The air hisses through Cali’s clenched teeth as he digs his feet in, bear hugging the boulder on the ground. A human bulldozer, he harnesses the weight of his long body and rolls the rock out of the woods and onto the trail.

“This rock, it’s not that big…like 250 [pounds],” he huffs, “maybe 300.” He moves it several more feet to the end of a log about 6 inches in diameter and 8 feet long that has already been cut and debarked.

Known as James Donahue in the front country, Cali is in his third season with AMC’s professional trail crew in the White Mountains, a group of 24 young people who crave physically demanding work and a chance to spend three months living outside. Members range from their late teens through their 20s.

On his first day of work three years ago, Cali, a native of Massachusetts on break from Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, walked into trail crew headquarters at Hutton Lodge in Pinkham Notch. He was wearing swim trunks and sunglasses, his brown hair long.

It wasn’t “good woods fashion,” Cali reflects. “Not really how we roll.” But it did earn him his “woods name,” California, given to him by upper-years that season. There are no formal naming ceremonies and not every crew member will use a woods name, but having such a moniker is a tradition nearly as old as the trail crew itself, a body first formed in 1919.

Now dressed in work pants, a grubby T-shirt, red suspenders, and well-worn boots, with his cropped hair under an orange hard hat, Cali, like most “third years,” is a crew leader this season. Tasked with running a backcountry business of sorts, he is responsible for a project on a stretch of the Kinsman Ridge Trail below Wolf Mountain. He and his crew of five are installing rock and wood water bars—all designed to reduce trail erosion and damage caused by heavy foot traffic.

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