A Kent man was awarded the National Forest Service Volunteer of the Year Award Friday at a ceremony in Seattle that featured Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who was on hand to personally present the award.
Harold Buresh earned the award for work he has done at the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. According to a release from the U.S. Forest Service, Buresh has averaged more than 400 volunteer hours per year annually since 1988. He is credited with building more than 100 miles of trails.
“I’m out there usually every weekend trying to do something to help out,” Buresh, 49, said Friday in a phone interview.
Buresh said his volunteer adventures began on National Trails Day in 1988, when a trails foreman asked if anyone had any construction experience while volunteers built handrails and decking.
Buresh said he volunteered and was made foreman.
“Nobody else had construction experience,” he said.
From that day forward, Buresh has spent almost every weekend in the woods, building trails and volunteering as a wilderness ranger to walk trails and answer questions as well as making sure rules of the park are being followed.
He also volunteers with the Washington Trails Association and Volunteers for Outdoor Washington
Buresh said he is “not the most avid hiker” but has always loved the outdoors, even hoping to get a job with the Department of Natural Resources as a young man.
Buresh said most of his volunteer work building and repairing trails, which takes the ability to read a trail, so that if a log up trail is forcing water onto the route, you make the right moves to fix it.
Buresh said he was most proud of his work to “get the ball rolling” on the Ira Spring Trail, a 4-mile pathway near Mason Lake that has an elevation change of 200 feet and is listed as “more difficult” on forest’s the Web site.
According to Buresh, there were old fire trails running down the mountain that were merged and built into a hiking trail that meets standards over a three-year period.
“They were basically ditches running down the hill,” he said of the prior trails.
When he’s not out in the woods building trails, Buresh works full-time in the shipping department at Cascade Machinery and Electric, but he says it’s his weekends in the forest that keep him going.
“It makes me be able to come to work on Monday,” he said.
Buresh said he has yet to walk all 13,000 miles of trail in the forest but added it was “hard to say” which of the hikes was his favorite, though he often goes to the less-known routes.
“A lot of our gems are so busy,” he said. “There’s trails up there people don’t know about that I can sneak away to.”
Along with the work he does himself, Buresh also leads other volunteers in trail construction, which according to the press release, can get pretty technical, especially when dealing with slope.
Buresh said the volunteer award came as a surprise to him, but he appreciates the recognition of his work.
“I was like ‘Are you sure it’s me?’” he said. “Really, it’s kind of overwhelming.”
Buresh also encouraged others to do their part to help maintain trails in the national forest.
“I wish more people would get involved,” he said. “You don’t have to be a hiker. There’s always something that can be done.”
For more information about the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, visit /www.fs.fed.us/r6/mbs.
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