Trail Ambassadors
With federal budgets dwindling, our local Inyo and Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forests have less and less ability to adequately staff our trails. Coupled with the millions of visitors to each forest every year, and our public lands are seeing adverse effects in the form of trail maintenance backlogs, trash strewn about, and habitat degradation.
In the summer of 2017 we launched our current iteration of the Trail Ambassadors to educate trail users on how to best recreate responsibly, provide interpretive talks and hikes, engage the public in volunteer public lands stewardship events, and provide a presence on the ground.
The Trail Ambassadors are making a big impact! Since 2018, the Trail Ambassadors have amassed some staggering stats:
- 9,158 visitor contacts
- 4,518.2 pounds of trash removed
- 452 logs removed from trails
- 663 campsites cleaned
- 405 interpretive hike participants for 936 hours
- 2,396.44 miles of trail monitored
- 130 miles of trail maintained
Friends of the Inyo would like to recognize the following organizations for their financial support over the past five years of the Trail Ambassador program:
Thank you!
Support the Trail Ambassadors
Updates
June is here, and we are very excited to have our Friends of the Inyo staff more than double in size! Say hello to our amazing summer staff. You’ll find them out on the trails, doing the on the ground work to keep your Eastern Sierra public lands in tip top shape. Stewardship Crew Astra Lincoln, Crew Leader Astra’s spent many seasons as a trail monkey up and down the intermountain west, harvesting plants, teaching antique tool use, and championing the silence of open spaces. She’s passionate about manual labor as a means of spiritual atonement and cultivating a sense of…