Greg Travelstead spends five to six days at a time working for free with trail crews in the Sawtooth Mountains, Boulder-White Clouds and Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.

More recently, he has taken crews to work in Hawaii.

Back in Hailey, he runs Evergreen Advisors, a land-use and water-rights planning company that he started after moving to the Wood River Valley in 2006. He co-founded the nonprofit Pulaski Users Group in 2019 and serves as its board president. Since its inception, the organization has restored 75 miles of wilderness trails, engaging with about 600 volunteers willing to spend time off the grid, using old-fashioned crosscut saws in rugged terrain.

“I have a great deal of respect for those who work full time for land management agencies. They are vastly underpaid,” said Travelstead. “If the Forest Service would have paid more, enough to afford a mortgage, I would have worked for them. But I needed a foot in the business world in order to have significant leisure time to wander in the woods.”

Travelstead, 62, was born in Baltimore and spent his teenage years in Rapid City, South Dakota. He remembers the nearby American Indian Movement occupation of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge Reservation and a flood that hit his hometown that killed 300 people.

“Those were interesting times,” said Travelstead, who moved to Boise for his final two years of high school. “The only thing that dug me out from a life of crime and delinquency was my first backpacking trip in the White Clouds Wilderness with my girlfriend. It plugged me into nature and soothed me like nothing else.”

Travelstead earned a geology degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, thinking it would land him in the woods like a prospector, but remote sensing technology had changed the discipline, so he worked for three years for a self-storage company before going to the University of Colorado for an MBA.

After four years with Arthur Andersen accounting firm, he wound up working as managing director of a diversified holding company in Australia. There he was introduced to the indigenous Bardi people of the Kimberley Region of Western Australia.  “I was adopted by the community and learned their customs and traditions,” he said. “One of the reason they were fond of me is that I helped them navigate the Office of Indigenous Affairs and helped them get grants for solar power and for Land Rovers, so they could get around.”

Travelstead has worked in the Wood River Valley on conservation easements, water rights transfers and valuations. His clients have included the Wood River Land Trust, The Nature Conservancy and private landowners.

But his passion is to spend time outdoors. Crews of six to 12 workers take to the wilderness seven times each year. For the last two summers, his Pulaski Users Group crews have been working on an 11-mile stretch of overgrown and damaged trail up Johnson Creek near Grandjean.  “The trail was getting so bad that it crisscrossed Johnson Creek and was imperiling critical bull trout spawning areas,” he said. “It’s been incredibly tough just to access the trailhead. We were unable to wrap it up this summer due to the Wapiti Fire.”  The Johnson Creek trail work has been funded with a $48,000 grant from the agency coalition known as American Trails. The Pulaski Users Group annual $100,000 budget is covered by donations and additional grants from the National Forest Foundation and Central Idaho Advisory Council.

The organization also works under a five-year cost-sharing agreement with the Forest Service.

“We have only two paid seasonal employees,” Travelstead said. “We are as close to a purely volunteer organization as you can get.”

The Pulaski Users Group works with retirees and students from the Sun Valley Community School and the Flourish Foundation. For three years the crews have been working in Hawaii, on the Big Island and Kauai.

Travelstead said the work they have been doing on trails has ingratiated them with the indigenous Hawaiians.

“At first they thought we were crazy, but now we’re getting invited to family dinners with the locals,” he said.

For more information, go to pulaskiusers.org.