Giving Back is Connection

Posted on November 7, 2025 by sheraaaa

It’s 0-dark-30 in Pendleton. My room sits eye-level to busy Highway 84, and I try to drown out the sound of trucks breaking and cars racing through the city by turning the fan on high.

I arrived in the late afternoon and shook off the four-hour drive. A pain had just started to take hold of my lower back, but some light stretching and walking helped to ease the stiffness that had set in.

It’s time for the yearly Oregon Outdoor Recreation Summit, and arriving here brings back all sorts of memories of my body last year. What do I mean? Last year, I was in such debilitating pain, still blaming my condition on slow-healing injuries, that I was jacked up on pain meds and moved so deliberately that many people noticed something was wrong. Only weeks later would I be diagnosed with cancer, which explained the constant neck and back spasms that had been plaguing me for months.

The Summit is designed and hosted by the Oregon Trails Coalition, the group I have been leading as Chair of the Steering Committee for the last three years, and this is my final summit in this volunteer role.

That first night I stopped in distillery where about 50 other summit folks milled about. Entering this room was both exciting and daunting. Many people knew of my challenging year because I’ve been quite public about it, but others had no idea. It was as if I was breaking out of a cocoon…a cocoon that had been smashed and thought destroyed, but not. I had emerged on the other side of my brush with mortality to find myself on a similar path I had been on before. It was both exciting and confusing.

But I digress. I wanted to write this blog post to talk about volunteering and how remaining involved in the Coalition has been a vital part of my healing. My fellow board members cheered me on this year, they ran the monthly meetings until I was able to engage again, and gave me lovely gifts like home-made granola, books, and a bright yellow t-shirt that I wear constantly.

To have a purpose greater than yourself and to be of service to your community is a powerful motivator and force for healing. I was deathly ill a year ago, and now I’m walking upright. I still have the glow from the Portugal sun on my cheeks, and am reimagining my future. This summit doesn’t represent my swan song; it’s a re-awakening. It’s a rebirth. BTW, this seems an opportune time to mention Renee means “reborn” in French. How can it be the first time I’m drawing this connection?

So volunteering. Volunteering has helped pull me out of my self-focused fog. Sure, I could have dwelled on my pain, quit the Coalition, and sulked about my inability to backpack, but I decided to use what energy I had to continue supporting, promoting, and advocating for the preservation, development, and stewardship of a statewide network of trails. Using my precious hours in this world for good has always been vitally important to me. When I was faced with a million career options after college, I pushed that all away to become a Peace Corps volunteer in West Africa. I wanted my time to mean something to someone. I found that direct aid was the best way to disentangle myself from the rampant consumerism and individualism that modern society primes us for. Volunteering connects us to the collective, much like I believe hiking connects us to the land. And connection is healing.

My mom will be spending Thanksgiving and Christmas at a diner serving dinner to those in need. And with the SNAP benefit disaster, I expect this small act of kindness will have a dramatic impact on her community, and her outlook in the wake of my dad’s death.

Are you volunteering?

My brother has always loved animals, so I’m encouraging him to look into animal shelters in his area and explore if they need help walking dogs or petting cats. Volunteering could look like anything. You could show up for children, the elderly, the sick, or the natural areas around you. You could pull invasive weeds or plant milkweed for migrating Monarch butterflies. It’s endless! And when it feels like everything is falling apart, volunteering can connect you with the beauty of what is working, what is alive around you.

If you are in Oregon, we are in our recruitment period for the Oregon Trails Coalition Steering Committee and Advisory Board. The Advisory Council strives to be truly representative of the Oregon Trails community of professionals, advocates, volunteers, and trail users. It advises the Steering Committee on coalition advocacy positions and campaigns, and helps implement and promote events and programs. The Steering Committee provides oversight and guidance to the Coalition Director, is responsible for carrying out the Coalition’s mission, and generally acts in accordance with the Advisory Council’s recommendations.… and you get to work with fabulous people. Please join us!

I’ll leave you with this post from my friend Jess, and I’d love to hear from you. How do you volunteer? How would you like to volunteer? I bet we could connect you with a meaningful opportunity that helps you see the beauty and richness of an engaged life.

Since commenting has been so buggy on this website, I’ve decided to share these posts on Substack , where commenting will be much easier.

Trails: Time to Give Back

Posted on September 14, 2017 by sheraaaa

Summer is most certainly coming to an end in Oregon, and while the days are getting shorter, we are still inundated with smoke from more wildfires than I can count. Oregon is burning, so I’m heading south for an upcoming hike. Stay tuned for more details soon. Blogging will happen, photos will be taken, but I plan to give myself the gift of unplugging from the internets (or 4G) during the hike…posts will come after a short delay.

Even though I haven’t been able to stretch my legs on any long hikes this year, I have been immersed in the land of trail work.

Part of my job as the Oregon Desert Trail Coordinator this year was to lead some trail work trips. It’s so satisfying to maintain trails, especially when they are as overgrown and neglected as some of the ones along the ODT.

But I thought the ODT is a route, not a trail…

Yes, you would be correct, but of the 750 miles (actually current count is 753.5 miles), 11% is along existing trail. These are trails our federal agency partners haven’t been able to work on in many years due to a myriad of reasons, including lack of funding and use. This leads to a vicious cycle of hikers not hiking the trails because they aren’t maintained, and trails aren’t maintained because hikers aren’t hiking them…

SO, we are harnessing the incredible hard working volunteer manpower to make a dent in some of that maintenance (last year over 500 ONDA volunteers contributed almost 10,000 hours to a variety of stewardship projects including riparian restoration and animal monitoring activities, WOW!). A lot of my work last year involved establishing relationships with the four different BLM Districts and two different National Forests that manage land along the Oregon Desert Trail in eastern Oregon, and this year I worked with those partners to develop four trips.

I’m incredibly proud of my volunteers and the work we did. It had been a full 10 years since I led trail crews around Colorado for the Southwest Conservation Corps, but the memories came flooding back as I swung the Pulaski and built berms along the drain dips with my crews. Trailwork!

A few numbers: 45 volunteers came out for 810 hours of work, and we:

• Built 2 miles of new trail in the Oregon Badlands Wilderness, and transformed a .4 mile cross-country section into trail on the ODT. (See photos here)
• Cleared 11 miles of downed trees from the Fremont National Recreation Trail and ODT corridor, and maintained 3 miles of trail. (See photos here)
• Cleared all the downed trees from the Big Indian Gorge Trail in the Steens Mountain Wilderness (by hand), and brushed over 2 miles of heavily overgrown trail. (See photos here)
• Built a .5 mile high water alternate to the Blitzen River Trail out of Page Springs Campground in the Steens Mountain Wilderness. (See photos here)

I will continue with the work in 2018…there is so much to do! Are you interested in joining me on one of the trips? Some are backpacking based, some are car-camping based. We were packed in by a BLM horse team on one trip, and might even provide some chain-saw training opportunities for another…lots to help with. The ONDA stewardship trips get announced in mid February each year, so I’ll keep you posted here on when those go live, I’d love to have you join me on a trip or two!

10 Ways Thru-hiking is like the Peace Corps

Posted on November 19, 2014 by sheraaaa

I first learned about long distance backpacking while living in my village of Zogore in Burkina Faso, West Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer over a decade ago. When someone joins the Peace Corps and has to decide what to bring with them, books are high on the list. Surely there will be time to read the complete works of Shakespeare or War and Peace, right?

And it’s true, I read well over 200 books during the 2 years I was there, but the book that made the most impact was There are Mountains to Climb. Not for the prose, or riveting story line, but it was the first time I learned about a trail that crosses the country, and the people who set out to hike it in just a few months.

It was September, 1999, I had just arrived in the Burkina 3 months earlier, but I already knew what I was doing in 2 years when my service was over. Hiking the Appalachian Trail!

When I finally made it to the trail in 2002 I realized there were LOTS of similarities.

Here are my top 10 ways thru-hiking is like the Peace Corps:

1. You will be covered in dirt almost all the time.

2. You will think about food non-stop.

3. People think you are crazy.

4. You have changed way more in a short amount of time than your friends and family at home.

5. You curse the postal system.

6. You talk about poop a lot.

7. You get giardia.

8. You make deeper connections with people faster than you ever thought possible.

9. When you return people always ask about getting attacked by bears/lions, but the wildest thing you saw was a porcupine eating someone’s shoe/a chicken tied to a bicycle.

10. You will never be the same again.

So after I posted this fellow thru-hiker and Peace Corps Volunteer, Lisa, posted her list. Wow! She must have had a lot of time on her hands Thru-hiking will do that. Wait, so will Peace Corps.

More of the 1000 ways in which PCT hiking and Peace Corps are the EXACT SAME THING:
1. You meticulously plan your next town meal at least 4 days in advance.
2. Then you dream big about the first meal you’ll eat after finishing.
3. You look forward to maildrops and cry if they are late, particularly if they contain something delicious.
4. You lick the melted chocolate out of every wrapper crevasse, then suck on the inside corners for trace remnants.
5. If you’re vegetarian, you turn carnivorous after the second encounter with an outside barbeque and charred meat.
6. You wear one outfit every day until only bleached, soft shreds remain.
7. It’s bizarre to see your comrades in normal clothing.
8. You suffer from the half-way blues, daydreaming about the things you would do and eat if you went home now.
9. Intestinal parasites, diseases, and associated smells are the hot topic of conversation, especially during meals.
10. You are perpetually sweaty and dirty and the locals are clean.
11. Your toenails take on bizarre shapes and co-exist with semi-permanent layers of funk.
12. When you emerge into a new town, friendly and curious locals find you bizarre or interesting or exciting.
13. Kids stare at you and think you’re odd.
13. Random strangers invite you into their house to eat.
14. You consume things you would never touch under normal circumstances.
15. Kind tourists feel sorry for you and give you soda pop and toiletries.
16. The small pleasures in life are so wonderful and you are filled with gratitude.
17. You have too many ups and downs to count, but feel extremely lucky to be alive.
18. People think you’re crazy.
19. You start with a filter, then switch to bleach, then just drink the water straight.
20. You start with toilet paper, then switch to rocks and sticks, then switch to the water method. It’s just so refreshing.
21. You have weird-sounding nicknames and insert trail/local speech into your everyday language. e.g. “i didn’t mean to take a nero – it just happened” or “the prefect bouffed all the money”
22. You are elated when you spy edible fruit along your walk.
23. Ice is SO very exciting.
24. During siesta, you end up chasing the shade even though you tried yet again to strategically place yourself in the likeliest continual-shade-spot.
25. You become great friends with unusual and magical people.
26. You watch terrible TV programs whenever you have the opportunity.
27. You talk to yourself and practice rolling your r’s as you walk.
28. You give up on flossing.
146. You notice every phase of the moon.
147. You smell like mildew.
148. Your body loses the ability to digest dairy products in a smooth and elegant fashion.
149. You think you’re tan, then take a shower and realize that half of it’s dirt.
361. You finally come to the realization that your gastrointestinal issues are not just a “phase”.
362. Though you’ve never bought a copy of “People” and never will, you devour it at any free opportunity.
363. Local, tiny libraries are the best.
364. Ice cream is amazing, no matter how cold it is outside and how much it gives you the runs.
365. You either love or hate the postal service.
366. Large ungulates casually walk past your sleeping pad.
367. You hitch rides no matter how sketchy the driver or vehicle and sometimes sit with farm animals on your lap.