Three weeks ago, I spent five days with dozens of other volunteers helping cut a new trail through the woods near Luck, Wisconsin, for the Ice Age Trail Alliance. This was my first IATA trail-building event.

I’ve been walking the Ice Age Trail for a couple years. The trail stretches around what had been the southern edge of the glaciers that covered Wisconsin during the Ice Age. The four lakes of Madison are under the southernmost lobe of glacial coverage, so the trail makes a loop south of Dane County and heads north again through Waukesha County. From our house, I can drive an hour and a half in almost any direction and find an interesting stretch of the IAT to hike.

After hiking segments of the IAT for a year or so, I became a dues-paying member of the IAT Alliance so I could get the emails and newsletters that told me about hikes and events near me but, because I can procrastinate like nobody else can, I didn’t make time to get to an event until this month.

I volunteered to work on the Straight River Segment for all five days of the event, to get the full experience of working on the Ice Age Trail. It’s a four-hour drive from Madison to Luck, so to avoid having to set an alarm for three o’clock in the morning and driving while barely awake, I drove up on Tuesday evening, leaving home immediately after I finished work at 3:30 pm. I didn’t get to the base camp until about 8:30 pm – traffic, road construction, and stopping to pee added about an hour to my travel time.

I arrived after dark and found myself in what appeared to be a large open field. In the far corner of the field behind some trees, a small group of people were hanging out under a pair of canopy tents, so I parked the van and headed over to see if I had to check in and ask where I could set up camp. There were almost two dozen people there: four or five of the men were named Dave and the rest were named Mark or Steve. They all appeared to be men of my generation, so this was not at all unusual. Some of them were using nicknames so they could call to each other without getting more than one answer, so I offered up my middle name, Leo, for them to use.

When I finally turned in for the night I didn’t bother trying to set up a tent, just filled up an air mattress and stretched out in the back of my minivan. I set an alarm for six-thirty but didn’t really need to. I didn’t sleep past six on any of the mornings I was there.

Breakfast started at six every morning and went until almost eight when we got our work assignments at the morning round-up. Dave (no nickname, just Dave — he’s the trail program manager for the IATA) or Riley (field operations specialist for the IATA) would call everybody to stand in a circle around them by shouting “Roundup!” After we all gathered around them, they would talk about what we did the day before, what we were going to do today, then ask someone to lead all the volunteers in stretches. After stretches, Becky called out the work assignments. We gathered around our team leaders as our names were called out, then we split up into carpools and headed into the field.

We were usually in the field by eight-thirty to collect tools from the tool wagon and hike to the section of trail we would be working on all day. On Wednesday and Thursday I was assigned to a different team each day to make a trail through the woods along a numbered section of the trail. We would walk the section so our team leader could point out what we were going to do and where, and then we would set to work raking up the ground cover, digging out roots and rocks, and finally “cutting tread,” digging a path through the dirt in a prescribed way that would be sustainable for a long time.

I had no idea what I was doing but I had good teachers, so by the middle of Thursday I started to feel like I was doing it right.

On Friday, I was assigned to a team that went back to five sections of completed trail to tidy up their work. Friday was much warmer than Wednesday or Thursday, and even though we worked in the shade most of the time, we were all dripping sweat by ten o’clock.

The trail crews took a short break for lunch at noon, usually thirty to forty-five minutes, and we finished up for the day at about three-thirty in the afternoon, so I was raking or digging or hauling dirt in a bucket for five or six hours each day. By Friday, I was struggling to keep up with the more seasoned members of the crew. Remember, I spent the past twenty years as a desk jockey. I thought I’d done a reasonably good job of keeping active over the years, but my muscles thought otherwise when I asked them to dig in the dirt for several days. A morning dose of naproxen got me through the day without aches and pain; an evening dose helped me sleep at night.

At the end of the work day, I drove into town to shower off all the dirt and sweat, then returned to camp where happy hour was already under way under a big tent set up in a corner of the hay field where we camped. They served a hot meal at six, usually after one of the staff members said a few words about the events of the day. After dinner, a couple dozen people usually hung out under the dinner tent playing cards or just talking, while about a dozen more sat around a camp fire to talk. I was usually in bed before nine each night.

I spent Saturday with one of the Marks (this one was nicknamed “M5”), driving a load of lumber from Straight River to Brunet Island State Park, where it would stay until it was needed for a future project. Sunday morning, I helped pack up the trailer with kitchen supplies, then helped clean tools until I finally hit the road at about eleven-thirty for the long drive back to Madison.

As an introduction to trail building, it couldn’t have been better: We had excellent weather all five days. The one thunderstorm that swept through the area on Friday waited until late afternoon, so we didn’t really lose much time working on the trail. And the bugs were almost non-existent. I had to slap on some bug dope Friday morning when a few persistent mosquitoes made a nuisance of themselves. And I had great team mates every day who were very patient with this newbie.