At 76, Bruce Fauskee says he’s slowing down. If that’s true, he must have had superhero strength when he was a whipper snapper.

Fauskee volunteers for several nonprofits and charitable organizations; none as laborious as the Shoshone Back Country Horsemen. The group is the tip of the spear in the war to clear area mountain trails in the Shoshone National Forest — typically more than 150 miles a year — on a volunteer basis. Some trips involve clearing dozens of trees from the trail with chainsaws and brute force. However, once they cross the border into wilderness, regulations require use of hand saws to cut through mature trees as no motors are allowed in areas designated as wilderness in an effort to keep the peace.

Fauskee has volunteered for the group since its inception in 1993 and his wife Bonnie and son Bryce followed him in service. Bonnie and Bruce are gearing up for their upcoming 50th anniversary.

Bruce served as club president in 2005, but prefers to serve silently in the background.

Last week the club was clearing the Deep Lake and Beartooth Loop trails. For some reason, folks don’t understand what “pack it in, pack it out” means, Fauskee said. It’s one of the original tenets of backcountry travel; Leave No Trace.

Among the several dedicated volunteers working the trails was the organization’s oldest member Bob Bessler, 82, and one of the youngest members Danika Fagan, 17. Bessler is a co-founder of the Shoshone chapter along with Bill Brazelton, who passed away shortly after his birthday in 2023 at the age of 85. Bessler is feeling his age.

“My age is kind of telling on me. I don’t do as much as I used to. It’s guys like Frank [Fagan] and Howard [Sanders] and Bruce that keep us going strong,” Bessler said. “We are a geriatric group, and so none of us do what we used to do. We can sit back and complain about the trails in the mountains being what they are, or we can go help.”

Danika Fagan is a freshman at Northwest College studying Equine Business Management and the organization’s first female full-time chainsaw operator. She has personally cut over 100 trees this year.

Plenty of work

There is plenty of work just clearing trails. The club has removed about 650 trees from area trail systems and has cleared more than 110 miles of trail so far this year. Volunteers shouldn’t need to clean up after others as well. Yet, after organizers of a bachelor party left two pony kegs and a bunch of litter behind at a campsite above Deep Lake a few years ago, the group decided to figure out how to get the kegs out and still have room in their panniers for the tools needed to clear trees blocking trails.

It’s not unusual for the group to collect garbage, but the litter left by the party shows more disregard for northwest Wyoming’s grand vistas than most. The crew took out more than 70 pounds of litter from the campsite and along the trails.

“You know, people have a tendency to just leave their garbage, and it’s starting to become a lot more issue than it was, because we’re not getting the help from the government anymore,” Bessler said.

The Horsemen aren’t usually the only team on the trails. The Shoshone National Forest has a small trail crew of three working to keep the trails open, Fagan said.

“They’re doing what they can,” he said.

Most years the organization receives “a handful of dollars” from the Forest Service, he said. The revenue is used to buy materials for projects like building public corrals and fire rings at mountain campsites. But with the current administration cutting services, including in the Forest Service, National Parks and Bureaus of Reclamation and Land Management, the Horsemen are unsure about their funding for the coming year.

“We aren’t even sure yet if we’re getting the money. It’s not a positive,” Fagan said.

Members of the organization provide their own horses, many of their own tools and the truck, trailer and gas it takes to get to the job sites. They also provide most of their own food.

“It doesn’t matter [to me] if we get the funding or not. We’ve got work to do, and we’re going to go out and do it,” he said. “Public lands and public trails need to be open.”

Even when the trails are buried deep under the snow and sleds are the predominant form of transportation, the club is busy running horsemanship clinics and attempting to recruit some young guns with strong backs and a passion to serve their community.

“Our club is getting so old, you know, and there’s so many of the trails to do,” Bessler said, adding “when we start having a group of people that’s 65 or 75 years old and going into the wilderness with hand saws, you just don’t get as much accomplished as we used to.”

There were a few volunteers along last week — all young and with hearty work ethics, but not (yet) members. They were invited to join the group  on the ride with recruitment in mind, said Fagan, who organized the work detail.

Even if volunteers can only get out once a summer, or would enjoy logistics (like food planning) that are done from an office chair rather than a saddle, the organization needs you, he said.

It’s not all work, Fagan said. There are plenty of fun rides, picnics and parties planned for members.

Fagan joined the organization about a decade ago, bringing his family of four along with him, after being recruited by his children’s school bus driver.

“Right away I knew [joining] was something that I wanted to do and bring my family, because I’ve been on the trails and was seeing not nearly enough work being done,” he said. “I’m not knocking the Forest Service, but rather than complain about it, let’s go out and do something to solve the problem.”

Public land challenges

Soon, the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem may face further challenges as the federal government has pushed to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule. On Friday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture is initiating the process to roll back critical protections for approximately 45 million acres of national forest land across 37 states. The move follows the agency’s announcement earlier this year and will trigger a short 21-day public comment period. 

“For nearly 25 years, the Roadless Rule has safeguarded America’s backcountry — lands that are home to 70% of our native trout and salmon, that protect drinking water for millions, and that offer some of the finest hunting and fishing opportunity in the world,” said Chris Wood, president and CEO of Trout Unlimited. “We would, honestly, welcome a transparent, collaborative process to determine if tweaks to the rule would allow us to better protect the values of roadless areas while also better protecting communities of people at risk of catastrophic fire. Rather than rescinding the Roadless Rule and allowing that chaos to unfold, we encourage the Forest Service to work with stakeholders to develop solutions that continue to protect roadless areas and intact fish and wildlife habitat.”

The Roadless Rule aims to conserve backcountry public lands and waters while providing flexibility for the U.S. Forest Service to steward these high-value landscapes through active management. Originally adopted in response to the growing backlog of costs associated with maintaining the more than 386,000 miles of roads spanning across the national forest system, the Roadless Rule has become an effective and popular mechanism for conserving important backcountry fish and wildlife habitat.

Roadless areas account for about 2% of the land in the United States. Meanwhile, 70% of roadless areas are home to native trout or salmon, making these public lands irreplaceable to sustain cold-water fisheries. 

“The Roadless Rule balances active forest management with the conservation of our last, best fish and wildlife habitat. Roadless Areas offer irreplaceable backcountry hunting and fishing for mule deer, elk and native trout, just to name a few opportunities,” said Trout Unlimited Public Land Policy Director Corey Fisher. “Rolling back the Roadless Rule risks trading clean water and healthy fisheries for little economic benefit, while saddling future generations with the bill for more roads, maintenance, and wildfire risk. Rather than remove a key conservation tool, the Forest Service should work with local communities to steward these last, best places — because once they’re gone, they’re gone forever.”

To join in the fun: Shoshone Back Country Horsemen meet on the third Thursday of each month at 6 p.m. with a potluck dinner followed by the business meeting. They meet at the Park County Weed and Pest building on U.S. Highway 14A (west of Powell and just east of Ralston) from September through May, with a summer meeting at the July 4 worksite trailhead.

For more information: shoshonebch.org/contact.php