As the director of trails for the Appalachian Mountain Club, Alexander DeLucia oversees the professional and volunteer crews responsible for maintaining some 1,800 miles of trails from northern Maine to Washington, D.C. With a degree in adventure education/outdoor program administration from Unity College in Maine, Alex has been a ridgerunner in Acadia National Park, led long distance canoe trips, and worked with a dog sledding company before landing at AMC in 2001. He’s been with the organization ever since, working on trail design and planning, building, and maintenance. He and his wife, Sara DeLucia (who also works with AMC), and their two sons also manage DeLucia Vineyards & Family Farm in Bath, New Hampshire.
Growing up in a suburban/urban area provided diverse cultural exposure, which I appreciate, but I was consistently interested in spending time in more open spaces. I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, but then moved to New Haven, Connecticut. If there was a patch of woods, no matter how small, I was in it. In my early teens I got hooked on rock climbing, and that directed my activities and ambitions for many, many years. Some of the best rock climbing is in Connecticut, and it’s highly underrated.
I really have an appreciation for small crag and traditional climbing. When I went to Unity College, it was awesome to have the Clifton Crags east of Bangor and all the climbing in Acadia, all the climbing in Camden Hills, and I was not too far from North Conway, New Hampshire. Then I got into bigger mountain mountaineering and big wall climbing. All of these things led me to more remote, more intense experiences, more expedition-type climbing experiences that required more planning, more time in the backcountry, more travel to get to these places. Then I found out I could go to Unity and get a degree in adventure education – I had no idea that was a thing.
I had always been on the consumer end of that public land use – using these public resources or leading trips on public lands – and I didn’t have that concept of what it takes to manage these public spaces. Then, in the summer of 2000, I worked for Friends of Acadia as a ridgerunner. There were four of us, and we were out on the trails hiking, doing visitor interaction, visitor education, basic trail maintenance. That was my first rec management position. To be on that side, you have to have the confidence and the knowledge and the experience to travel in backcountry scenarios, but you’re working to protect the resource and manage the resource. All the things that I loved about whatever public land I was on, I was now helping to ensure other people would have that same experience. That was really cool for me, and I shifted to wanting to work to maintain the integrity of these public spaces.
The summer of 2001, AMC hired me to lead teen trail crews in the White Mountains. That first summer, I really dove deep into trail work for the first time – rock staircase construction and rock water bars. I got hooked. It was so fun hiking into places and then building stuff. For five years I strung together seasonal positions at AMC. I’d lead teenage volunteers in the summer, work Pro Crew in the fall, make trail signs in the shop in the winter. Then I secured a full time position with AMC’s trails department, and I’ve held various positions over the years. I’ve been the director of trails since March of 2021.
Over time, many trainings, and many projects, I continued to build on my technical trail experience, and I am still learning to this day. Techniques evolve, things change, tools improve, and it is great to share and learn from the broader trails community across the Northeast. In May we hosted our first annual Trails Skills College with the White Mountain National Forest. It’s a three-day conference with multiple trail trainings and workshops happening simultaneously. AMC and the Forest Service partnered to host it, and we had other regional experts instructing courses on trail layout and design, trail assessment, accessible trails, crosscut saw use, axe trainings, rock work. There were over 100 folks at the event, including agency partners, trail contractors, and lots of volunteers from various agencies.
AMC has been doing this work forever, but in a vacuum. We have been doing trail work since 1876. We were the first to pay people to do trail work, starting in 1919. In 2019 we had the 100th anniversary of our Professional Trail Crew. But we hadn’t intentionally been part of the broader Conservation Corps or other efforts. With the post-Covid reorientation, this collaborative approach to land management is a real focus now – and an acknowledgement that no one organization can do it all. We’re challenged with unprecedented public use and climate change. We can’t do trail work the way that we’ve done it the past 20 or 30 years. We need to do it together.
Climate change is a whole new game. We’re seeing these hundred year flood events every other year instead of every 100 years. We’re seeing high volume of use on some of these trails that just can’t take it. You start putting thousands and thousands of hiker feet on these trails, that loosens the soils, then you get this rain event that causes a year’s worth or two years’ worth of erosion in one storm. We’re finding ourselves going back to places from one field season to the next, and they look totally different. It’s been shocking in some places.
We’re looking at how we can address the impacts not just now but into the future. That is changing trail design. AMC is a landowner in few places, so we largely have to defer to the land manager – the state entity, the federal entity. We can’t just go in and change stuff. We have to work with the land managers to propose these changes. The White Mountain National Forest is our primary partner in this region, but we work with all kinds of state and federal partners and municipalities and land trusts.
A consistent theme across all managers now is that they are not necessarily committed to current trail alignment. They’re looking at structural changes to how we build trails. There are some trails that are really historic that we’re not going to dramatically change. But there are other trails where the land managers are working with partners to consider different, more sustainable alignments. You might have the same start point and end point, but how we get there now is just not sustainable. Substantial realignments of trails are multiyear planning projects.
There’s been an evolution, not in the tools we use to build trails, but in the way we use them. The rock bar is the rock bar, and I don’t think that has ever changed. What changes is technique. What changes is how we build. It’s more commonplace now to pack in rock drills and generators for backcountry projects. To hear the hum of a generator is a pretty normal thing, and that wouldn’t have been the case a long time ago. We used to just use the rock that we could find. Now, we make the rock work for us, so we’re drilling and splitting and shaping stone, which allows us to have more consistent material to build stronger structures.
We are working on 40 different trail projects this year, from the Appalachian Trail to some urban and suburban trails in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and in Minuteman National Historic Park in Concord, Massachusetts, as well as in Valley Forge in Pennsylvania. We have seven professional trail crews, two AmeriCorps crews, two workforce development crews, and some staff-led volunteer engagement on larger rehab projects. I’ve got a really solid team of folks. There are seven fulltime, year-round professional trail staff – they’re an all-star team – and this year we have nearly 100 seasonal employees.
We’ll also be starting a five-year trail restoration project on the Franconia Loop trails, which include Franconia Ridge, as well as the Greenleaf, Old Bridle Path, and Falling Waters trails. AMC submitted the proposal for $1.125 million in federal funding for this project, which is supported by the White Mountain National Forest, the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, and New Hampshire State Parks. The funding will go to the White Mountain National Forest, and AMC will enter into an agreement for the five years of trail rehabilitation work in partnership with other local trails organizations.
This is really a once in a lifetime investment in trail rehabilitation, where we’re looking to directly address the use and the impacts of climate change. We’ll be asking the White Mountain National Forest to consider innovative trail design that will combat the effects of climate change. We’re starting on the Old Bridle Path this fall. We’re not changing the alignment of this section of trail, but we’re going big with cut stone stairs and really stabilizing the existing tread. The work on all four trails will continue through 2026.
One of the challenges we deal with is hiker perceptions of trail maintenance in Wilderness areas. There are six Wilderness areas in the White Mountains. When hikers look at a map, there’s this green area that indicates the White Mountain National Forest, and within that there are darker green areas that designate Wilderness. When you cross that line, conditions change dramatically. These areas are managed to a Wilderness standard, a more primitive and more remote experience. We’re following the directive of our manager and their forest plan. We need to leave narrower corridors. If there are trees that have blown down across the trail and they’re easy over/easy under, they stay. There are no mechanized tools allowed in Wilderness. There’s no paint used to mark trail blazes. There’s very limited signage, and mileage is not listed on the signs.
That’s unique to Wilderness areas in the east, including the White Mountain National Forest. There’s just not really an understanding of what the congressional designation of Wilderness means. Wilderness areas in the east cannot be truly wild and untrailed. If there were no trails in the Great Gulf or in the Wild River or in the Sandwich Wilderness, visitors would create their own, and there would be this spiderweb network of impacted grounds. So, in this case we need trails to consolidate that impact. But these areas are in a more primitive condition by design.
Trails help to provide human connectivity to our natural world. Building and caring for sustainable trails is critical to maintain the integrity of our public lands. These are not just paths in the woods, but well designed, built, and maintained trails. Resource protection is the priority, and well-built trails offer human access while minimizing the negative impacts to the natural resource. This work requires tremendous effort from volunteers and staff, as well as the high costs of labor and materials. I love the problem solving required in trail work. There is also an art to a well laid out trail or beautifully built stone staircase or trail bridge.