What Goes Into a Trail Builder’s Pack?

For a sport with seemingly infinite adjustments to head tube angles and suspension leverage curves to make riding ever easier, mountain biking has never exactly catered to the trail builders who make all that riding possible in the first place. Carrying around tools, whether a small folding saw for stray branches in a fanny pack or a hoe for clearing drains, largely relies on jury rigging said object to pack, body or bike. Wood handled tools are drawn through shoulder straps to reduce sway, requiring careful attention and body english to avoid intersecting a rear wheel or a wayward branch overhead.

Offroad dirt bike plate caddies can be welded to headtube spacers, requiring a few extra PSI in the front fork to offset the extra 25 pounds of fuel and chainsaw. All said, riding with tools isn’t exactly the same experience as riding for fun, rather it is a dance with avoiding grievous injury in the name of making the fun riding possible. Over the years, I and the nine other trail builders that I work alongside for our trail stewardship program have experimented with enough systems to make our packing efficient, allowing for a better working environment, and more importantly, more miles of trail to be turned out.

This packing system begins with one of two packs: The Dakine Builder 40L pack for big days with the chainsaw, or the Mission Workshop Hauser 14L for strike missions mid-season. Both packs contain the same system of tools, with the Dakine having the storage capacity for the hard days on forgotten trails that require a few liters of gasoline, two stroke tools, and a fair amount of water and calories.

Every pack begins with the critical components for body and tools, ensuring both survive the day. A bleed stop kit, water filter, two spare tubes, Dynaplug kit, hand pump, Topeak multi tools, a scrench (single tool that can disassemble a chainsaw), emergency inreach, radio, water bottles, and an extra spark plug fit in a tool pouch or two.

After the essentials have added a half dozen pounds to the pack, a Trail Boss tool with at least two five-pound heads (ideally a hoe and a pick for my preferences) is dropped into the bottom to keep center of gravity as close to the bottom bracket as possible. Along with the trail boss, a Silky handsaw is zipped into a side pocket for quick action on hanging branches.

For the wood rounds larger in diameter than my thigh, a chainsaw with a bar between 18 and 24 inches is set into the outer open pocket of the pack, with bar cover set tight and chaps wrapped about the motor. To keep it purring, a few gas cans of fuel and bar oil are set aside the tool heads within the pack. By now, 20 to 30 pounds are sitting against my back, essentially adding the weight of the exact bike I’m riding to the equation. In recent years, I’ve finally found enough trust in the reliability of electric chainsaws to bring them along for the reduced weight and efficiency, even if they don’t become lighter throughout the day as they burn gas like their equivalents of the louder and smellier variety. Away from the gas based and dirt covered objects, a lunch and thermos of coffee is stored in the front compartment. To protect these items of most importance, a favored pair of trail gloves are nested around them.

As strange as it is, all of this weight and hard labor often acts as a constant reminder that this whole sport is a core center of my life. As I cut back brush in order to bring back lines across the land that have existed since time immemorial, I can’t help but be thankful that a small, yet significant evolution in tools and storage solutions have made my job infinitely easier than the countless beings who kept up these paths before me. As small as it may seem, bringing along a Silky saw to clear passage for those who come next is a way to connect not only to the community, but to the landscape. A trail builder's backpack can be complex and cumbersome, but it is exactly that weight that slows us all down and forces an appreciation for place and the collective knowledge that resides in each place we aim to provide passage across.