Lightly on the Land : Trail Builder’s Goal Is a Hiking Path That’s Barely Noticeable

Ron Webster figures that if he does his job right, no one will notice.

Webster, you see, is a master trail builder--one of a small fraternity of backcountry enthusiasts who hack walkways out of the wilderness.

“I try to build them so that people don’t think they’re walking on a trail,” Webster said. “I want them to think they’re just walking in the woods.”

Anyone who walks in the woods of Los Angeles County has probably traveled some of the hundreds of miles of mountain trail designed, built or maintained by Webster over two decades.

For the past 10 years, Webster, 61, has been employed full time as a professional trail builder, spending much of his time on the nearly complete 65-mile Backbone Trail that winds its way across the twisted spine of the Santa Monica Mountains from Will Rogers State Park in Pacific Palisades to Point Mugu.

Webster’s vocation is an arcane pursuit, one in which an instinctive feel for the flow of a mountainside is as important as a working knowledge of hydrodynamics, and the ability to work in solitude for days at a time is as critical as skill with an ax.

Webster, with salt-and-pepper hair and tanned, leathery hands that come from a lifetime of hard work, is considered a master of the trade, though the distinction embarrasses him.

“The joke is, they won’t pay someone who sort of knows what he is doing. They want to pay an expert--’a trail master.’ It makes me cringe,” said Webster while huffing along the Solstice Canyon Trail above Malibu one recent morning.

His is an expertise that comes largely from years of just walking in the mountains.

“There’s a lot of trail manuals and schools,” Webster said. “I didn’t go to any of them. But I remember something that lots of trail builders forget: The trail should lay lightly on the land.”

Webster drifted into the job in a roundabout way. He wasn’t particularly outdoorsy, but as the father of three in the 1970s he wanted his children to be exposed to the outdoors, so he began attending Sierra Club hikes. He soon became a volunteer hike leader and in the late 1970s he was instrumental in volunteer efforts to build the one-mile Musch Ranch Trail on newly acquired public land and to maintain existing trails.

A few years later, at the age of 51, Webster lost his job as a machinist. At the same time, the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and its related organizations were launching an aggressive trail construction campaign. “I needed a job and they wanted trails,” Webster said. “So it all sort of fit together.”

Webster’s $24,000 salary is paid under a grant awarded to the Trails Council, which is affiliated with the mountains conservancy and the Conservancy Foundation. These organizations, along with the Sierra Club, work in conjunction with a patchwork of federal, state and local park agencies that acquire and maintain public lands in the local mountains.

Most trails in Southern California are man-made and of recent origin. The old Indian, Spanish and pioneer corridors have long since been paved over. The pockets of wilderness that still exist in the Los Angeles Basin are generally the toughest, most severe landscapes.

Those are the places where Webster now plies his trade. But while the terrain is tough, Webster applies a gentle touch.

“It feels good when you can’t see my trail,” said Webster, looking across a canyon at the seamless face of the opposite slope where the missing brush is hard to notice.

Unlike some of the nation’s celebrated trail builders, Webster does not use bulldozers or other heavy equipment. Alone, or with a crew of six or eight, Webster relies on a simple collection of broad-bladed McCleod hoes, sharp Pulaski axes and Forest Service-style picks to pare back the thick chaparral and chip away at the notoriously hard, dry turf of the Santa Monica Mountains.

Webster starts the process of building a new trail by studying topographic maps and bushwhacking around the area. Once he has settled on a general course, he takes off across the mountain, leaving a series of flags to mark the proposed path. A work crew, usually including Webster, chops down and clears out brush, removes rock and cuts into the slope of the hill to create a flat footpath.

One of Webster’s simple but overriding principles in these ventures is: “Never build trail people won’t use.”

That means keeping the severity of the incline to an easy average of 10 degrees and designing as many loop-trails--ones that begin and end at the same place--as possible. “That’s what people want,” Webster said.

The wilderness purists are more interested in lengthy, destination trail projects such as the Backbone Trail, but Webster says that despite the inviting prospect of spending a week to traverse that trail, most hikers will do it in small sections, a day hike at a time.

Ruth Kilday, executive director of the Mountains Conservancy Foundation, says Webster’s trails are distinctive because of his knack for winding them past the prettiest or most unusual features of a mountain--a rock formation, a creek or striking tree.

“He designs to the fullest advantage” of the terrain, Kilday said.

Most of the digging and cutting has been done by Sierra Club volunteers. “The best volunteers aren’t the guys who come out talking about how they love nature,” Webster said. “It’s the guys who just like to get dirty and see something get done.”

More recently, the volunteer efforts have been buttressed with paid crews from the Los Angeles Conservation Corps under a grant that also pays Webster’s salary.

Webster is clearly at home in his surroundings. He moves easily along the trail, with the steady sure-footedness of a veteran woodsman.

He’s a friendly, talkative man, who maintains a constant patter of rambling explanations, anecdotes and notes on points of interest as he escorts a visitor along a Malibu area trail.

But to some questions, Webster responds with uncharacteristically direct and succinct answers.

You like your work, don’t you? “Yes,” says Webster plainly. Have you ever considered giving it up and getting a real job? “No,” he says simply.

After a while he adds: “I’ve got a job that I hear dozens of people say, ‘God, I’d like to have a job like yours.’ But you know what, probably not.”

Webster ticks off the occupational hazards: poison oak, mountain lions, valley fever and the generally dirty, backbreaking nature of the work.

And the isolation. “A lot of people can’t handle the hours and hours of being alone, but I look forward to it,” Webster says.

Then, there’s the Mountain Tax. “Everyone who works in the mountains pays the Mountain Tax,” Webster says. “That means you don’t make any money.”

While grants and other outdoors funding sources are never secure for long, there’s little question of how much work there is to be done. Just maintaining existing trail is an enormous job, Webster notes.

“Once you stop maintaining trail, it’s incredible how fast Mother Nature can chew it up and spit it down the mountain,” Webster said. Even new trail doesn’t stay put long, Webster says. “By the time you get to the end, the beginning has already changed.”