9 minute read
Shovels and Sagebrush
Story and photos by JOHNIE GALL
How a geologist and pro mountain biker is creating more sustainable Ojai trails.
When Dillon Osleger jams the printer at the local copy-and-ship, the weather outside is cool and overcast. it’s ideal mountain-biking weather, really, so I’m surprised to find the professional cyclist hunched over a paper tray instead of his handlebars.
“I convinced a library to send me a copy of an original 1968 Los Padres forest map from their basement archives,” he laughs, smoothing his hand over the half-finished print. “It was just way too big of a file.”
If most of us perceive our worlds through shapes and colors, Osleger sees in layers and lines. The 27-year-old Ojai local is the executive director of SAGE Trail Alliance, a nonprofit that designs and restores trails throughout Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Ojai. The organization stewards over 250 miles of trail alongside land management partners and has invested more than $500,000 in the region’s public lands,
with construction of 65 miles of new trail planned by 2030. It’s a job that feels almost poetically suited for the geologist, professional mountain biker and budding historian — because, as it turns out, you need a lot more than a shovel to build a trail.
Like the sinewy lines snaking across his half-printed map, Osleger’s story zigs and zags. His great-grandfather was the head of the Alpine Club in Switzerland. His parents are geologists, and he spent his childhood getting acquainted with the dirt next to them as they conducted their fi eld work. But despite his academic pedigree, school didn’t click for Osleger, and he found himself skipping class to spend time in the forests around his hometown in Truckee, California.
“I had a lot of anxiety as a kid and seeing math laid out on a whiteboard didn’t work with my learning style,” he explains. “I liked taking my bike out on the trails though, and I started making friends with all the old guys who would be out hiking and biking, and they invited me to a trail building volunteer day.”
While trigonometry didn’t make sense to Osleger on paper, understanding why a trail needs to slope at a particular angle to prevent erosion was easy. Suddenly, he was memorizing soil composition and native species with the ease and fervor some kids master video games with, which eventually led to a master’s degree in earth science.
It was around the same time he was collecting diplomas that Osleger realized he was fast on a mountain bike — we’re talking podium and champagne-shower fast — and so did his sponsors. He’d made it to the highest level of competition with 200 of the top riders on the Enduro World Series circuit when something started to not sit right with him and, ironically, it all came back to trigonometry.
“When I started biking, there used to be
this equilateral triangle,” he says. “There was racing at the top of the triangle, then community in one corner, and trail building and environmental advocacy at the other. But as time went on and the sport tried to legitimize itself, the triangle got weighted toward the professional athletes and really left youth and the reasons people join the sport behind. We were flying to the same places again and again, the same 100 people going as fast as they could and braking hard. That’s incredibly damaging to trails. I just didn’t understand where I was going with it and I missed the sense of community and advocacy that I’d had in Truckee.”
It took a fire for Osleger to realize what he’d maybe already known about trails. Call it a case of not seeing the forest for the trees, maybe — except in this case, the trees were charred black and the trails were completely missing.
“I lived in Santa Barbara during the 2017 Thomas Fire, and at night I could see its glow when it surrounded Ojai and eventually when the flames licked the border of Montecito,” he remembers. “That spring, as part of my graduate studies, I was tasked with measuring the geomorphic impact of the landslides that occurred as a result of that fi re and following heavy rains.” Assuming he’d just hike the same trail he always took to the top of the canyon, he was shocked to find it had been wiped away alongside the homes that had been torn o their foundations. Car-sized boulders littered the mountainside. The waterfall he’d frequented was running thick and black down to the ocean, where beaches were closed on account of the carcinogens in the water. “That’s when I realized that the ways we cope with hardships in life, like being outside in nature and hiking and biking on trails, were being threatened by climate change,” he says. It wasn’t long after that he moved up from volunteer to executive director of SAGE Trail Alliance and set
to work restoring the trails that had been lost to the fi res with the help of other local scientists and organizations. It was a larger task than any volunteer effort could address, costing thousands of fundraised dollars and requiring years of physical labor that involved using dynamite to blast clear new paths and mule trains to carry wood for building new retaining walls. Here’s the thing not many people realize about the trails in Ojai and beyond: they take a lot of time, money, and manpower to maintain. Foot, hoof, and tire track might be enough to keep weeds at bay, but then there’s the need for drainage repairs, the swiftly eroding Santa Ynez Mountains that send dirt and boulders down onto the trail, and the chaparral brush that can grow a foot or more outward every year. According to Osleger’s napkin math, it takes about $5,000 a year to maintain each two-mile trail.
Dillion Osleger
photo by Johnie Gall
“I mean, just think about poodle-dog bush,” he laughs, “Anyone who lives in Ojai probably knows about it — it grows for about three years after a fire and if you touch it, you’re going to have the worst month of your life. It also takes a lot of training and understanding to do trail work. You can’t just roll out there and start chopping.”
Which is precisely why some trails have faded away over time — and why Osleger is so interested in that map currently jamming up the printer. Maps have always served a greater purpose than dictating how human explorers might chart a course from point A to B. They tell deeper stories about a place, but not all of us know how to interpret them. Fueled by rumor, dive-bar folklore, and whatever he can exhume from library basements, Osleger has been analyzing historic maps to cobble together a story about the long-forgotten paths that have been lost to time and climate change and, with chainsaw in tow, is working to bring them back into our trail system.
“Every time I’m at Ojai’s Deer Lodge, I have someone tell me about a trail they used to use before a lot of this wilderness was enacted,” he says. “One day, I found some old maps and realized the USGS geology map I had was vastly different from the US Forest Service map. Some routes were built during the mining days in the 1800s, or were created by ranchers moving cattle. Some have lasted and some haven’t. It made me realize you have one shot to build a trail the right way, and if you aren’t building it for the long-term benefit of the community, that’s just silly. You have to let the landscape tell you where the trail should go instead of forcing what you want. I want trails to be meaningful for people, to connect them to the history of a place and tell a story about our past.”
Before a spade ever touches the earth, Osleger looks at everything from hydrologic charts to soil stability to migration patterns to vulnerable plant species, layering map upon map to determine what trail is truly worth building. By looking at the intersectionality of trail
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL TRAILS:
The Concerned Resources Environmental Workers (C.R.E.W.)
www.thecrew.org
Ojai Valley Land Conservancy
www.ovlc.org
Los Padres Forest Association
www.lpforest.org
SAGE Trail Alliance
www.sagetrail.org
building and examining what trail builders of years past got right or wrong, Osleger is hoping to create a legacy for Ojai and the surrounding areas — not just in the dirt, but in his team of trail crew, local volunteers, and the future land stewards who will come after him. And that includes the hikers, bikers, and equestrians who set foot on the trails every single day.
“When the US Forest Service got 1,500 letters from local people saying they wanted to protect Pine Mountain from logging, it became clear that no one really knew where it was, and those letters were mostly ignored,” says Dillon. “That’s why the first step isn’t volunteering, but just going out and making memories on these trails. You will work to protect a place you have a relationship with, where your community is. We’ll pay for a season lift ticket at a ski hill and not put money into the trails we use everyday — that’s something we really need to consider. You have to do what you can based on the value it brings to your life.”
To become a member of SAGE Trail Alliance, make a donation and get informed about upcoming volunteer days, sign up at www.sagetrail.org, and follow them on
Instagram @sagetrailalliance
Story and photos by
Johnie Gall
