It’s a blazing hot midsummer day, and Nick Hodges pushes through a sea of brush, straining to step over thick stems of slick-leaf ceanothus somewhere deep in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area. Poison oak rubs along his body, and tanoak dust gathers on his eyebrows and in his nose. But he presses on.
Photo by Leah Doeden.
He’s looking for a long-lost hiking route that cuts deep into the 180,000-acre wilderness. Its restoration has been a dream many years in the making.
It will be Nick’s final project with Siskiyou Mountain Club.
Over the past decade, he’s risen through the ranks of the organization, developing the unique skills needed to find and restore forgotten wilderness trails. But he’d begun his career as a Wilderness Corps intern, a young college student who knew nothing about working in the backcountry.
Nick in the early days. Photo by Aaron Babcock.
“I met Nick in 2016,” remembers executive director Gabe Howe. “He was 30 minutes late for an interview to sit on our intern crew. But, you know, he was 18 or 19 years old, and … I didn’t hold it against him.”
“Gabe must’ve seen something in me that I hadn’t seen,” Nick laughs.
He was hired, and embarked on a wild summer of eight-day backpacking trips paired with strenuous trail work.
Despite admitting he was an “average intern,” Nick was invited to return as a seasonal staff member for the 2017 season.
It was then that Karly White and Trevor Meyer were hired as interns under his leadership.
“My first impression of Nick … was he was so quiet,” Karly says.
Trevor agrees that, in the beginning, Nick was “aloof … working with something to prove.”
Both were promoted to staff the following year, joining Nick as seasonal crew members. And as the seasons progressed, they saw him begin to break out of his shell.
Nick (second from left) at Taggart's Bar in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness with the 2018 crew.
“That shyness kind of grew into stoicism,” Gabe says, “And his confidence grew. His leadership style has matured, but it’s still very similar in that he really does lead by example.”
“When we got out on trail,” Karly says, Nick “was so fast and strong and so good at everything. It was a little bit intimidating.”
“That was really my relationship with Nick for the first several years,” Trevor laughs, “knowing that he was going to outwork me every single day, and I was just trying to keep up.”
In 2018, Karly remembers leading a crew with Nick to the Clear Creek Trail in the Siskiyou Wilderness.
Nick navigates downed logs the Clear Creek Trail in 2018.
“We were just young kids,” Karly remembers. “20 years old, in leadership positions, leading these interns that were basically the same age we were. And we were just … in the thick of it.”
“[We were] always out of our comfort zones,” Nick says.
But that trip was only the beginning. Season after season, Nick accumulated hundreds of nights on trail, guiding intern crews through some of the worst conditions in the most remote wilderness in the continental United States. He quickly became an invaluable member of the team.
“He’s someone that I could always count on to show up on time with a consistent attitude,” Trevor says. “Always a great work ethic. He sets big goals for himself, and he kind of works like a machine.”
Nick crosscuts a large log in the Marble Mountain Wilderness, 2022. Photo by Vincent DiFrancesco.
From crosscutting to brushing to treading and building complex rock walls, Nick had a “mind of a genius,” Karly says.
And while his technical skills were superb, his attitude was the most memorable. On trail, his “goofy persona,” came to the fore.
“Nick makes things that are objectively very hard look very easy,” Karly says. “You can see Nick walk up to something that seems almost impossible. And he just busts it out really quickly, laughing through the entire thing … and you’re like, ‘Wow, I actually can do really hard things. This guy just did it.’”
Photo by Vincent DiFrancesco
The staff relied on Nick for his trail-finding skills. Trevor remembers joining him on scouting trips in areas where fire had ravaged the landscape. Large-scale fire events often render trails impassable, if not invisible beneath layers of thick vegetation and sliding soil.
“His ability to find trails hidden under brush and logs is really special,” says Trevor. “He’s able to flag out these routes that have been long-forgotten and put them in their historic path.”
Nick scouts the Tincup Trail #1117 in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness. Photo by Karly White.
Karly recalls spending days trekking through remote sections of wilderness alongside Nick, trying to find traces of old routes. “We did a lot of terrible cross-country through awful brush fields and scrambled down many cliffs and found a lot of places the trail absolutely could not go.”
Karly recalls turning to Nick at some point during a trip and looking him dead in the eyes. Perhaps jokingly, but with a hint of truth, she asked him, “are we going to die?”
“Well, we’ve made it this far,” she remembers him saying. “Might as well just keep going.”
His steadfast confidence was a powerful motivator.
Nick lays out a plan for an intern crew on the Johnson Butte Trail in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness area in 2022. Photo by Vincent DiFrancesco.
“Whenever I was worried or scared about anything,” Karly says. “I would follow Nick anywhere. I always trusted him to make a good decision.”
As the seasons wore on, Nick played an important role in developing interns into entry-level assistant crew leaders, in the hopes that they might one day rise the ranks as he had.
One of these young staff members was Chloe Grimes, a Michigan native who moved to Oregon to work with the Club after her internship in 2024.
Chloe cooks dinner with Nick on an early season hitch in 2025.
“I had some hesitancy about becoming an assistant crew leader,” she says. “I was nervous.”
But Nick “let me spread my wings. He did just enough to let me figure things out on my own … he let [me] make mistakes and learn from them.”
This past season, Chloe admits that she saw “hints” that Nick might be moving on from the Club.
Nick explains logistics to an intern crew on the Upper Chetco Trail in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness in 2022. Photo by Vincent DiFrancesco.
She remembers that he “started to pass on his knowledge on to us. He made a point of spending 10-hour days teaching us stuff like tool sharpening.”
This winter, after eleven seasons with Siskiyou Mountain Club, Nick decided to take his talents elsewhere and begin a new chapter of his career.
Chloe has been thinking a lot about what things will be like without him.
“I haven’t had a season without Nick,” she says. “I’m really going to miss him.”
Nick, Karly, and Trevor after finishing a 14-day hitch in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area.
“I look back on all that he’s accomplished and all that I’ve been around,” Trevor says. “I’m just amazed by it all. We kind of grew up together … and I’m going to miss the hell out of him for sure.”
In May, Nick will join the Diamond Mountain hot shots out of Susanville, CA.
“This is kind of your goodbye,” I told him. “Do you have any closing thoughts?” He was silent for a moment, and I was worried I’d put too much pressure on him with the question.
Nick appreciates the view atop a peak in the Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area in 2025. Photo by Chloe Grimes.
But when he did finally answer, he didn’t mention the trails he’d maintained or the vast wilderness he’d explored, nor did he speak of the many interns he’d led or the staff he’d worked alongside. Instead, he thanked the volunteers.
Some of them are “doing just as much as me,” he chuckled. “And not getting paid for it.”
I asked him what he’ll miss most about working with Siskiyou Mountain Club. Always the jokester, he said, “sometimes I’d go into the office and there’d be candy or cookies there. That was pretty nice.”
But once he had a moment to get serious, Nick admitted that it hadn’t quite sunk in yet.
“It was special working with so many people for so long,” he says. “It was a small crew … a family.”
