Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods
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A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national park trail crew—and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work
Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal “traildog” maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from “the real world” before going on to graduate school. She came to find out that work in the woods on a trail crew was more demanding, more rewarding—more real—than she ever imagined.
During her first season, Byl embraces the backbreaking difficulty of the work, learning how to clear trees, move boulders, and build stairs in the backcountry. Her first mentors are the colorful characters with whom she works—the packers, sawyers, and traildogs from all walks of life—along with the tools in her hands: axe, shovel, chainsaw, rock bar. As she invests herself deeply in new work, the mountains, rivers, animals, and weather become teachers as well. While Byl expected that her tenure at the parks would be temporary, she ends up turning this summer gig into a decades-long job, moving from Montana to Alaska, breaking expectations—including her own—that she would follow a “professional” career path.
Returning season after season, she eventually leads her own crews, mentoring other trail dogs along the way. In Dirt Work, Byl probes common assumptions about the division between mental and physical labor, “women’s work” and “men’s work,” white collars and blue collars. The supposedly simple work of digging holes, dropping trees, and blasting snowdrifts in fact offers her an education of the hands and the head, as well as membership in an utterly unique subculture. Dirt Work is a contemplative but unsentimental look at the pleasures of labor, the challenges of apprenticeship, and the way a place becomes a home.
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Christine Byl. (2013). Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods. Beacon Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Christine Byl. 2013. Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods. Beacon Press.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Christine Byl, Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods. Beacon Press, 2013.
MLA Citation (style guide)Christine Byl. Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods. Beacon Press, 2013.
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Christine Byl lives on a few acres of tundra north of Denali National Park outside the town of Healy, Alaska, with her husband and an old sled dog. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Alaska-Anchorage, and her stories and essays have appeared in magazines, journals, and anthologies. She owns and operates a small trail design and construction business.
- name: Christine Byl
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A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national park trail crew—and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work
Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal “traildog” maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from “the real world” before going on to graduate school. She came to find out that work in the woods on a trail crew was more demanding, more rewarding—more real—than she ever imagined.
During her first season, Byl embraces the backbreaking difficulty of the work, learning how to clear trees, move boulders, and build stairs in the backcountry. Her first mentors are the colorful characters with whom she works—the packers, sawyers, and traildogs from all walks of life—along with the tools in her hands: axe, shovel, chainsaw, rock bar. As she invests herself deeply in new work, the mountains, rivers, animals, and weather become teachers as well. While Byl expected that her tenure at the parks would be temporary, she ends up turning this summer gig into a decades-long job, moving from Montana to Alaska, breaking expectations—including her own—that she would follow a “professional” career path.
Returning season after season, she eventually leads her own crews, mentoring other trail dogs along the way. In Dirt Work, Byl probes common assumptions about the division between mental and physical labor, “women’s work” and “men’s work,” white collars and blue collars. The supposedly simple work of digging holes, dropping trees, and blasting snowdrifts in fact offers her an education of the hands and the head, as well as membership in an utterly unique subculture. Dirt Work is a contemplative but unsentimental look at the pleasures of labor, the challenges of apprenticeship, and the way a place becomes a home.- reviews
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- source: High Country News
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"[It] blends beauty and crudeness, grit and grace... With language that is lyrical despite the earthiness of its subject, Byl turns the words of work into found poetry ("brake on, choke on, pull, pull, fire"), offering a bridge for readers to those "who would not speak like this themselves"--a beautiful memoir of muscle and metal." --Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
"A beguiling journey of self-discovery." --Kirkus Reviews
"Here is a love story that encompasses wild country, skillful labor, hand tools, crusty workmates, and lingo formal and foul. As a woman, and a small one at that, the author must persuade the males on her crews that she can more than hold her own at hiking, trail-building, and swearing. She begins by convincing the man who becomes her husband, and ends by convincing the reader. You'll find plenty to relish here, in a narrative that's gritty, witty, and wise." --Scott Russell Sanders, author of A Conservationist Manifesto
"Christine Byl has been summering on trail crews for more than a decade and a half. A first-rate storyteller, she details the techniques and tools, and the spirit of fellowship and feel of the woods. If you love getting into the back country, or even if you're an armchair backpacker as Iam now at age eighty, you'll love Dirt Work." --William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky and The Nature of Generosity
"Every denizen of wild places from Laotse to St. Francis to Rachel Carson to black bears to field mice has depended upon trails. But rarely have we considered the people, tools, or toil that lay our favorite trails down. Dirt Work is a spectacular correction of this omission. Imbued with a tough-minded, ribald reverence for honest labor that brings to mind a female Gary Snyder or Wendell Berry (if you can imagine that!), Christine Byl does epic justice to the whole-bodied satisfactions that come of staying out in the weather, staying alert, and working one's ass off for others with love, tenacity and skill." --David James Duncan, author of The River Why and Sun House
"Byl's is not a world of groomed nature, inert tools, or nostalgic rituals, but a vibrant landscape inhabited by people and animals and layered by idea and history. She means this book as a love song, she writes, and it is, not only from her to her fellow laborers, but from the mind to the body, the hand to the tool, the human to the wild." --Sherry Simpson, author of The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska
"While Byl does not romanticize nature or her work, she skillfully uses poetic language, daring the reader to feel the grit, grim, and sore muscles of working ten hour shifts digging, chopping, clearing, and creating trails... Dirt Work is highly recommended for readers who love the outdoors, and especially those who have hiked in a national park or forest, and benefited from the hard work of trail crews." --Women's Adventure Magazine
"'Our work speaks for us,' Byl writes, speaking on behalf of all traildogs, who seldom brag about what they do. And it speaks volumes for this woodswoman and wordsmith."
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Starred review from December 17, 2012
This chronicle of years spent as a “traildog”—a seasonal worker doing the underappreciated, backbreaking work of maintaining wilderness trails—first in Montana’s Glacier National Park, and later in Alaska’s Denali National Park—blends beauty and crudeness, grit and grace. Successfully articulating the satisfaction of physical labor and the camaraderie of the people who do it, Byl organizes the book around her beloved tools, starting with whimsical descriptions of each and using her experience to launch stories about how she learned to do the myriad unseen jobs that keep park trails navigable. Byl is just as likely to be sentimental about backhoes and boots as about the gorgeous vistas of Alaska, but her most obvious love is for the people who work the trails with her, whose taciturn behavior, practical jokes, and machismo she must navigate, whose internal culture she learns as she becomes a part of the team, and whose mentorship is invaluable. With language that is lyrical despite the earthiness of its subject, Byl turns the words of work into found poetry (“brake on, choke on, pull, pull, fire”), offering a bridge for readers to those “who would not speak like this themselves”—a beautiful memoir of muscle and metal. Agent: Janet Silver, Zachary Shuster Harmsworth.
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February 1, 2013
A young woman's account of life on trail crews in two national parks. In her debut, Byl, who now operates an Alaska trail-design business with her husband, celebrates the satisfying rituals of work in the wild. Right out of college, she spent 15 years clearing downfall, building bridges, sinking signposts and otherwise maintaining trails in Montana's Glacier National Park and Alaska's Denali National Park. Initially the skinniest and least-muscled of her cohorts, she was soon able to swing an axe and run a chain saw. She imitated the veteran workers, especially the women: "I studied them, envied their tight-veined hands, tanned wrinkles shooting from their eyes, their easy cussing and the way they strode in their logging boots." During long workdays that included up to 20 miles of hiking, Byl learned how to work with men, how to fell a tree and how to speak the language of mules. While friends and family wondered when she was going to get a real job, the author was lured ever deeper into the woods by the wild's siren of impermanence. Much of her evocative book recalls pranks, projects and camaraderie; the tools essential to outdoor labor; and trailside moments, from singing the "Montana Cowgirl's Mating Song" ("Get it up, get it in, get it out, don't muss my hair-doooooo!") to eating her favorite outdoor sandwich (ham, cheddar cheese, heavy on the mayo). Along the way, she found her "inner dirtball," married her boyfriend and made a home in Healy, Alaska, north of Denali, where she and her husband live in a yurt with two sled dogs, an outhouse and WiFi and often go dip-netting for red salmon on the Copper River. A beguiling journey of self-discovery.COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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February 15, 2013
Recent college graduate Byl (in philosophy, no less) made an unusual choice for summer employment as a traildog at Glacier National Park. What began as a lark becomes a transformative experience stretching into years spent wielding chainsaws and shovels doing dirt work in the back country for the National Park Service in Montana and Alaska. Framed with descriptions of the tools she learned to handle with aplomb, Byl shifts rapidly from thoughts on Thoreau to the sexual politics of women in a male-dominated field, to questions about the wild and pragmatic concerns over health insurance. Along the way she casts baleful glances in many directions, from tourists to Outside magazine to her employers and fellow federal employees. This is certainly an author with a literary chip on her shoulder, but the work is unique and Byl does such a good job of celebrating a colorful cast of characters that the occasional surges of attitude will be overlooked in light of her tale of an education earned in the woods that so deeply complements that of the classroom.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)
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A lively and lyrical account of one woman’s unlikely apprenticeship on a national park trail crew—and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work
Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal “traildog” maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from “the real world” before going on to graduate school. She came to find out that work in the woods on a trail crew was more demanding, more rewarding—more real—than she ever imagined.
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