Ever stopped and thought “hmm, I wonder how this trail got here?”
In national and state parks, the answer is obvious: the trails are built mostly by park management, supported by either national or state funds. For most trails on public land outside of official parks, the answer to who builds your trails can get a lot more complicated. But if you’ve ever hiked in northern California, there’s a chance your trails were built by young people from the Eastern Sierra Conservation Corps, or ESCC.
It’s a totally independent non-profit loosely based on the successes of the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s, which built park amenities, infrastructure projects, and thousands of miles of trail through the American West. However, it’s significantly smaller than California’s current-day version of the CCC (the California Conservation Corps), which founder Agnes Vianzon says is on purpose. “They’re the largest and oldest conservation corps in the country, and get a line item in the state budget,” she says. They also cap the maximum age lower than Vianzon does (at 25, rather than 30), and limit how much participants can be paid. “And then we provide additional things for our members, like weekly mental health counselors available even in the wilderness,” she says. “Because that’s the level of support we want our members to have.”
CCC workers in Pinnacles National Park, circa 1940. Photo: NPS/Allison Van V. Dunn/Pinnacles National Park
The nonprofit is based in Bishop and Mammoth Lakes and combines caring for the land with leadership and skill development, with a focus on improving access to and inclusion in the outdoors. It was founded in 2016 by Vianzon when she realized that traditional conservation and outdoor skill programs tended to appeal to and focus on only a small section of the population. Today, ESCC runs outdoor trail- and park-focused construction and maintenance programs across the Sierra, providing gear and transportation to participants who need them. It explicitly recruits from historically underrepresented communities and doesn’t set strict requirements on experience or previous time spent outdoors.
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It runs multiple tiers of programming across California, like the “Range” program, geared toward first-time participants and those who want to build their skills. Seasonal volunteers live and work in the wild, spending their days getting hands-on with trail development while learning about wilderness skills, ecology, and outdoor teamwork. ESCC’s “WILDlands Technical Trail Crews” are for ESCC alumni to lead more advanced projects, like major trail reroutes and builds, while potentially also developing the next generation of trail talent. In some cases, ESCC workers can even live inside a national park, as in Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, where the organization partners with the National Parks Foundation.
ESCC participants are trained on wilderness first aid, camp cooking, tool use, water safety, and even mental health strategies for when they’re feeling overwhelmed in remote, difficult surroundings. One thing that sets ESCC apart, says Vianzon, is how much it values representation and inclusion. “Our demographics are representative of the general demographics,” she says. “Black, brown, queer folks, trans folks come here. We have crews that are majority trans, majority queer.” That’s on purpose, she says, to make sure being on a crew feels like a safe, welcoming space.
The first ESCC trail crew was only five people, all women, working in Sequoia and Kings Canyon in 2017. “We doubled every season,” she says, “and hit a million dollars in annual budget leading into 2019. We’ve had to rebuild that every year, and we still continued to grow.”
Like many conservation organizations, ESCC’s budget is always in flux. Much of the organization’s funding comes from grants and donations, and Vianzon acknowledges that in the current political climate, some of ESCC’s programs could be targeted. ESCC supplements its work with private donations and ensures participants, all of whom are between 18 and 30, are fairly paid for their labor. Since January of 2025, federal funding for conservation, climate, national parks, and public lands projects has been drastically cut, leaving organizations like ESCC to fill in the gaps. With funding harder to come by and more areas of need, Vianzon acknowledges it’s a tough climate. “It’s been hard to figure out how to keep our crews on the ground,” she says, “and there’s a particular way in which ESCC does that. So yeah, I feel like there is an urgency.”
Matador Network connected with Vianzon to learn more about ESCC’s work, get the scoop on how trails are built, and learn how organizations like hers are staying alive in the current political climate.
Some answers have been edited for length and clarity.
Matador Network: How and why did ESCC get started?
Vianzon: We were founded in 2016, and really for these first nine years, I’ve basically been a staff of one up until just a few years ago. It was partially to fill a gap not just in government and federal agencies, state agencies, and public land agencies, [but] also a gap in leadership development of young people. I was working in the conservation corps space for a very long time before ESCC.
In what ways are you similar to probably the only trail-building organization most people know — the CCC during the New Deal?
Vianzon: The California Conservation Corps is based on the CCC, the Civilian Conservation Corps of the New Deal. And so the Green New Deal was being proposed as the new Climate Corps came up in the last administration. We also hire young adults. However, the original CCC didn’t even allow women to participate. And there’s always been this [idea that] yes, it’s service, yet it comes at a sacrifice — including pay. So there are some ways that we’re similar and really, a lot of ways in which I really didn’t want to be similar. Very much that stemmed from my own experience and what I was seeing in employment and visitation of the demographics of national parks, of who gets to go and who gets to work there.
We’re a nonprofit. However, we don’t have a lot of volunteers. The youth that come here to work are paid W2 employees, and the mechanism to get them out in the mountains to live and work is through fee-for-service contracts. So, the organization partners with federal agencies and negotiate to have our crews out there. We’re not the only ones who do this; however, we have our crews literally immersed in that outdoor backcountry environment. So, they are taking care of the land. It’s more than building trails and maintaining trails. We’re restoring areas. We’re protecting the land. We’re keeping the hikers on the trail.
What is the primary goal of the org: to build trails, or personal growth/development for volunteers?
Vianzon: So, not only is this a work mission, but it’s job training and workforce development. It is also skills for life and the coaching, the impact, the big investment in every young person that comes through, because we are out there the whole entire time. So, it’s building trails and protecting the land, and building themselves at the same time.
How has your work and mission changed in light of fluctuating funding for environmental work, and fluctuating political opinion? Or shutdowns?
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Vianzon: What has been interesting most recently I would say is in 2025, our organization was not affected by AmeriCorps cuts, because we’re not dependent on AmeriCorps funding. With [AmeriCorps] there are rules and policies with what you’re allowed to pay, and what ESCC was paying was above the maximum limits. And although we could get AmeriCorps funding and be able to provide scholarships, it still put our members below the poverty line for pay, which is exploitation.
It is very, very, very scary to have been witnessing the gutting of the people who protect our public lands, the gutting of the Forest Service, the USDA, the Department of the Interior, and who is running those agencies and who this administration has put in charge. And so our work is still based in protecting the land and building up our young people. But it will be hard to figure out how to keep our crews on the ground. We also need to get back to community, back to talking to your neighbor, back to mutual aid, back to living and working or living and cooperating in a community. Because with how things are moving forward, it doesn’t look great without more collaboration.
What do you wish the average person knew about who is actually building/maintaining trails?
Vianzon: If you have access to a trail and know what it is and how it feels to experience one, that’s a privilege right there. But yeah, it’s hard f****** work. It is laborious. It is manual labor. It takes, and not just in a physical way. It takes mental emotional labor to put down your phone, to put down addictions, as with our sober crews. We have limited cell service, and you can’t go home and dissociate. If you have an argument or conflict with someone at work, you are going back to camp, and that person is cooking you dinner. So it’s such a big learning curve. The physical, the mental, the hiking and work facilitates transformative experience in these young people. Like I said, it is immersive.
With how trails got there, it wasn’t John Muir. It was Indigenous people for tens of thousands of years, with trading routes. It’s [important] to assess access to trails now, who is building trails, and the importance of trails and how much recreation is growing. Those are things I wish everyday people knew.
What’s an average work day/week look like in the Sierra Nevada?
Vianzon: Our programs run from May to September. We have an orientation period, virtual orientation, on-the-ground orientation, and training on the ground. Once our crews are out there, they get resupplied once a week with fresh food. They’re in a front country camp that might have bathrooms and showers and stuff like that, but at some point, all of our crews move into the wilderness in the backcountry, where resupplies are only via packers and meal trains. Throughout the entire season, weekends are spent with the crew.
On week days, it’s not “set your own alarm and be ready to go by 8 AM.” It’s a team effort as people rotate who cooks breakfast and gets lunch out. Everyone does chores. Everyone keeps camp tidy in order for us to be ready for work at our work location, which happens to be in the back country of the Sierra. Days start around 6:00 AM and end around 8 or 9 PM. Not every night, but a couple nights a week, our program also includes a curriculum. There’s communication necessary for getting on the same page as far as the community and how work is going, what needs to be done, work reminders. Each of those meetings once a week ends with a gratitude circle, because a functioning, communicative group is going to get more work done.
This is a group of young people from all different backgrounds and ages, and we’ve figured out a way to have this work. We facilitate this experience every summer, every crew. And it’s not always pretty, but it’s life changing and, in some cases, life saving.
Tell us about your work/projects to get underrepresented groups into the outdoors.
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This is where I feel like, yes, there are so many conservation cores and they all serve youth. They all serve opportunity youth. They all serve unhoused or young adults who don’t have their high school diploma. I went through these ranks, and had to fight and claw as a queer person or as a woman of color or as a “fill in the blank.” And I watched, I witnessed, I was passed over for promotions. If you had a beard, you became a crew leader almost immediately. I spent all these summers in the park service and then I spent all these summers working with conservation corps kids, and I saw discrimination, bullying, all kinds of stuff.
Not that we have all the answers or are doing everything exactly right, but we’re different than other places. The folks that come here have heard of us through word of mouth, our alumni network, or our partnership with Pattie Gonia, a drag queen activist who helps bring in money for us every single summer. This is a BIPOC- and woman queer-led organization. It was important for us to have that representation before having or facilitating an affinity space.
So if we are going to have a queer crew that is going to be led by a queer person, if we’re going to have a trans crew, which we have, it will be led and made up of all trans people. So that level of demographics, that level of affinity space alone provides something different for these folks, folks that are dedicating their summer to doing something that they know is going to be hard and push them.
If ESCC went away next year, what’s the first thing people in California’s outdoors would notice?
Photo: Philip Bird LRPS CPAGB/Shutterstock
Unfortunately on a big scale, we would go unnoticed. But the impact I would say of our alumni, of peoples whose lives have been changed, of what people come here and feel and see, that is different than in other places from around the state and around the country. We’re a small piece of a bigger fight that is going on, and there’s an urgency to now, in the political climate, with the literal harm being caused daily to the populations that I serve and am a part of. Along with other conservation cores across the country, everyone agrees every conservation corps is in trouble.
Right now in the government shutdown, our national parks are being trashed. There are people on the ground, but there’s a total overhaul of people, resources, restrooms, trash, impacts to wildlife, on and on and on. Those places are getting trashed. And so maybe we need our crews out there more. There’s a big backlog of work that will need to get done — not only opening up and protecting the land, but building the opportunity and the skills for these young adults.
And we can back it up with the number of people that stay in this type of work. We can back it up in the folks that come back for leadership training and the percentage of leaders, leaders of color, queer leaders that are going into National Park Service jobs, Forest Service jobs, conservation corps jobs, and leadership positions. So, it’s literally changing the face of the people who are in those places and spaces. That has to continue to happen in order for there to be an investment in these places.
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