BLAZING A TRAIL BECOMING PASSION OF PRIVATE CITIZENS.

Byline: Deb Acord Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Americans aren't afraid to get their hands dirty.

Bill Ruskin discovered that in 1974, when he placed a 1-inch ad in Backpacker magazine looking for volunteers to work on national forest trails in Colorado.

He got 4,000 replies.

That year, the Volunteer Conservation Corps was born, based on the philosophy that private citizens are stewards of public land and can be trained to take care of it.

An ardent hiker and cross-country skier, Ruskin envisioned a corps of volunteers who loved the outdoors as he did, and who were schooled - through his program - in conservation, environmental issues, safety, first-aid and use of hand tools.

He believed others would share his vision once they started working on trails, in part because of the sheer physical satisfaction.

``There's something about getting your hands dirty ... moving dirt ... carrying rocks,'' he says.

``When you've done that, you feel different about a trail, about the outdoors.''

Soon after that ad ran in 1974, 150 volunteers from 28 states set out for national forests in Colorado to begin work on trails.

This summer, nearly 600 people will participate in 57 different projects on public lands through the American Hiking Society's Volunteer Vacations program, which grew out of Ruskin's VCC program years ago.

He was inspired to start a volunteer corps of trail builders when legislation passed in 1972 that allowed private citizens to help the U.S. Forest Service with conservation projects.

Ruskin talks proudly about projects sponsored by the American Hiking Society and the growth of the program he helped pioneer.

And though the name of the organization has changed, Ruskin's vision has remained basically the same: As the number of people using the outdoors grows and government funding shrinks, the need for volunteers to build and maintain trails has become even more pressing.

Trails are used today in different ways than in decades past.

``Many of the trails in the national forests were built years ago to allow forest firefighters access to the back country,'' Ruskin says. ``They were built by mules and paid crews of men hired specifically for that purpose.''

As forest firefighting equipment improved in the '40s and '50s, those back-country trails and roads fell into disuse.

Then in the 1960s, people began rediscovering the outdoors and all those unused roads and trails. But little money was available for the trail maintenance - such as installing water bars to curb erosion, erecting trail signs and trimming foliage - that was needed for the increasing traffic.

``About that time, it became apparent that we had to find other ways to maintain trails and work on conservation projects if we wanted our public lands to survive,'' Ruskin says.

Ruskin is pleased with the active role the American Hiking Society has taken in trails projects nationwide, including work on the Continental Divide Trail, which someday will take hikers from Canada to Mexico; and the American Discovery Trail, a massive project that links trails coast-to-coast.

The idea of land stewardship is woven into the fabric of the American Hiking Society - it has been since the group's beginning, Ruskin says, when President Jimmy Carter said of the organization:

``By encouraging citizens to join in this effort and to share their knowledge and skills, the (American Hiking) Society has given our nation an aesthetic and spiritual legacy.

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Photo: Working as a volunteer on a trail changes the way you feel about the outdoors, says Volunteer Conservation Corps founder Bill Ruskin.