Jaime Loucky: 60 Years of Stewarding Trails in the Evergreen State

Jaime Loucky is the CEO of the Washington Trails Association, one of the largest trail stewardship nonprofits in the United States. The organization now facilitates more than 160,000 hours of volunteer trail work each year, runs gear lending libraries that generated 5,000 outdoor experiences for youth last year alone, and serves one to two million website visitors monthly looking for reliable information about where and how to get outside. The sixtieth anniversary arrives at a moment when the public lands those trails cross are under serious pressure.A central concept in the conversation is what Jaime calls the flywheel: the cycle by which high-quality trail information draws people outside, outdoor experiences build personal connection, and connection generates the volunteers, donors, and advocates who keep public lands accessible. That flywheel is under stress. In 2025, federal staffing cuts eliminated hundreds of Forest Service and National Park Service positions across Washington State, including all but three of the thirteen-person recreation team managing the Enchantments, one of the state's most-visited backcountry landscapes. Jaime describes what a trail nonprofit does when agency partners disappear, how WTA has expanded paid professional crews into post-wildfire backcountry areas that volunteers cannot safely work in, and why urban day work parties in city parks are not a retreat from the wilderness mission but a genuine entry point for the next generation of trail stewards.The episode is also about coalition. Jaime identifies the fourth pillar of WTA's new strategic plan, building an outdoors movement, as the one that excites him most: uniting recreation groups, conservation organizations, hunters and anglers, and motorized users around shared public lands interests, a coordination that has not historically happened at the scale the current moment requires. The question he is working toward is not whether people care about public lands, because they do across the political spectrum, but whether they can be organized to show it before the losses become permanent.Learn more about the links and resources mentioned today at our website, thewildidea.com.