MUDDY CREEK TWP — Call them what you will: trailblazers, mud dogs or woodland architects. But the 27 volunteers working to improve the Shenango Trail at McConnells Mill State Park last weekend say they simply want to give back to the trails that have given them so much.

"I think it's just the greatest thing in the world to be out walking in the woods, and it's even better when you're not about to be lost or trespassing on private property," said event organizer Paul Henry, the state council chair for the North Country Trails Association.

Armed with mostly hand tools like spire rakes, pick mattocks, tampers and Pulaskis — a tool attached to a long wooden handle with one side resembling an ax head and the other a broad, flat blade like a hoe — the volunteers spent the weekend clearing roots and rocks, called "trippers," from the trail, as well as leveling out eroded trail sections upstream from Eckert Bridge.

"We try to get a trail bed that's about 24 inches wide and drops one inch over that 24 inches to allow for water drainage," Henry said.

Trail Care Weekends are done once a month March through November, a cooperative effort between the North Country Trails Association and the Keystone Trails Association.

Joe Healey, president of the Keystone Trails Association and a resident of the Poconos, made the five-hour drive Friday to help preserve the trails he so loves.

Healey was covered in mud as he dug out roots and tamped down dirt along the trail.

"We're all hikers, and we get so much out of the trails that we want to put something back into them," Healey said.

The volunteers, split into three crews each working about 12 hours over the course of the weekend, invested more than 320 hours of their time on the project.

"We built this trail in the early 1990s. Before that, there was nothing here," said Healey, now in his 25th year of Trail Care volunteering.

Dave Myers of Greenville, also a member of the Keystone Trails Association, spent Saturday toiling in the pouring rain on muddy, leaf-covered slopes, installing stone steps to make the trail safer.

"If there's no small rocks to make steps, you get a sledgehammer and make them yourself," he said. "The parks are more and more dependent on us as they have less people to do the work."

Myers said all trail work follows federal guidelines to ensure consistency along the 4,000 miles.

"The idea behind any trail is to make it self-maintaining," he said.

Kyle Veloski, 15, of Fombell was the team's only teenage volunteer and was working on Trail Care to fulfill five hours of community service required by his school for graduation.

Helen Coyne of Cranberry Township, meanwhile, has volunteered for Trail Care for the past 15 years.

"I love the outdoors: hiking, bicycling, you name it. Volunteering, I can do as much or as little as I like," she said.

Since retiring, the 70-year-old Coyne has worked as a cashier at the Seven Fields Giant Eagle, but the outdoors has never lost its appeal for her. In 18 months between 1995 and 1996, Coyne was one of 17 people to bicycle 20,000 miles around the world, so digging in the mud is a fairly easy day for her.

"I raised seven kids and they're on their own now, so I wanted to have an adventure. As I get older, it gets more difficult, but I enjoy it so much," Coyne said.

"Trails don't just happen by themselves. If you're going to enjoy hiking them, they do need some work."

Diane Buscarini, a Poconos resident and hiker drawn into Trail Care by the Healeys, said she wasn't much phased by the steady rainfall or the muddy labor.

"The work is much more physically demanding in the summer, when the sun is beating down, and this is the first time I've used a Pulaski," she said.

The amount of work crews accomplish on any given weekend depends on the state of the trails and what needs to be done.

Sometimes crews bring chain saws and brush cutters, others they simply paint the trees that mark the trail's path.

"The North Country Trail in Pennsylvania is one of the most beautiful in the world. It will be over 4,000 miles when we are done with it. At this point there are more than 1,700 miles that are off-road," Henry said.

He acknowledged volunteers' efforts are vital to keeping trails accessible to hikers.

"We try to design the trails so that they do not erode, but we have a particular problem along Slippery Rock Creek, where Hurricane Ivan fallout washed out parts of the trail. We have done a lot of work to get that back open."

Henry added that, in lieu of digging through the mud and rolling (slippery) rocks off the trail, volunteers are always welcome to help with everything from fundraising to stuffing envelopes.

"Anybody can help out with this in some way or another" he said.

For more information about the Keystone Trails Association, go to www.kta-hike.org/. For information on the North Country Trail Association, go to www.northcountrytrail.org/.