Meet the AMC Crews Who Build White Mountain Trails | Photos
AMC Trail Crew - High above Tree line in the White Mountains
Before dawn breaks over the Presidential Range, the AMC Professional Trail Crew is already shouldering packboards loaded with axes, rock bars, and a week's worth of food. What follows is a 10-hour workday moving boulders, building stone staircases, and maintaining 360 miles of trail across New Hampshire's White Mountains.
This documentary project follows the crew through their summer season—from spring patrols cutting blowdown off the Appalachian Trail to alpine zone work on the 200-year-old Crawford Path. These images capture the physical intensity of backcountry trail maintenance: quarrying stones from the forest, fitting rock steps with millimeter precision, constructing scree walls to protect fragile vegetation.
The crew operates with minimal modern equipment, using the same hand tools their predecessors wielded a century ago. Every stone they move, every staircase they build, is carried in on their backs and placed by hand. The work is demanding enough that crew members earn "woods names" and measure their experience in summers survived.
Shot for New Hampshire Magazine's feature on the AMC's centennial trail crew season, this collection extends beyond the published editorial to document the full scope of maintaining trails that hundreds of thousands of hikers traverse annually.
No Easy Things