Edition: U.S. / Global

You Call This A Vacation?

Published: June 18, 2004

MONDAY morning, five women and two men, ranging in age from 18 to 70 and dressed in work pants, hiking boots and hats, trudged up a short hill to the work site. As construction pits go, it wasn't bad: a milewide gorge jammed with Gaudíesque sandstone spires and pillars, some hundreds of feet high, in every shade from pink to beige and gold to salmon. Beyond it lay green fields backed by white-gray cliffs.

''Will this do?'' Joan Mansfield, one of the workers, asked no one in particular. The consensus was that the winding trail into Fairyland Canyon, part of Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, would be a decent place to spend the day swinging a pickax.

For some people, a dream vacation involves no labor harder than balancing a paper umbrella on the rim of a tall glass. Others avoid even that much effort, preferring to let attending hands daub their faces with cucumber-enriched mud. But under the auspices of the Sierra Club and accompanied by a group leader, these six volunteers, most of them eminently sensible-seeming people, had paid $395 plus airfare for the privilege of spending a week performing back-breaking or mind-numbing tasks to help fix up the park. The only mud masks they would wear would be composed of their own sweat and the sun-baked Utah clay that sprayed up in their faces as they chipped at the trail.

It's called a service vacation, and more and more people are taking them. The Sierra Club has been sponsoring such trips since 1958 and runs about 90 a year, with an average of 15 people volunteering for each one. Similar trips are now offered by many groups, including the American Hiking Society, the Appalachian Mountain Club, the Nature Conservancy and Habitat for Humanity.

The grunt work is endless and endlessly varied. The Bryce trip's tireless leader, a 70-year-old from Florida named Suzanne Valencia, said that in the last few years she had yanked tamarisk, the kudzu of the West, at Arches National Park in Utah, cleared hyacinths from a pond on the Outer Banks of North Carolina and paddled through the Okefenokee Swamp, clearing canoe channels of overhanging branches.

But whatever the work turns out to be, the attraction of the trips seems much the same for everyone. The afternoon before, as the volunteers sat around their ponderosa-shaded campsite in clean clothes and name tags, introducing themselves, all offered similar reasons for making the journey. ''I'd been here about 10 years ago and loved it,'' said Maryann Kampmann, a physical therapist from Lawrenceville, N.J., ''and I really wanted to come back and participate so that other people can enjoy the park.''

Ms. Valencia, a retired nurse, who explained that service vacations enabled her to ''meet all kinds of people who become your friends and who kind of think the way you do.'' She said she didn't much care what kind of work the park rangers required of her, ''just whatever they need doing, and most people feel that way.''

And the parks, currently with a maintenance backlog of $4.9 billion, appreciate the effort. ''Volunteers are a tremendous help to the National Park Service,'' said Joy Pietschmann, the coordinator of volunteer programs. ''There are a lot of places that have a lot of things that need to be done that we wouldn't be able to do without them.''

The volunteer program has grown exponentially since it started in 1970, from 100 people that year to 6,000 in 1980, to 70,000 in 1990, to 121,000 today. Last year, Ms. Pietschmann said, volunteers donated 4.5 million hours of work, the equivalent of 2,160 full-time jobs, or 10 percent of the park service's work force.

The assignment from the Bryce staff on Monday was to stabilize the Fairyland Canyon trail against erosion. This entailed digging a drainage gulley along the inside of the trail, the side that hugged the wall of rock, and using the displaced dirt to build up the side that ran along the cliff edge.

It could have been a lot less glamorous. On other Bryce trips, Ms. Valencia recalled, the work tended to keep the volunteers well away from the surreally majestic stonescapes that draw about a million people to the park each year. Previous crews had made trash cans out of old oil drums, built a bathroom ramp for the disabled and cleaned up shuttle-bus stops. (The Sierra Club runs a separate back-country trip to Bryce each year to replace the barbed-wire cattle fencing around the park perimeter.)

On Monday morning, the park's roads and trails foreman, Tom Dearden, a burly, red-bearded former cattleman, delivered a brief instructional lecture and pep talk. ''This is the hardest job in the park and the least recognized,'' he said. ''And it's not going to get done this year. I've got three guys and 63 miles of trails.'' Then he handed out pickaxes, shovels and rakes and turned the troops loose.

In the first 15 minutes, the volunteers covered about 20 feet. Mr. Dearden reviewed their work. ''You got to do this part over again,'' he said, ''cut it down more on the inside and build it up more on the outside. You can't have a puddle, though. The water has to drain all the way in to the inside.'' The mention of rain seemed like a bad joke. The dirt was rock hard, the sun cauterizing through the thin air. The altitude, 7,758 feet, made the very act of breathing a chore.

According to the weather board in the visitor center, the park had not seen a raindrop since April. One of the volunteers, Lynn Devore, 60, a computer scientist, sized up the situation.

''This is a grim place to work,'' said Mr. Devore, a veteran of more than a dozen service trips since 1990. ''One of the prettiest, but also one of the hardest. There's no breeze. There's no shade.''