Dillon Osleger: The Hidden Histories Beneath America's Trails

Dillon Osleger is a geologist, conservationist, and trail builder whose debut book, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands, reads as both a love letter and a reckoning. Named after Dillon, Montana, and raised by field geologists who hauled him on their excursions through the Canadian Rockies and the rangelands of southwestern Montana, Osleger grew up learning that the land itself is a kind of map, one that records what came before and what we choose to preserve. This episode continues The Wild Idea's month of stewardship with a wide-ranging conversation about trails, history, and what the act of maintenance actually means.

The conversation moves through the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail as case studies in how long-distance trails have drifted from their original purposes, which were economically and socially rooted in rural communities, toward a culture of speed and personal achievement that has little relationship to the land itself. It returns, finally, to the people who maintain the trails: the campground hosts, trail crews, and seasonal rangers who rarely receive the recognition the work deserves. Osleger's argument is not nostalgic. It is a civic one. Stewardship, he says, is one of the few remaining spaces where people from genuinely different backgrounds can work side by side, swinging tools for the same reasons. The question the episode leaves open is how long that common ground can hold if we stop funding the people who tend it.

Learn more about Dillon and today's conversation at our website, thewildidea.com.