 62

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 Welcome to the Washington State Hiking Podcast. I'm your host, Jennie Thwing Flaming, 

and I'm your co-host Craig Romano.

Craig and I are happy to have you here. We provide practical and timely seasonal hiking advice for hikers, trail runners, and potential hikers and trail runners of all skill and ability levels that is helpful, accurate, fun, and inclusive.

 Our guest today is Jeff Kish from the Pacific Northwest Trail Association, and Craig and I invited Jeff to join the podcast today because we really wanted to talk with someone who's working on the front lines of what's going on with our public lands right now.

To share a little bit with you. About what's going on, how this will impact your hike, what you can do as a hiker, that sort of thing. And this is a two part series. So next week we'll have another episode on  similar topic with,  a different person. So Jeff, welcome to the Washington State Hiking Podcast.

Thank you so much for being here. 

Thank you for having me. 

Yeah. So to start off, Jeff, can you talk a little bit about the Pacific Northwest Trail Association? What is the Pacific Northwest Trail, how do you work with these land managers? So let's start there. 

Sure.  The Pacific Northwest Trail Association is the primary nonprofit partner of the Forest Service in the management of the Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail.

So there are 11 national scenic trails. Most people are aware of. The first two that were designated back in 1968,  those being the Pacific Crest Trail and the Appalachian Trail. The Pacific Northwest Trail is the same classification. It's just the newest of the National Scenic Trails having been designated officially in 2009.

But Pacific Northwest Trail has been around since the 1970s and people have been hiking at end to end since 1977. So we have been around for a long time. The work that we do is, everything that is involved in the management of the trail. So we do a lot of trail maintenance and construction. We do a lot of  advocacy and policy work.

We do a lot of trail planning. We participate to the effort to permanently protect the trail, which means land acquisition planning. We do trail information, user education. We provide the navigation resources for the trail. 



 We're the organization that facilitates volunteers working on the trail, and we're also the way that private money makes it to the maintenance of the trail through our donors and through corporate sponsors and foundations. So we bring a lot of value to that partnership because we do leverage the federal dollars that we get to do a lot more work than those dollars themselves would pay for.

That makes a lot of sense. Thanks for explaining that. So of course I'm sure, as everyone listening to this podcast knows are public lands in general and the agencies you work with in particular under an enormous threat right now.  But I also know that this sort of long-term funding challenge, particularly with the Forest Service,  that part isn't new.

 It's particularly acute right now, but as more people have been hiking and recreating. Funding has been going down for a long time. So could you. Talk a little bit about how we got to this very acute point. Of course, currently there are these huge cuts as well, but I think it's important for people to know that's coming on top of a several decades of, less funding.

So could you talk just a little bit about how that works and what that looks like, just to set the stage a little more? 

The funding for public lands is really complicated. Unfortunately, there's not just one pot of money that's obligated every year that's adequate to cover everything that needs to be done. It comes from a lot of different places. And in the average year, all of those things come together to result in the kind of maintenance that we've been seeing in recent years, which is.

Not enough. Yeah. And that's why we've been seeing things like five years ago, the Great American Outdoors Act was passed and half of that was specifically to obligate additional funds to address deferred maintenance on public lands. 

Yeah. 

That's just because we're not keeping up. And that's been happening for a long time.

I've been going to Washington, DC for 10 years now. I meet with the offices of every member of Congress and every senator from the state of Washington, Idaho, and Montana, which is the three states that the Pacific Northwest Trail runs through. 

Yep. 

Part of what we do is advocate for better funding for public lands.

And to give you an idea of what we're seeing in return the main pot of money that the Forest Service has for the maintenance of trails is called CMTL. That's capital improvement and maintenance of trails, and that's been about $20 million a year for the entire forest service across the country. It hasn't really changed much in the 10 years that I've been advocating. Meanwhile, the costs have been going up considerably. Yeah. So even if we have level funding, the result is we're seeing less and less of an actual investment in the upkeep of our public lands. 

Yeah. 

And that keeps going.

Yeah.  I think that, and also I know that there are more people using our public lands as well, so that's a, Costco up, there's also more users, so I'm sure there's also more pressure that also costs more. I. 

That's true. Just the population of our country has gone up a lot since the 1990s when I would say the Forest Service was probably at its peak of staffing.

Yeah. 

And the interest in outdoor recreation has certainly grown a lot, I would say in the last decade. COVID was a big boost for people getting outside and yeah. When those people realized how great it is to be out there they kept coming back. 

And 

That's great.

But it is a lot of pressure. And we can't leave out one of the most important things that's been affecting trails in the west in the last five to 10 years. And that's been wildfire. Yeah. The impacts that wildfires had on the landscape and the amount of resources it takes to rehab an area that's been affected by a burn has contributed significantly to the cost of doing business.

And that's having huge impacts on just the quality. Of our recreation, infrastructure, and the quantity, because we're losing trails. 

Yeah. Absolutely. Okay, so Jeff by the way, listeners, we are recording. This episode on May 1st, and it's going to be live on May 8th. So one thing about this topic right now is that things are changing quite rapidly and we're we have no idea of what we're talking about today will be accurate in the future.

So we'll try to keep up with what's going on and also, we are just getting into kind of the heaviest season of trail use for sure in the Pacific Northwest, but I think many other places as well. So Jeff, can you talk a little bit about what's happening in the current situation?

So I know that many. Many staff from the Forest Service have been, their jobs have been cut recently. Is there, what are the impacts of that sort of, right this moment, understanding that we're recording this and talking about this at a moment in time and things may change? 

Yeah. To your point about this being a longer problem than just the last couple of months let's start last fall.

Last fall, we found out that or late summer, last late summer, we found out that the Forest Service wouldn't be bringing back seasonal employees in 2025. And seasonal employees Yeah. Are largely the staff that you see out on the ground doing the work out on the ground. 

Yeah. 

So without them, 2025 was already looking like it was gonna be a really tough year.

And then in the last few months we've had probationary employees at the Forest Service who were let go. And that was I think 3,400 employees was the estimate that were lost. In that cut. They've been going back. And you're 

just talking about the Forest service, 

correct. And yeah, I'm probably gonna speak about the Forest Service primarily in this.

Yeah, it does apply across the agencies, but the Forest Service is our primary partner. Yep. It's where most of our trail is and it's what I know the best. 

Yep. And listeners, just, I, you may know this, but this is, it is not only the Forest Service that's experienced these cuts, but that's what we're focusing on today.

Okay. So go ahead, Jeff. 

Yeah, so that was about 3,400 employees. There was a court order that said that was an illegal firing. And all of those employees were offered their jobs back for 45 days. And then just more recently there was another ruling that those firings could proceed. So some of those employees are currently still around, but might not be in the future.

We're gonna have to wait and see, but a lot of them are lost. There was additional reductions in force that have happened since the probationary employees were cut. And that's resulted in substantial cuts to just the whole agency here in region six, which covers the state of Washington. We're seeing in many cases different departments in the regional office have been cut in half in the past month, and, a lot of partners in the public that rely on the forest service to keep our infrastructure open and our trails hackable would tell you that this problem has. It's been going on for a long time that Yeah. Even before the cuts, they were short staffed and because of that 

yeah. 

Things took too long to get done and now we're trying to get the same things done with half as many people.

Yeah. And it's even worse than that because for a couple months, all of this ground to a halt. So now it's half as many people trying to catch up on a couple months of this work. 

Yeah. 

It's gonna have serious impacts and we don't know what the future's gonna look like. Things are changing every day, but I do know we're so far behind right now.

It's definitely gonna be bad. 

Yeah. Yeah, I know. It's really a bummer. And I will just say, I. From an editorial standpoint as the host of this podcast, one of the things that I find really discouraging about this situation is that in the past, public lands have not been a partisan issue. That this is something that, that all Americans, the vast majority of people, have really supported regardless of how they vote or their party.

So seeing this kind of devastation is really. Hard because for me, because, and not only me of course, this is something that has really held us together, I think as a country. And so it's really hard for me to see this happen. My husband also, I think listeners already know my husband worked for the Park Service for a long time and grew up in the Park service.

He's not working there now. But yeah, it's, it. It's tough. So Jeff I'm not really asking you to predict the future because I know that's impossible. And even what is it gonna be like to hike in Washington State or Idaho or Montana in July is a bit hard to know right now, but. With that caveat in mind, things might change.

We don't know exactly what's gonna happen. Not all of these decisions have been made. Some of the people who would make the decisions aren't there anymore. But what advice do you have for hikers in Washington and Idaho and Montana? If they're going to be hiking on Forest Service lands this summer, what are some of the things that you expect would be different?

In a few minutes, we'll get to things we can do to help, but for right now, just to help people understand what to expect. What are some of the things that you think people should be prepared for this summer that will be different than the past?

I think for hikers, one of the things that's going to be very obvious is just how much work usually goes into keeping trails maintained. 

Yeah. 

I think that the general public doesn't understand that trails don't maintain themselves or they have an idea that it doesn't take much to keep things open.

What we're gonna see this year is just how much paid employees of our federal agencies paid trail crews of the contractors. The federal agencies will hire and paid crews for cooperator partners like the nonprofits that help the forest Service like PNTA actually do out there. And it's a lot of work.

So I think that hikers are gonna see, much worse conditions than they've seen on trails in Yeah. Probably ever. And the longer this goes on, the worse it's going to get. I think you're gonna see a lot of impacts to facilities. You're probably gonna see overflowing trash cans because the agency doesn't have the capacity to be keeping up with those.

We're gonna see probably closed facilities. I think that with reduced capacity, some hard decisions are gonna be made about what can stay open and what can't. 



I think we're gonna see things like vault toilets that aren't being pumped and stocked with toilet paper. I think we're gonna see slower response times if there's any issues out in the ground that are reported.

I'm really worried about the ability of the agencies to respond to fire this year. A lot of news focused on the fact that people that were firefighters were not included in a reduction in force. But the truth is that a huge portion of the Forest Service does contribute to the firefighting effort and supports the firefighting effort.

And a huge portion of those that typically are involved in that effort are gone. 

Yeah. 

I'm really worried about fire. I'm worried about search and rescue. I'm worried about, yeah. Just about anything that relies on good maintained trails and yeah. The support of our government. So I think that hikers should really be prepared.

To take care of themselves. Not rely on these services being there, whether that's, just for your own safety, but also what are you gonna do if that the vault toilet's closed? Yeah. What are you gonna do if the trash can's full? Be prepared to really leave no trace this sheer Yeah.

You and leave things better than you found them. Because no one else is gonna be there to do it for you, unfortunately. 

Yeah. Listeners, if you missed Craig's and my episode back in November about backcountry toilets, I want to encourage you to go back and listen to that one because Craig was a Forest Service ranger and so he talked in depth about what goes on to maintaining those vault toilets and also back country toilets.

And, it's not just a hole in the ground and magic. There's a lot of work that goes into making those safe and sanitary. So yeah, definitely go back to that if you're curious about that. Yeah, so I think that's really good advice, Jeff, to be like. You're going to, leaving no trace is always important, but this is gonna be extra important now.

Just being prepared for things to not be as good. In as good of condition. When you were talking about trail maintenance I really thought about trails being one of those things that nobody notices that the job is getting done, like until it's not getting done. Could you give a couple examples of the kind of maintenance.

Like something that someone might encounter on the trail that might be new if they're used to hiking on a more maintained trail, just to give us an example of what that would look like. 

Sure. I'll start by saying that I. Part of the reason why people don't realize how much work goes into trail maintenance is if you're doing trail maintenance correctly, you're not really leaving any sign that you were there, right?

Yeah. You're trying to keep this naturally appearing. 

Yeah. 

We tell all of our crews to do that. What you see when you don't have crews out there maintaining the trails regularly. The first thing you'll see much brushier trail. You'll see more down trees that you have to climb over. But with time you start seeing things like severely eroded trail trails that are washed out and disappear.

Bridges that get swept away because, they weren't maintained for erosion. The analogy I like to use to explain the situation we're in is it's a lot like maintaining your car, right? If you have regular oil changes. It's not too expensive to keep your car running, but if you decide to stop changing the oil in your car for a couple of years, all of a sudden you're gonna have a catastrophic repair.

Yeah. 

And I think that's my biggest fear right now is that if things don't turn around pretty quick we're gonna be in that replacing. The whole engine thing. Yeah. And that means rather than just cleaning drains and doing some brushing and keeping up with logout when we're able to return at full capacity to do this work, we'll be talking about replacing an entire section of trail it's been washed out and maybe able cost tens of thousands of dollars to fix rather than just the routine maintenance that would've kept it there in the first place.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So Jeff, let's transition to talking a little bit about what we can do and before asking you this I just wanna say, speaking for myself again, hopefully listeners I hope that it is obvious that as trail users who have other jobs and, are going out there that volunteer labor cannot replace the work of paid staff with the Forest Service.

That seems pretty obvious even though volunteers do a ton of work on our trails in Washington. Just a volunteer effort. Really isn't enough. But with that in mind, Jeff, what can people like me who, who hike and care about our public lands a lot and feel, speaking for myself, I just feel like such a sense of helplessness in the face of this situation, and it's something I really care about.

So what advice do you have for people who, who want to be able to do something to help? What should we. Be doing, and what should we be thinking about? 

That's a great question, and I think that there's several different ways that the public can be more engaged in what's happening. I really liked earlier when you mentioned that this hasn't traditionally been a partisan issue.

It is a political issue and I still don't believe it's a part of a partisan issue. 

Yeah. 

And one of the ways that I see that, all the time is in my advocacy work. In the last couple of years, some of the funding that does become available for this kind of work has been because of legislation that Republicans have introduced and sometimes it's Democrats.

But my point here is, reaching out to those member of Congress, they are the people who represent us. It doesn't matter if you're in a blue district or a red district. Letting those members know how important public lands are to you. Yeah. Is very important. Because if they know that they have their constituency behind them they're much more likely to act on what's happening right now.

Yeah. 

I think that advocacy is very important. It's really easy to call your members of Congress. I think that maybe some people feel that it's intimidating. And the truth is it's a five minute phone call. Someone will pick up, you just let them know where you live, that you're constituent and you describe how important public lands are.

And you give them an ask, which is, properly fund these things or stop the cuts. Just let them know that, there's a lot of people out here who really care about this stuff and it should be important to them too. Yeah. As far as more, direct action that you can do on the ground you're right about the volunteer thing.

There will just never be enough volunteer contribution to make up for what's being lost right now. 

Yeah. 

But volunteers do contribute a lot. And it's definitely our hope that in this moment we'll see people try volunteering for the first time or prioritize volunteering in the summer.

I know that there's a lot of things that you want to do, including just hiking the trails yourself. But this might be a good year to say, maybe I'm gonna do a little less hiking for the fun of hiking and more hiking to get to that project and using a tool and figuring out who the community is that maintains these things and becoming a part of it.

Yeah. Yourself. When it comes to the paid crews that we've lost at the agencies partners like PNTA do have the capacity the expertise to, to be substituted in. We are typically part of the whole pie that makes things work. And we're not going to be able to fill everything that's gone, but we can still keep doing what we can with the funding that we have.

Yep. And 

that's where individual contributions to organizations like ours really makes a difference. We do rely on federal funding in normal years to get some of the work that we do done. Right now, partners like us are just waiting to see what's gonna happen this year. Typically, we would have funded agreements with our federal partners and be ready to go.

Hit the ground running right now. It's still unclear whether we'll get funding at all. Yeah. So we're relying on state funding. We're relying on private funding. We're relying on foundations and corporate support. And I know that our crew workforce, which is usually we pay 70 employees full-time all summer to be maintaining trails.

Yeah. I 

know it's gonna be greatly reduced this year. But every little bit helps. And, if we can fund one more person or one more crew, that's a lot more work that's gonna get done this year. Yeah. We're really hoping that the public gets more involved in that way as well. 

Yeah. Yeah.

I wanna add just a couple things about what you said, Jeff, when you were talking about calling your member of Congress and that it doesn't matter. You know what party they're in or what, whether you're in a red or blue district, like they wanna hear what is important to their constituents regardless of that.

And I was also gonna add that, I know this seems obvious, but I think people forget this. It's okay if you didn't vote for them yourself, right? Like you're still their cons constituent and they are representing you even if you voted for their opponent. So don't forget that. It's sometimes I know it like feels easier to reach out to the person you didn't vote for or the one you did vote for.

So just keep in mind that doesn't matter and they don't know how you voted and probably don't care. 

Yeah. Yeah. And keep in mind that again, regardless if you generally agree with your representative or not, you might be surprised to learn just how supportive they are of public lands. 

Yeah. Yeah.

You might disagree with them about everything else, but when it comes to this, you might find that you have more in common than you think. Yeah, absolutely. And then one other thing I was gonna mention about donations to you. Is just keep in mind listeners, if you are donating to any organization that supports our public lands, which is a fantastic thing to do right now, many employers will also match your donation.

So if you work for. If you work at a school or a nonprofit, that's not gonna happen. But if you work for a company definitely find out about that. 'cause you can double and sometimes more what your contribution is. If your employer is matching that. 

That's an excellent point. And related to that, some companies will actually compensate a nonprofit organization in proportion to the amount of time their employees have volunteered with that organization.

Yes. So it's not just matching for financial contributions. Sometimes you can report to your employer that I put in. Eight hours of time yeah. With this organization and their company will actually make a contribution. 

Yeah. To 

match. 

Thank you for mentioning that. 'cause that also is super important and amazing.

Yeah. Okay. So Jeff, before we move to wrapping up here, is there any anything else you wanna add or just anything you wanna share with folks about what to expect this summer and what's happening right now with the Forest Service? 

I think we covered what to expect this summer. I think that the one thing that we could probably touch on is just some of the long-term impacts that maybe we're not gonna see right away.

Yes. But we should be very concerned about. 

Yep. 

In a project like completing the Pacific Northwest Trail we have a approximately 1200 mile trail across three states and, almost no work has been completed since the designation of our trail to start making the connections that are necessary to have a permanently protected and connected trail.

Yeah, that was 

because the Forest Service was behind in developing a comprehensive management plan for our trail, which guides how that process is supposed to work. But we got our comprehensive plan completed in 2023, and this was the year that work was start supposed to start. And with the staffing cuts that we're seeing at the agency's important work, like optimal location reviews is not happening.

That's the work that determines where the trail should go and puts parcels of land into an acquisition inventory. So you know, you're gonna see immediate impacts, but when it comes to things like land acquisition for national scenic trails. We're working with willing sellers only, and a lot of the parcels that you need to build new trail and permanently predict something like the PNT are once in a lifetime opportunities when you have a willing seller.

And right now we're missing opportunities with willing sellers that might not come around in our lifetime again. So it's not just the immediate impact, it's the, these big delays that might be longer than the problems that we have with staffing and funding, because they were. Very time specific opportunities and we're just not ready to jump right now.

So these are the things I'm thinking about. It's gonna be bad now but if we don't come up with some fixes soon, it could be bad for a long time.

Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for talking about that. And I think that's another thing that people aren't always aware of with these long distance trails like the Pacific Northwest. Trail. There are places where there's land. Of course it's not part of the forest service. So when you're trying to connect them up, there are all these things that have to happen to do that.

Yeah. Okay. I. Jeff, I really appreciate your time and coming on and sharing about this with us. It's super, super helpful and important and thank you for everything that you do to protect our trails. Before we go, I would love to ask you if you have a personal favorite trail. Maybe it's a section of trail on the Pacific Northwest Trail or something that adjoins that, just a personal favorite that you wanna share with everybody.

Yeah. It's kinda like picking your favorite kid. I love the entire Pacific Northwest Trail and there's great spots all around it, and I think that there's a lot of awareness about some of them, especially where the p and t crosses the national parks. 

Yeah. 

But there are also some areas that, maybe a little lesser known that are equally fantastic, if not more so just because they're not in a national park and they don't get quite the same attention. 

Yeah. 

So I'll risk bringing some attention to one of those right now. Okay. The Passat Wilderness is one of my favorite places. It's the place where the Pacific Northwest Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail meet in Okanagan, Wenatchee National Forest.

Up along the Canadian border, and it is a large wilderness. The p and t has almost a hundred miles going across it. And it's spectacular. Not just in its beauty, but its remoteness and it's also one of the hardest places to protect. It's really concerning to me that one of the best places out there is gonna be extra challenging to continue to protect this year ahead.

But we're gonna, we're gonna do our best and any excuse I have to get out there even if it's standing there alongside the crews with a tool I'll take for sure. 

Yeah. I love that. Jeff, thank you again so much for being here today. 

Thank you for having me, and thank you for bringing attention to what's happening and also  📍 to letting people know what they can do.

If you are enjoying the Washington State Hiking Podcast, Craig and I would love to have you leave us a rating and a review that helps other people find us. And if you wanna support us financially, you can leave us a tip through the show notes. No account, no commitment, nothing like that. Thank you so much for listening and see you next week.

 

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Jennie Thwing Flaming

Host
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Craig Romano

Co-host