It takes a community: the volunteer

Four Wheel Drive Association of BC photo

The Four Wheel Drive Association shows that without donated time and energy the backcountry would be a less desirable place to play.  

In a time when trails, roads, campgrounds, rivers and lakes are busier than ever, it’s important to remember that it takes a community to make fun possible. This story is part of a series of profiles on the people who work behind the scenes in BC, so you can have that special moment today. 

Kim Reeves once voluntarily cleaned up a dump of old diapers. Someone had chucked the dirty nappies along a logging road, and the Four Wheel Drive Association of BC had stepped up to remove them. The sorbent crystals inside had soaked up weeks and months of rain, turning them into saggy cesspools. 

“That was one of the more memorable clean-ups,” Reeves, the president of the association, remembers with a grimace. “Clean-ups can be fun, but they can also be nasty.”

Almost every outdoor advocacy group relies on these kinds of dedicated volunteers for vast amounts of work. From making coffee at meetings to building a trail out in the forest, little would get done in the outdoors without dedicated members who commit their time and energy for nothing more than the satisfaction of contributing to something bigger than themselves. The unpaid work enables the passion of the general user in just about every activity. But few groups do more dirty work that impacts more users than the Four Wheel Drive Association. 

“Instead of complaining, we step up,” Reeves says simply.

Exhibit A: dirty diapers! 

More often, the clean-ups are not that disgusting. The association runs two annual clean-up events on forestry roads in the Lower Mainland, and the 18 member clubs run their own when they spot dumps of garbage in the backcountry. Work parties have removed up to 60 tonnes of waste in a day, though thousands of kilograms are more common.

Members voluntarily clean up garbage for two main reasons, says Reeves.  

The first is to help change the image of the four-wheel-drive enthusiast. When hikers and bird watchers see piles of garbage on the side of a forest service road, they often assume it was the guy in the muddy truck they passed a few kilometres back, says Reeves. Anyone who four-wheel-drives for fun must be someone who doesn’t care about the environment, they might think. 

In fact, treading lightly is a core value of the association. And Reeves likes to point out that the membership is more like the rest of the greater outdoor community than different.

“Almost every recreationalists uses four-wheel drive to get to trailheads,” notes Reeves. “The president of the North Shore Mountain Bike Association drives a Tacoma with a rooftop tent. You’d be hard-pressed to say who represents a self-propelled organization when we park side by side. My family tours around to camp, fish, hike, and canoe. I just happen to identify as a four-wheel driver.”

Performing volunteer clean-ups is one way to change what people see when a muddy Jeep or Toyota Tacoma drives by.

The second motivation is more personal – it’s about satisfaction. “You arrive at a ravine full of garbage, carry it all out, and leave it as it should be,” says Reeves. “Everyone wants to give selflessly and see the results of their work.”

Clean-ups are only a small part of the association’s volunteer work. In partnership with Rec Sites and Trails, they manage 20 hard-to-access sites. Places the provincial government doesn’t have the time and money to keep operational but are a fun outing for club members. Along with keeping the roads open, when they get there, they maintain campgrounds and trails, install fire pits, clean outhouses, and build shelters and other infrastructure. 

In Cornwall Hills Provincial Park, near Ashcroft, the association signed the first-ever partnership agreement between BC Parks and a motorized user group. Instead of decommissioning the Cornwall Fire Lookout, as BC Parks was planning, the association took over maintenance. 

It’s a perfect example of the reach of the association’s volunteer efforts. While Cornwall Fire Lookout may require four-wheel drive to access, it is also a jumping-off point to adventure even deeper in the backcountry. Without volunteers giving up their playtime to maintain it, the landmark lookout wouldn’t still be open to the public.

Ryan Stuart started writing about his adventures as a way to get paid to play. Twenty years later he’s still at it. Look for his name in magazines like Outside, Men’s Journal, Ski Canada, online at Hakai and The Narwhal. When he’s not typing at his home office in Vancouver Island’s Comox Valley, you can find him skiing, hiking, mountain biking, surfing, paddling or fishing somewhere nearby.