Patrick Kelly and his class are going over final instructions before working on the trail. Photo by Angela Foster.
Equipped with crowbars, saws and loppers, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga students are clearing and rebuilding overgrown trails as part of a new Trail Building and Management course.
Students in the Department of Health and Human Performance’s Sport, Outdoor Recreation and Tourism Management (SORT) program are making a positive impact on the Chattanooga community by removing rotten steps, cleaning man-made waste and clearing forest trails.
As part of the Trail Building and Management course, students have received classroom instruction and applied their knowledge to local trails.
It is the first time the course has been offered and is taught by Adjunct Professor Patrick Kelly, who has over 25 years of experience in the field. He currently serves as the stewardship director of the Lula Lake Land Trust and previously worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Service and AmeriCorps, teaching environmental stewardship and conservation.
UC Foundation Professor Andrew Bailey, the SORT program coordinator, explained that this course is a necessity in Chattanooga.
“The issue is we have hundreds and hundreds of miles of trail in Chattanooga, hiking, biking, access to climbing and access to boating,” Bailey said. “We built it all out, some of it through official means and some of it by renegade people out there digging a trail. It’s nice because we have all this access, but we have one person in the entire county who’s in charge of maintaining all of these things.
“We’re trying to transition as an industry. We need to really build up the skills of people moving through this course and schools and also in our community. They can’t just be volunteers all the time.”
Bailey wanted “experienced people” to teach the course, so he reached out to Kelly.
“He can prepare for any contingency in the field that I wouldn’t be able to do,” Bailey said. “He has them laying everything out in GIS the same way he would for the job. The specific skillset needed for this class, he has really honed.”
The Trail Building and Management is a new course in the SORT catalog.
Through AmeriCorps, Kelly taught a similar age range for six months at a time and described the UTC course as “filling a gap.” He said the goal is not necessarily to make students professional trail builders, but to give them broader conservation knowledge.
“It’s giving them a taste of every little aspect of managing land and managing trails,” Kelly explained. “If they’re ever taking any jobs in recreation with the city, the recreation department and parks are always intertwined.
“I’ve noticed that land managers are finding themselves responsible for a trail and they’re like, ‘I know how to ride on them. I know how to work with users and program for them. How do you maintain them? How do you go through really identifying the hazards of it?’”
The class performed two trail reroutes. This required planning and preparation before taking action, including identifying trail hazards, maintenance needs and required tools.
Kelly and his students partnered with the City of Chattanooga to help reopen the trail, provided GPS maps and highlighted the concerns.
Olivia Steele is clearing brush with tools, working on the beginning of a new trailhead.
Chattanooga native Olivia Steele used loppers to cut branches to establish a new trailhead, relocating the start from steps that were no longer usable because of rot.
“Right now, we’re making little steps so that we can start to clear out some more greenery,” said Steele, a junior at UTC. “We’re extending the trailhead so that it’s a slower grade to go up the trail. We don’t have to build steps, which is the big thing.
“We’re using what’s already here.”
Steele enjoyed being out of the classroom and in the field, which she called her “passion.” A runner and a member of the UTC cross country and track and field teams, she loves the outdoors and hopes to work in the field one day.
“I’ve been hiking since I was in middle school, maybe even elementary school,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to learn how they build trails and the engineering behind it all. This would also be a useful tool to have moving forward in life, to know how to build a trail.”
Fellow student Drew Vetter used a crowbar to remove the rotten wooden steps at the start of the old trailhead, a major safety hazard and one of the reasons the trail was closed.
A SORT major and Eagle Scout, the junior is one of the few students with experience in trail building.
“I built a trail for my Eagle project, which was the main reason this caught my eye,” Vetter said. “It’s a pretty cool skill to have. You can go into the Conservation Corps with this. You go into professional trail building, which is a newer job field but is really fast-growing.”
Bailey hopes to build the program’s infrastructure and continue building community partners to help support the “fast-growing” industry.
“When you’re talking about managing an area, building and maintaining trails, the recreationists that come, conservation, there’s no good class to do that,” Bailey said. “We’re trying to train students so that they can have those skills to step right into those positions when they get out.”
Learn more
Department of Health and Human Performance
Sport, Outdoor Recreation and Tourism Management
Photo gallery by Angela Foster
