Ben Hughey
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“I started working on trails the summer before my senior year in high school when I got a job for Sitka Trail Works. We spent the summer rebuilding the Sealion Cove Trail, the WWII Causeway, and trails around town, and I kinda caught the bug.
I spent the next three seasons on the Forest Service Cabin and Trail crew, traveling around Baranof and Chichagof Islands taking care of amazing destinations. I kept up the pursuit while at school back east, teaching a trailwork PE class and leading the college timbersports club. Despite a fancy undergraduate degree, my resume said manual laborer, so after college, I worked a season on a nonprofit crew in the Cascades. After the season was up, I was hired onto the permanent staff of that nonprofit, the Mountains to Sound Greenway Trust, and started a career in environmental policy. That pathway led me to DC for a year before coming home during COVID.
When I moved home, I started working for the Sitka Conservation Society and led a Conservation Corps funded by the CARES Act stimulus through the City of Sitka. We put a bunch of people to work and did cool projects around town during 2020. The projects we completed brought light to our community in a dark time. People got jobs, the community got better infrastructure, and we all had something to rally around - it was a win win win.
After that experience in tangible on-the-ground impacts, I was convinced to stay focused on the field instead of the hypotheticals of policy. And when the former executive director of Sitka Trail Works mentioned that she was stepping down and was looking for a replacement, I jumped at the opportunity.”
—Ben Hughey, Sitka Trail Works executive director
“Sitka Trail Works was founded when the local pulp mill closed in the mid-1990s. People feared that the economy would collapse and families would be forced to leave. When the city received some Congressional stimulus funding, a group of citizens put forward the idea of investing in a jobs training program that would re-employ displaced mill workers in trail building.
After a few years of success, Sitka Trail Works created the first community-wide Trail Plan, which led to the interconnected trail network we have today, weaving across city, state, and federal lands. We have one of the most robust trail networks in rural Alaska, which brings people to our town who would never move here if they didn't have that access to the outdoors.”
—Ben Hughey, Sitka Trail Works executive director,