NEWS: Posted on March 2, 2024

The logistics and resources required for managing a trail system are nothing short of a marathon effort. From unpredictable winter grooming ops, to moving the trail crews around the mountains for spring maintenance, to fundraising for expensive projects, we’ve got our hands full.

As I write this message, just six dedicated employees manage all of these responsibilities for more than one half of the year. In a few short months, we’ll hire four seasonal crew members, raising our employee count to 10 for about five months. During that time, we will roll through a long list of projects, and cover maintenance for over 200 miles of trail spanning from Bonanza Flat to Round Valley and most of what lies in between. To say our crew is a lean machine is, perhaps, a boastful truth – and a truth we are very proud of.

MTF’s treasurer and I put final touches on the 2024 budget in early January, and as always, he reminded me to take a deep breath. As a nonprofit we can predict neither revenue, nor surprise expenses like the most recent whopper for an excavator repair. Thus, the budget is the best, educated guess we can make. And yet, year after year, we come remarkably close to projections – last year we were within a couple hundred dollars on expense projections.

Still, I do believe my heart skipped a few beats as we pressed the go-button on a budget that added many tens of thousands of dollars to cover livable wage increases for MTF’s professional trail crew. It was a huge leap of faith that our donors and community would understand that we cannot ask of this small crew what we do, and not pay them what they’re worth. The jump in the budget was a must from both the employee retention perspective and the ethical perspective.

No sooner had we leapt off that cliff, than I received a message from our friends, the Goldfield Family, wondering how they might help MTF this year. With full support for the merits of livable wage increases and extreme generosity, their family readily offered to cover that line item in the budget.  

In the nonprofit world, it is a most delightful, if emotional, privilege to experience the intense gratitude that comes from taking a leap, knowing that what you’re doing is right, and then being gifted a golden parachute.

To our many wonderful donors – you make what we do possible and wonderful.

THANK YOU!