About this item

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.



About the Author

Christine Byl

Christine Byl is the author of "Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods" (Beacon Press, April 2013) , which was a finalist for the WILLA Award in Nonfiction, and named as one of Shelf Awareness's 10 Best NF of 2013. She lives north of Healy, Alaska, where she and her husband run a trail-design and construction business, Interior Trails. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Alaska-Anchorage in 2005, and her prose has appeared in literary magazines, journals, and anthologies including The Sun, Glimmer Train Stories, Crazyhorse, and others. Byl lives off the grid with an old sled dog in a yurt on a few acres of tundra just north of Denali National Park. When she isn't working outside or writing, she loves reading, homestead projects, wilderness adventures, and anything that happens in the snow.

Photo Copyright Photographer Name: Lucy Capehart, 2012.



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