I just got home from leading my very first service trip for the Sierra Club (because obviously I need more hobbies), and I couldn’t be more thrilled with how it turned out. I wrote the piece below with the intended audience of fellow Sierra Club trip leaders, but wanted to share it here as well and figured I should add some context first.

The Sierra Club Outings department runs many group trips throughout the year, from backpacking to kayaking to lodge-based adventures. Last summer, I trained to become a leader expressly to lead service trips, where groups go out and do trail maintenance or other service work, usually in conjunction with the forest service or a trail-specific volunteer group. Trips are usually 7 days long including an arrival day, two days of work, a free day, two more days of work, and a departure day. The leaders of these trips are volunteers that do all of the logistics and planning work, including providing all meals during the trip. It’s admittedly a fair bit of effort, but I care deeply about taking care of the wilderness I so enjoy and about creating opportunities for meaningful connection among people who want to help. So, here’s how it went down.

It all started with a beer after the game. It was mid-August 2025, I had just gotten back from being an assistant on an incredibly fun service trip to the Gros Ventre Wilderness in Wyoming, and I was all set to lead my very first trip the following April. It would be the zillionth iteration of an established trip with an experienced cook, i.e. an exceedingly gentle entrance into the world of leading for Sierra Club service trips. And then out of the blue, I met a guy (a forest ranger) and got an idea (for a new backcountry service trip near Tahoe).

As we all know, ideas are dangerous things, creeping in at the most inconvenient times and latching on with force. I wasn’t even actively looking for one; I already had my trip planned for the next year. I was simply sitting at a bar, enjoying a drink after our final recreational soccer game of the season, and chatting with my teammate about this awesome land bridge/turnpike we had just built in Gros Ventre. As it turns out, this guy I had been playing soccer with for five months happened to be a ranger for the Carson City ranger district in Nevada, and also happened to be in charge of trails. I ask casually, has he worked with volunteer groups like the Sierra Club? Would he be interested?

Thus started the process of planning my very own backcountry hitch in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest. I passed off my assigned, easy trip to another leader in order to focus on this totally new thing that I had basically no qualifications for. I also decided to make it a specialty 20s/30s trip partially because I want to encourage more folks in my generation to get out in the mountains and take care of the wilderness, and partially because I figured they wouldn’t know the difference if I totally botched the trip. 

For context, a backcountry service trip involves a myriad of moving parts. Most commonly, the group hikes in several miles to a basecamp while pack support brings in the food and cooking equipment. It’s not quite backpacking since we sleep in the same basecamp for six nights instead of moving camp each day, but we still have to carry all of our personal gear and tools out there and be creative with the food menu as well as evaporative cooling to keep vegetables fresh. Plus there’s usually the forest service or another agency involved to guide a work project, from clearing logs to repairing bridges to opening new trail.

After calling my forest service contact seven times over the course of three days to figure out the things I forgot to ask the first time, getting a bit of help from the service leadership team, and the addition of an all-star cook as my co-lead, the trip was officially submitted. (My co-leader Allison literally won an award last year for rave reviews from participants and she is my hero.) But I didn’t really start panicking until the trip went live and I got my first sign up the very next day.

Millennials are a finicky bunch and even though the trip filled relatively quickly, five people dropped out for various reasons. Luckily, the waitlist was also continuously getting signups the entire time and the trip stayed at full capacity (10 people) regardless.

As per usual, there were some shenanigans. The packer wasn’t available to pack in the food and equipment (on mules) at the beginning of the trip but could go in two weeks before and leave the food safely tucked away for us in an old forest service cabin. The cook lives across the country, but fortunately my house is very close to the ranger district office and I was able to buy, repackage, and hand off all of the non-perishables and cooking equipment two weeks before the trip. That would have been an absolute disaster if both leaders lived far away. As it was, I had about 36 hours between getting the cook set from the previous trip and dropping it off with the packer, so that was an exciting time for my dishwasher. 

This also meant that all the perishables (fruit! bread! cheese! vegetables!) had to be carried in. I felt bad planning to have the participants carry a bit of extra weight on our six-mile hike into base camp until I remembered they’re all under 40. Young knees can handle it, probably. It’ll be fine, I reassured the cook. 

I was only kind of right and it was only kind of fine. We had a lot more food than expected that needed to be carried in, and the solution was to leave some perishable items in a cooler in my car at the trailhead. I hiked out and retrieved those items during the mid-week free day while all the participants went and frolicked by a waterfall. Twelve extra miles on the free day with a heavy pack for half of it? Sure, no problem. I didn’t want to swim anyways. To be clear, there were absolutely ways to plan differently and avoid this situation, we just … didn’t. A learning experience for sure. (In case you’re wondering, Yeti coolers are magic and our items stayed cool even in a baking hot truck for 4 days. Also, I’m being extra facetious here because I did in fact get to swim the next day.)

Jokes aside, I would call the trip a resounding success, especially for a first-time leader. It was a questionable decision to design and plan a totally new trip with a totally new ranger district as my very first leader experience, but I’m glad I took advantage of the connection I made in a bar and turned the idea into fruition. We cleared a ton of trail, cross-cut many a log, established a relationship with an awesome trail crew, heard coyotes howling in the night, witnessed some truly spectacular sunsets, bonded over guessing each other’s middle names, and laughed too hard playing telestrations and the salad bowl game after dinner. The participants were fun and genuine and hard-working and we created such a special community over the course of one short week. As questionable decisions go, this turned out to be an excellent one. And if you want to learn more about the trip and the forest service cabin we got to use for our basecamp, ask me over a beer.