Park Bench Banter with Jo Daloisio: Trail Work, Volunteer Spirit, and a Whole Lot of Heart (Episode 22) Transcript

Welcome to Boulder County's Voices of Open Space. I'm your host, Eva Lark, and we're here for another episode of Park Bench Banter, where we pull back the curtain and learn what our parks and open space employees do and how their work intersects with our recreation on these open space properties. I can't wait to sit down and have a conversation with Jo. Thanks for being on the podcast today.  

Thanks for having me, Eva. I'm thrilled to be here. I like for folks to introduce themselves. So if you could say your name, your title, what you do for Boulder County Parks and Open Space.  

Yeah, I am Jo Daloisio. I'm a senior volunteer coordinator with the Recreation and Facilities Department. So that basically means I run volunteer projects in collaboration with the department, which includes work groups like trails, trailhead operations, buildings and historic preservation, urban forestry, things like that. Wonderful. And since we're sitting on a metaphorical park bench, I want you to paint a picture for our listeners. Where are we? It could be a real park bench or it could be just where you would like a park bench. Oh, I have a favorite park bench. I'm going to take us to Hall Ranch on the Nighthawk Trail. It's near the top of the trail, but before it intersects with the Nelson Loop, there is this bench that just looks over with sweeping views of the divide. You can see mountains and you just feel like you are alone on top of the world, but in a good way, not a lonely way. So it's the two of us sitting there looking out over the mountains and you can see Longs and Meeker. It's really lovely. I love that.  

How often do you get to visit this location?  

For work, I'll happen to stumble upon it a few times a year. And then I think I visit it, you know, a couple times a year in my own time as well. I'll have lunch there if I can for work. It's a great lunch spot.  

Wow, that must be a major perk to get to eat outside and see some beautiful vistas around Boulder County. You know, it's really not so bad. I'm a big fan.  

So how did you get into this work? How did you find yourself into this volunteer work project leader? What's your background, your education?  

That's a good question. I do have a bachelor's degree, but it's in a completely unrelated field. I started off doing trail work over 10 years ago with an AmeriCorps program, which is a youth corps program for people between the ages of 18 and 26 to kind of introduce them to new life skills. And I chose trail work and I fell in love with it. The work, the community, it's And my plan after that was to work at a different national park every year. And back in 2016, I moved out to Colorado and just fell in love with it out here. I got stuck in a way. And I've been doing trail work ever since. I've dabbled in working with youth corps and working with volunteers. I started out in Boulder County as a volunteer coordinator, sorry, as a field coordinator for their youth corps. And then transitioned into my current role as volunteer coordinator about four years ago. I think it's really important to talk about how the trajectory to working for like a Parks and Open Space department doesn't have to be like a playbook. It could really be I was going to school for this thing and then I had some lived experiences in a totally different fashion that changed the trajectory.  

It sounds like that's what happened with you.  

Totally, yeah. I'm a big fan of youth cores for young people who maybe don't quite have an exact direction they want to kind of give you a practice year and a variety of different jobs. And it clicked for me. I think in this field, specifically in fieldwork like trails or other, degrees aren't as important as some of our other roles. So it's a really nice way to get in. It feels like you're working a trade almost. You just don't need a bachelor's degree. So it's refreshing. Take me through a typical day, if there is one, or maybe a typical week. It's kind of broken up into two parts. Am I running a volunteer event or not? If I am, I have a great crew I work with that loads up all of our event supplies. We just put everything in a truck, tools, safety equipment, pop-up garbage cans, kind of just everything you could think of for any hypothetical situation. It's like Mary Poppins purse where you could just pop. Pull anything out of there. We'll set up the event. We work with a lot of public groups, but also corporate groups that want to give back and donate their time, school groups, special interest groups. So kind of, we run a lot of like one-off events where we'll have a group of people for one day at a time. We'll teach them all the required skills. Just yesterday, we built these really cool elk jumps by Hall Ranch, which was something I'd never done before. Wrap up the event. Sometimes my crew will stay behind and kind of wrap up all the loose pieces. And that's kind of a day if there's an event. Otherwise, it's a pretty big variety. I run a lot of staff projects that are a little more technical. Think rock work or carpentry projects. It's things that are just harder to teach in a day. Or I'm checking for muddy trail conditions, mapping social trails, meeting with different departments to plan future events, or just designing different projects.  

So did you get all of your learning, the technical know-how on the job?  

I got some of the training on the job, but I came into it with several years of trail work. The AmeriCorps program was really helpful because with just one session of that, I was eligible to work and could get hired onto professional trail crews. So I did that for a while to beef up my trail work skills. After that, to kind of get the leadership component, I worked with various youth corps, Student Conservation Association, among others, to get... Volunteer management skills, leading groups. So it's kind of a combination of a few different things.  

Now, since your projects are outside on trails, is it year round or is there kind of a seasonality to your work?  

I'm fortunate enough to be year-round. A lot of our outdoor positions are seasonal. I have worked through the winter in that capacity and it's a lot of standing around in the cold or working in an excavator. So that's not personally my favorite, but I do work year-round. I run volunteer events April through October. And then in the off season, it's a lot of planning or mapping. Tiring seasonals and muddy trail closures. Whenever it snows or the ground is kind of sticky and muddy, I'll just hike around and check conditions to make sure we're not damaging the trails. Yeah, probably people don't realize that we are actually like putting eyes on those trails. And that's why when they're getting that closure, it's because we are looking at it. We see that it's muddy, right? Totally. It's not some magic button where we just push it and all the gates just slap shut. We do have various checkpoints and it takes, I would say, maybe eight to 10 hours to do a thorough check of our entire system. And usually that's a few different people all working together. But sometimes you'll see one closure go out in the morning and another in the afternoon because it really just does take time to put eyes on everything.  

So you mentioned hiring seasonal staff. How many do you work with or how many people are kind of in your group?  

Yeah, so I directly have two seasonals on our volunteer work crew projects crew. But we have, I think, eight or 10 trail seasonals, trailhead operations hires. I'm going to make up a number and say around six. Same with buildings and historic preservation. I would say parks and open space as a whole is really run by seasonals. They work about half the year, but that's, what, would you say a third of our workforce?  

It's a decent amount.  

Right. And it's a great introduction to getting into conservation, I think.  

Do you find that they come back year after year or are you kind of training new people each season?  

We get a pretty decent return rate, usually around 50% for my crew at least. I like to keep people on and I want them to stay on as long as they can, but there does kind of hit a ceiling to how much we can teach them in that capacity, in that type of role, and then they usually move on.  

Let's talk about the participants that come work on your work projects. So these are volunteer work projects, and you mentioned earlier they can be schools or corporations, organizations, but also the general public, is that right?  

Yeah. So we have National Trails Day coming up this weekend. That's a big public event for trails. Earth Day, National Public Lands Day. There's a lot of big holidays, if you will, for volunteerism. But I think every work group has at least one public volunteer event a month. We also work a lot with corporate groups or clubs, anything where there's a group of eight or more Anyone listening can request a custom volunteer event if you get seven of your friends. We'd love to host you and teach you a new skill.  

How long do these events last?  

If I was going to bring a group of seven of my friends to come out and I reach out to you, what does it look like? Is it an hour, half day? Does it vary?  

That's a great question. It definitely varies. I would say on average three to five hours. I tend to shy away from full day events. They're just really exhausting and manual labor can be really fun until it's not. So I try to plan them where we cut them off while people are still vibing and before they're exhausted.  

Is there any special skills that someone would need to have to come do one of these work projects?  

Not at all. I think people think they hear trail work and they think, oh, this is gonna be hard. I can't do that. I'm not strong or fast at hiking, but we really can accept people of all skills and abilities. It's a big teamwork event. So we might be building a fence and that might seem really overwhelming on your own because I can't carry one of those big fence posts by myself. But when you team up with people, you can get so much done. There's usually a variety enough too of different types of tasks where If I don't want to use a power drill, I don't have to use a power drill. I can focus on leveling a post or lopping the area, cutting back brush in the area. So it's kind of, you can learn and take away as much as you want, or if you just want to dip a toe in the water, that's fine too.  

And how young can you take people on these projects, like high school?  

It depends on the event. Most of our events, I would say, are 12 and up, 16 and up, or 18 and up. If you're under 18, most events require a parent on site, so you're not just dropping off a group of 20 14-year-olds. But Yeah, we especially our public events are very open to, I would say, preteens and older.  

And why do you think people are signing up for these?  

Because you have great attendance.  

Is it other than learning some technical skills? Are there other benefits of being on a work project?  

It's satisfying to celebrate a community that you're part of and feel like you're giving back. I think it gives people a sense of ownership, or at least that's what I help. You know, if you have a favorite trail, like the Nighthawk Trail. And you're building box steps on that, you know that the fourth step up from the bottom is you. Like that thing is going to last 20 years, maybe longer if you built it well. And it's cool. It's a cool thing to celebrate. Or if we're building in stone, I ran an Earth Day event earlier this year where volunteers were building stone paving sections. That work is going to outlast the grand kids, not in a morbid way, but... The work that we do, if we do it right, lasts generations. And it's a beautiful thing to feel like you're part of the community and meeting other people who are like-minded.  

Yeah, I think that's an important aspect is like you will, even if you go by yourself, you will come back probably with some new friends or some new acquaintances or just that fellowship of doing something different. Totally. Together. And then, of course, the perk of being outside in nature, immersing yourself into some physical type of labor can be really rejuvenating. That can't be understated. I think for me, trail work is... In a weird way, a form of self-love. I think a lot of people, myself included, have struggled with body image issues or looking in the mirror and not feeling pretty enough or skinny enough or good enough. And I think trail work or anything where you're working physically with your body can kind of, it changed my mindset. It became, it stopped being like, how do I look? And it kind of became, what can I do? Knowing that Eva, you and I, just us and two rock bars, like we could move a 500 pound rock down the trail. It's very empowering to see how much we are capable of. And I love teaching that to people or showing kind of opening the door and handing them a new tool they've never worked with before.  

Do you get people that come back to multiple projects?  

We do. Yeah. It's my fourth year on the job and I'm working with several groups this year for the fourth time. And it's just lovely to see people and catch up with them throughout the years.  

Yeah. And like you said, you get to touch base with them and they get to have that kind of grounding experience with a specific piece of property or trail or whatever project you're working on that day.  

Yeah. And then they bring their friends and the community kind of expands outward a little more.  

Yeah. You mentioned earlier about the work groups that you're working with. For our listeners, they may not know based on those titles.  

So what's the difference between trails and like trailhead operations?  

Totally. Great question. I hope I can do it justice. Trails, we have about 150 miles of hiking, biking, running, bird-watching trails that run through the county. Trails manages all structures on there, staircases, retaining walls, a lot of stuff that hopefully you wouldn't even notice. I think the best trail work is invisible, so a lot of it goes unnoticed. Trailhead operations takes care of... Parking lots, facilities, kiosks, bathroom structures, mowing the sight lines to make sure we can see the cars coming around. We have buildings and historic preservation, which manage kind of unrelated to trails, just all of the historic structures on Boulder County land. I'm not going to make up a number, but we have a crazy amount. I'm going to ballpark 300, and someone can give me crap for that later. And then urban forestry, which is the trees around... Parking lots, owned lands, also kind of on trails too. That one's a little harder to differentiate.  

Are you coordinating projects with their key staff and then you're creating these opportunities for volunteers to come and complete the work? Is that how it works?  

Exactly. So I design a lot of trail work events that kind of stays in my domain. But then my favorite part of the job is collaborating with other staff to work on projects that I might not necessarily have expertise in.  

I mentioned that elk jump fence yesterday. I just learned this.  

Oh, Eva, it's so cool. Elk cross the road and they have like... They'll often hop over barbed wire fencing and get stuck in it. So I had a group yesterday of volunteers that on both sides of the road created this, um, structure from natural like timbers that were cut down by our forestry crew. And we build this fencing that is short enough to allow elk to jump over it. So it has to be 42 inches or less, but then it has enough room underneath that the fawns can kind of crawl under since you know fawns aren't really great with barbed wire and they're just kind of getting caught in there so we've noticed a large large herds tend to pass in this certain area by hall ranch so we did the project there wow that's really interesting Yeah, it was great to collaborate. I worked with Chase Stewart and Caleb Dixon from our Trailhead Operations crew, and they really just took charge. I just brought the volunteers and kept the hype up, and they did the rest.  

Can you tell us maybe something that's surprising about your position? Maybe people wouldn't think, oh, you do that in that position?  

Yeah, so I've hinted at this before, but the best trail work is completely invisible. When you're hiking, you want a sense of discovery. You want to turn a corner and not know where you're going, and no one wants to feel hurt. So people often notice the bad trail work where something sticks out or that step is too high or this wall... Isn't natural with the landscape. But if a trail is well designed and construction executed well, you're just meandering through, looking at, you know, that cool outcropping and feeling like you see something across the way and then the trail kind of slowly delivers you there, but you're not noticing all of the stone steps because everything is the perfect height. So yeah, I think kind of that goes for a lot of stuff in conservation. If done well, our work is invisible. I love that. But I also like that we're kind of, like I said, pulling back the curtain and showing people like behind every trail, behind every step and ramp, there's people, people like you that are and people like our volunteers that are giving their service, that are making these open and welcome to all people that are out there recreating. Yeah, and our trails are a beautiful reflection of our community. We have a great variety of mountain biking, running. The more I do trail work, I think, The more I learn about how to design for the user. When I first came to Boulder County, I thought all of our trails needed aggressive drainages. So I was cutting in drainages every 30 feet. And then I heard from our mountain bike community, it's not good. The bikes were kind of chunking over things. I heard from our runners that sometimes sections of stone paving that we design, they don't like to run over. So they'll kind of run adjacent to it and build a little, run a little social trail into the ground on accident since they don't like running on the paving.  

You mentioned this word cupping. Are there two questions? So one, can you explain what that is? And then is there any other like trail vocabulary that maybe us users, non-trail builders don't know?  

Oh my gosh, I'm going to build it. I'm going to build us all some flashcards. Yeah. So this is Crazy to say in 2026, but water is the biggest enemy to a lot of our trails, even though we desperately want it. Cupping happens when water runs down a trail and the water doesn't have anywhere to exit. The water kind of eats away at the dirt and starts to erode. And over time, as... This continues, the trail kind of forms a trench, like a U-shaped trench. I've seen it so bad in sections, it goes all the way up to your knees and no one likes to walk on that. We call it trail braiding, where people start to make little lines around the bad features. We see this a lot with muddy conditions. People don't want to walk through the mud, so they'll start to curve around it, expanding the trail. Trails are designed where instead of a straight line, this will be hard because this is a podcast, Trails don't go straight across a hillside. They undulate up and down to allow natural watersheds. That's why if you ever look at something on a topographical map, it'll kind of snake up and down a hillside. Typically, when people are cutting around mud or features that aren't working, slowly over time, those undulations kind of just turn into a straight line. Oh. And all of the built-in drainages just magically, not so magically, disappear. So once that starts happening, we really want to curb it and get people back on the original alignment or add additional drainages. So that's probably one of the reasons that Boulder County does closed trails when they are extremely muddy or the drainage is maybe not working as good as we want because we're having a heavy rain event.  

Exactly. That and there's nothing better than walking through a beautiful park.  

Pristine meadow and you look to your left and there's poppies and you look to your right and there's columbine flowers. And if we didn't close for mud, that meadow slowly kind of has a lot of little snaking braided trails all around it. And next thing you look at the meadow and the poppies smashed. Not to be dramatic. We want to keep people in as wild of a space as we can. And we can best preserve that by doing muddy trail closures.  

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.  

So you mentioned the elk project recently. Are there any other recent projects that you're like proud of or you would like to highlight?  

I am so excited about a new style of project I've tried this year. And I've been working with volunteers for seven years, and I always said, I'm not going to do this. It's too much effort to teach this skill in one day. I want to shout out the Boulder Trail Running Breakfast Club because they worked on this as well as our Earth Day public project, and they knocked it out of the water, and they made me eat seven years of my words, Aoife. I'm very proud of some stone armoring work we've done in sections of trail that are prone to mud and we don't have any way to get the water off. We can either raise the level of a trail and build a turnpike, which we've done many times, or we can use materials we find on site. We were on the picture rock trail and there are a lot of great natural rocks there that we can use to build. And we, we harden or armor a trail where we set, uh, essentially like stone pavers at tread level. So instead of stepping on mud, you're stepping on slightly elevated rocks. It's a lot harder to do rock work than you would think. You have to have a lot of contact points. You have to have them super stable or they become dangerous. And rock work that's done well, as I've mentioned before, can last hundreds of years. So we set some rocks with volunteers in a five or six hour project and it went so well. I love that. And I love that the volunteers kind of challenged your mindset of they could actually accomplish something that probably only in the past would have been done by staff.  

Yeah, we had a lot of great returners coming back. I think when I see the same name on a list, I want to make sure that we're still always giving volunteers new experiences. So they challenge me all the time.  

All right, we're at the part where we're going to do a little rapid fire. I'm just going to ask you some questions. You give me the first thing that pops in your mind. Let's go. All right. Coffee or tea?  

Coffee. We're drinking tea, so this is silly to say. Best animal sighting on the job. Oh, okay, okay. I was at Heil Valley Ranch, and up on the hillside was an elk herd, which is really cool in and of itself. But my coworker George and I watched as three coyotes started to triangulate them in and try to hunt them. It was so cool. It was the middle of winter. Everything was silent. The elk didn't see the coyotes, but we watched them slowly creep in. That is really amazing.  

Essential tool or piece of equipment on the job. A fanny pack. Here's why. You got hands full of tools. You got a backpack full of your lunch. Everything's heavy. You're bogged down. But wait, you want a chapstick. What do you do? You're not going to finagle around your backpack. Bam, fanny pack. You want your phone? Fanny pack. Any essential clinometer? Fanny pack. Done. You need your own like branded fanny pack after this, I think. We are within 10 feet of my fanny pack right now. Love it. All right. How about your favorite plant or tree flower?  

Cedar tree. We don't have them out here. If we're talking out here, I really like a scarlet paintbrush. Where would I find a cedar tree? Oh, I'm upstate New York, my hometown. I can pick a better one. No, that's great. I think people often associate their favorite thing with like a childhood or growing up association.  

Yeah. And I'm from the East Coast as well. So most of my favorites are out there. But that's another fun thing. Like you said, you came to Colorado and kind of got stuck here. But you also probably fell in love with Colorado plants and trees and things that you see here as well. But those back home still hold the memory, right?  

Exactly. Everyone has the why they're here and your hometown can reflect that as well. So you're going out on the trail, not working on your day off. OK, are you taking with you?  

Eva, I'm taking my fiance, Daniel. Are you putting him to work or are you just going to have fun out there?  

He shows up to a lot of my volunteer events. He's very kind. He's a keeper then if he's going to work with you.  

Favorite snack that you're putting in that fanny pack?  

Oh, okay. Sour Patch Kids in a Ziploc bag. That way, if you're hiking and you're tired and you're just looking at that big final uphill, you take a breather, you reach for some Sour Patch Kids, bam, you're shooting up that thing. Love it. I don't want to say shooting up that.  

Sugar rush?  

Oh, yeah. Also not at work. What are you doing? You're out on the trail. Are you hiking, bird-watching, sleeping, recreating? In what fashion? I'm pretending to birdwatch with the Merlin app. I'm not that good at identifying, but I'm trying. I love backpacking. Maybe not here at Boulder County. I'm trail running until I'm tired enough that I tell myself I have to make a phone call that second. But mostly just hiking. We talked about vocabulary earlier, but I realized that trail work has a lot of really weird names for the tools they use.  

Yeah. Can you give us a few and what they do? For instance, I looked up one that's like a pickmatic. Pickmatic. What's a pickmatic? Oh, that is just the fundamental, a trail work, Eva. On one end, you have a pick, traditional pick, a pointy part. It's used for like breaking up soil and then a matic on the other end. Kind of, it's great for digging. How do I describe it? Oh, it's like that game. What's that game where you have to, one person describes something blindly and the other draws it. I want to do that, but I don't know how. McClouds, you have a rake on one side. And a scrapey tool on the other, and then you flip it and you can tamp with it. We've got a Pulaski, which is a fire tool named after a firefighter that designed it. I know, it feels like we're in our own little secret trail work club with all these cool names. And we're inviting the public to get the inside scoop. They're going to come to your work project and be like, where's my Pulaski? Oh, I hope they do. I'll have one with their name on it. I would love that. All right, we have another game. Are you ready? Let's, yes. I'm a huge basketball fan, women's basketball. Okay. And we're going to play a little start, bench, cut. Start being favorite, bench, suck it, cut. It's gone. Okay. We're going to start with a fun one. Teaching a staff first aid class. Oh, no. Leading a volunteer work project or cooking pancakes on pie day. Wow. Oh, man. I want to start with all of them. I'm going to start with a volunteer event, My First Love. What's the second one where they're on backup? You're either cooking pancakes for staff on Pi Day. That's number two. Okay. And you're cutting the first date?  

I'll cut the first aid because I'll get to see all the staff when I'm cooking pancakes. And first aid, it's just a few people who need a certification. And we have other staff that can teach the first aid.  

Yeah, exactly. So it's not like our staff won't be certified. It's just you're not going to be doing it. Plus, I'd go for some pancakes right now. So, yeah. Yeah, this is a fun fact for those. Jo treats us every year on Pi Day and makes pancakes or some type of pie-related thing. And Amanda. We can't leave out Amanda Hatfield. Shout out. It's her idea. She's also another volunteer work project lead, and you guys are like a dynamic duo. Love her.  

All right, here's our next start bench cut. A trail drainage project, a debris cleanup, or a fire fuel reduction project?  

- Start drainage, not to be dramatic Eva, but I think trail drainage projects, getting water off the trail is the number one most important thing I do with volunteers. It's hard 'cause it's a lot of repetitive tasks and it's not glamorous work, but that's how you get your trail muscles. And that is the best thing volunteers can help with, in my opinion, on trails to preserve their lifespan.  

- And it keeps our trails open from those muddy day closures.  

Exactly. Yes. Number two, did you say forestry? I said fire fuel reduction. Yeah. Let's lop some stuff. Let's cut. That sounds great. Number three, ditch.  

Sorry, ditches. All right, we have one final start bench cut for you. This one's going to be a park edition. I tried to pick some parks. And you can pick your start bench cut based on any parameter. It could be because you like to do projects there, or it could be that's where you like to go hiking, or it's just pretty. It doesn't matter. Your parameters, your answers. Shurstein cut Mud Lake, and I'm not going to forgive her for that one. All right, here it is. Ron Stewart Preserve at Rabbit Mountain, Hall Ranch, or Batasso?  

Oh, no. You've picked like three of my favorites. You know, in honor of today, we're going to start with Hall Ranch. Because remember, we are sitting on a bench at Hall Ranch. That's right. We're on the Nighthawk Trail. See, it comes full circle. Look at that. Next, Betasso. You get such a wilderness experience like you're in the mountains at Betasso and it's beautiful.  

Ron Stewart Preserve at Rabbit Mountain. I'm actually going to give to another volunteer coordinator, George Carter. He can start with that one. You're not going to cut it completely. I can't do that. No. So for folks who are listening, if they want to come on one of your volunteer work projects, where can they sign up? How do they get a hold of you?  

Great question. The easiest way is honestly to Google Boulder County Parks volunteering. We have a website. It's longer and more complicated. That's what I tell everyone. And that'll lead them to every type of volunteer event, not just trail work or recreation and facilities. There's also seed collections, or forestry projects, ditch removal or ditch debris removals. It kind of has the wide spectrum. So go there. It'll take you to a portal called Discover. And if they click on the calendar page, they'll see so many diverse opportunities. I love that. So I hope those who are listening will join you soon. I hope so too. I just once again want to emphasize that anyone with a desire can join our projects. You don't have to have any type of physical ability or body type. We would all welcome you and are excited to teach you some new skills. And you can walk away with new skills, maybe new friends or new passion for trail work like you have. At the very least, we'll feed you a weird snack you haven't had since you were a child.  

Thanks, Jo, for being on the podcast today.  

Thank you so much for having me, Eva. And thanks to Pouria, the secret mastermind behind the scenes who brings us all together. This podcast wouldn't be possible without either of you. Thank you.  

Yeah, thanks. You can find us wherever you listen to podcasts. Special thanks to Longmont Public Media. And go to discover.bouldercounty.gov to sign up.