Tired of picking your way up and down overgrown trails in the Santa Catalinas, eyeing what you can see of the tread for loose rocks, protruding rocks, and serpents?

Well, it’s on us to fix the trails. The Forest Service hasn’t had regular paid trail crews in about 30 years! Three years ago, however, it launched a national effort to form partnerships with volunteer citizen organizations to maintain and restore Forest Service trails.

Friends of the Santa Catalina Trails is one of the citizen organizations that has responded to this call to action. Our mission is two-fold: to get existing designated trails into sustainable, inviting shape, and to restore and reconstruct designated trails that have seriously deteriorated due to remoteness and post-fire neglect or virtual abandonment.

To those ends, we aim to organize volunteer trail maintenance events, ranging from small- to large-scale, from occasional to regular, and to obtain grants that will allow us to hire professional trail design and trail construction companies where needed.

Fix our trails - and then keep them fixed so they’re a pleasure to use! Our trails don’t need to be obstacle courses or tests of agility that make even glancing up from our feet at the magnificent scenery of the Santa Catalinas too risky to contemplate, maybe even discouraging us from venturing out at all. Our goal is to change all that. Together, we can fix up our trails and have fun in the process!

So, come out and join us in working for the common good in one of the finest workplaces in the world: the Santa Catalina Mountains of Arizona!

A young white-nosed coati

Photo by Tom Murray [CC BY-NC 2.0] via flickr.com – Found on dnazoo.org