I grew up coming to these mountains.

Being able to just help educate people and give back to these mountains means the world to me.

My name is John Mashburn.

I work with the San Juan Mountains Association as a forest ambassador, which means I'm out here on trail most of the summer talking to folks, doing a little bit of trail work.

This is probably our busiest trail in the San Juan.

On a busy weekend or a holiday.

We'll see five, six, even hundred people here in a single day.

Up here around the lakes.

They're still pretty frozen.

They're still pretty deep snow up there.

Really nice waterfalls right about a mile in.

We're good to go for the waterfall?

Sick, yeah.

Nice chill hike.

You guys are fun out there.

The Alpine Loop is a scenic byway outside of Silverton, and it's about a 65 mile long loop that goes through high elevations through the mountains, going over several mountain passes that reach altitudes of 11 or 12,000ft.

My name is Misty French.

I'm a Alpine Loop ambassador with the San Juan Mountains Association.

We do get a lot of motorized users out on the BLM lands around here.

People doing Jeeping, four wheel driving, OHV use.

So we try to spread the message of stay on the trail.

Don't drive on the tundra.

I think that people go and recreate outdoors, they just see the trail, assume that it's accessible and passable.

Same with the restrooms or toilets.

It's assumed that they're going to find, like a clean and usable toilet with toilet paper.

And they're people like come in like several times a week to have the facilities maintained and ready for the public.

Those aspects kind of make our job invisible at times.

One very important part of our job is education.

So we spend most of our time talking to people, making sure people know how to leave no trace.

Making sure people know trail conditions.

We do a lot of drainage work.

So just to make sure there's no erosion on the trails.

we try to make sure the water flows off in a nice way.

If there's a social trail that leads off somewhere that we don't want people going, we'll block it off with some branches.

And that's a way to help prevent erosion and anyone from trampling on our fragile alpine ecosystems.

We go to a lot of historic sites.

We go check on the buildings, pick up trash.

I think people don't understand how little things add up to be big things.

So just like that tiny little corner of your candy wrapper or your granola bar package that, you know, maybe you put it in your pocket and it blows out and that ends up out there.

We find all those things.

We see about a half million people a year using the Alpine Loop.

And so if everybody just has a tiny, tiny little piece of trash that's still huge bags of trash we're hauling out at the end of the day.

We had one day two weeks ago.

We hauled out like 95 pounds of trash in one day.

The other aspect that's important with our job is the data collection part of it.

25 hikers, five mountain bikers.

The Forest Service is so spread thin that they need people like us to help get numbers on trails.

We collect data such as usership.

How many people are there?

How many horses, how many mountain bikes, how many dogs?

You know, we're trying to get the best picture possible for how these trails are being used so that we can accommodate them.

Something that sets the San Juans apart from a lot of our mountains in this country is the pure beauty and cleanliness of them.

This isn't just government land.

This is your public land, and you have the right to be out here and you have the right to enjoy it.

If we all work together as a team to help clean trash and to help keep these trails nice, then no matter what happens, these mountains will be okay.