Thanks very much for expressing an interest in watershed restoration, which I think is the best job ever. It’s also a pretty tough life and lots of people are either romanticizing the life or just idly curious, so the following is intentionally blunt.

Welcome to the selection process, which so far has a 90% mortality rate. Here’s how it goes and why.

The first thing everybody who wants to be part of this traveling circus does is volunteer. That’s the first coarse filter that eliminates everyone who can’t or won’t give a fraction of their lifetime to a noble, desperately-needed cause. Won’t is a generosity failure, and can’t is a life-organization failure because the irregular work and pay means you’ll need to sometimes weather a month with zero income. Additionally, we do it that way because initially you won’t be providing much value to the taxpayers who cover our wages, and teaching you things will soak up valuable time that we should be spending restoring habitat.

During your volunteer time, in order to get paid you have to become useful in some meaningful fashion that moves the build forward. This is the second coarse filter. We need people who can shovel fast, lop brush efficiently to exacting specs, carry heavy rocks, wrestle big clumps of wet and muddy grass into place, fix every mechanical thing fast and clean, demonstrate extraordinary grasp of physics including leverage, pulleys, ropes, anchors, winches, and such, fell a 10” DBH tree on target with a handsaw, EMT and WFR skills, the list of things you can be good at is endless, and only a few are listed here. Everybody on our team is good at something, everybody has a favorite thing they love to do, and everybody has to be in pretty good shape.

It will be unrelenting physical work, to the limit of your capacity, for days and days on end with effectively zero relief. If you’ve got heart problems, high blood pressure, bad circulation, risk of stroke, bad asthma, back problems, basically any reduction in muscular or cardiovascular capacity all the way up to 9000 feet, you’re probably going to die out here. And if you do something stupid and get hurt really badly, the excess physical capacity that makes the work possible day after day is also what’s going to save your life while waiting for a helicopter. It’s not like the suburbs where you can get an ambulance for a broken wrist, or a quick car ride to the ER with a sprained pinkie—we’re talking more like waiting an hour for a helevac with a tourniquet on your femoral bleed.

Having demonstrated generosity and good life-organization skills, and become immediately useful, your potential inclusion will go to an anonymous vote of current team members who will have to be prepared to spend days snowed into a small tent-cabin with you after the coffee’s run out and the beer’s frozen. This is the one non-negotiable, because cultural fit can’t be faked, ignored or manufactured—it is binary and those decisions are final. By design, I’m not part of that vote, so I can’t force the team to work with anyone they don’t want to.

That’s the first rung on the ladder. Having passed those tests and gotten voted in, you’ll start out at $30/hr with all of your food and drinks for the hitch, gas to either the job or meeting site, and occasional weather days in hotels covered. Raises are contingent on commitment, availability, attitude and steady performance, with the first bump coming once you’ve built 500 or so structures with us, and you start getting $40/hr and payment for your drive to the job site. Some days are easy, some long and brutal, and if you’re going to squabble over 15-minute increments, don’t even try out. There’s no clock to watch or punch. Becoming a team lead is a rarity but it does happen, at which point there’s another pay raise and a bunch of other perks start to show up.

Plan to be away from home a minimum of 8 days, with hitches often stretching to multiple weeks at a time. You’ll work in roasting heat, pouring rain, snow, and temperatures down below freezing—weather days are very rare. There will be stinging insects, rattlesnakes, leeches, mosquitoes, bears, occasionally biblical poison oak, broken tools and vehicles, wrecked tents, every imaginable objective hazard, and you’ll have to deal with all of them quickly and gracefully with a minimum of bitching about it.

We’re a little obsessive about carbon footprint, so forget commuting. Minimum commitment to get gas money is 40 hours. We’ll camp as close as physically possible to the job site, take only necessary vehicles, and won’t have generators present or running. We’ll often have little or no cell reception, and limited charging capacity for laptops and other devices, so if you have a digital addiction you’re gonna suffer.

Speaking of addictions, we’ve got enough objective hazards and hassles without adding exotic chemistry into the mix, so if you’re currently into anything stronger than beers after work or the occasional joint, or are accustomed to waking up hungover, forget it. Nobody is going to carry you, and you can’t show up late.

Hygiene? Forget that too. Laundry is jumping in the creek with your clothes on, and showers are jumping in the creek with them off. If you need makeup, deodorant, twice-daily showers, never-ending fresh clothes and all the other useless modern obsession with “cleanliness” you’ll never make it. Anticipate mud, ash, dust, wood chips, charcoal, two-stroke smoke, black fingernails and wader socks that smell like death, and you’ll do just fine.

We have enough dogs already, thanks. While we love dogs and it’d be nice to add to the pack, they’re a huge pain in the ass already. Obviously, due to the nature of the work, you can’t bring your kids either. Since we’re on the road so much, you should also anticipate meaningful and ongoing stress (like, divorce-level lack of availability on your part) on your intimate relationship(s). You won’t be able to just drop everything when they’re feeling needy, jealous, stressed-out or whatever, so have a relationship that’s either disposable or mature and well-developed before you even consider this work.

If you have any other questions, don’t contact me, because I can’t take the time to answer them digitally. Show up at a job site, boots on and fully prepared, and we’ll talk all you want. Still interested? See the volunteer prep list for what to bring and expect, and get muddy!