Master of the Machine Valerie Naylor's Trails Ride like They Were Meant to be There
Valerie Naylor is the Rock Queen. At least, that’s what Randy Conner of Contour Trail Design Company calls her. He’s seen her move rocks that weigh more than an excavator.
“I don’t know how she didn’t knock herself and the machine off the side of the hill,” Conner said, recalling a time at Concord Park in Knoxville, Tennessee when Naylor was lead machine operator on a project. “[The rock] was probably eight feet long, four feet across, a foot-and-a-half thick, and she just dragged it down the hill and dropped it straight where it was supposed to go. It’s like she makes up her own physics.”
There are no rocks at Naylor’s latest project, a half-mile of flowing trail in Knoxville’s I.C. King Park. At her job site early this spring, Naylor made quick work of the open hardwood forest, combing through duff with deft strokes of the mini excavator’s thumb. Although Naylor loves the intricacy of a technical build, that’s not why she’s a trailbuilder. The 52-year-old cyclist has been designing, planning, and constructing trails for nearly two decades. No matter the project, be it lift-serve lines in the Swiss Alps or rock sidewalks at Jake’s Rocks in Pennsylvania, Naylor feels it’s enough to know that any trail she creates will bring joy to others.
“Getting [on a bike] and away from the straight lines and the right angles and the built environment, that’s how I destress,” Naylor said. “When you think about how many people a year use the trails that you built and you think about how many years those trails are going to be there, you start to feel pretty good about what you’re doing.”
Born and raised in the New Jersey borough, Hightstown, Naylor was the youngest of four. Living in the shadow of New York City didn’t necessarily lend itself to an outdoorsy childhood. Her family did a little canoeing but never camped. All Naylor knew of the great outdoors she intuited through picking berries in her mother’s garden, observing the world from her perch in the backyard maple tree, or playing at an undeveloped lot near her house.
From an early age, it was obvious to Naylor’s mother Mary that her youngest daughter was endlessly curious, a studiousness that bordered on the serious. She was also stubborn as hell. Once, in middle school, Naylor rode her bike about 14 miles one way to her grandmother’s house on a busy commuter artery and didn’t tell anyone where she was going.
“She could be dreadfully adventuresome with that bike,” Mary said. “Grandma and a friend tried to insist [Valerie] let them drive her home, but she took off.”
Throughout her teenage years, Naylor dabbled in a little bit of everything—basketball, tennis, soccer. She managed stage productions and wrote for the school paper. If you’d asked her then what she wanted to be when she grew up, she might have said truck driver— “I decided I liked to travel.” Truth be told, she had no idea.
So, she kept dabbling after school, eventually moving to Tampa, Florida, and working as a production assistant on commercial photography shoots. But it was here, in a state with no mountains, where Naylor found mountain biking thanks to the Swamp Mountain Bike Club. Florida might not have any hills taller than 350 feet, but Georgia’s Cohutta National Forest and North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest did. Naylor traveled throughout the Southeast riding with the club. Once she’d ridden the mountains of western North Carolina, she couldn’t forget them.
In 2003, Naylor made a trip to Asheville, North Carolina to scope out the city as a place to potentially move. The visit would prove serendipitous on many fronts. Her first stop was a volunteer trail workday, led by veteran trailbuilder Woody Keen. In the span of that one afternoon, Naylor met her future employer (Keen), and the grandson of her future landlord.
“I got my karma points on that workday,” Naylor said
Naylor moved to Asheville later that year and worked seasonal outdoor jobs in the area but left soon after. Although she loved where she was living, she was barely scraping by financially. To make ends meet, she moved back to Florida to take a job as a trail coordinator with the state’s Office of Greenways and Trails, which had partnered with the International Mountain Bicycling Association’s (IMBA) Trail Solutions on construction of the Vortex freeride area at Santos. Naylor, who previously had only worked on trail projects as a volunteer, suddenly found herself in charge of a major feature-heavy trail build.
“I learned a ton on that job,” Naylor said. “I knew mountain biking but I didn’t know how to manage projects or how to work with the government. When you take a job doing something that you care deeply and passionately about, it’s hard to figure out that separation between work and play, how to balance those. I definitely struggled with that.”
When the project wrapped, Naylor moved back to North Carolina in 2007. Almost immediately, Keen and Ed Sutton atTrail Dynamics hired her as hand crew. At Santos, she was often left to her own devices, which suited her independent personality but didn’t address the knowledge gaps she knew she had when it came to building quality, sustainable trails. At Trail Dynamics, she wasted no time closing those gaps.
For nearly five years, Naylor learned under the tutelage of Keen and Sutton. They gave her advice and valuable hours in a machine, first a mini skid steer, and later a mini excavator. In between jobs, Naylor pored over trailbuilding manuals from IMBA and sought every opportunity to learn about the trade, from Professional Trailbuilders Association conferences to Keen’s invite-only trailbuilder “Guru Gatherings.” Those were the most formative years in her trajectory as a trailbuilder, and not just for the technical skills she gained. In learning to master the machine, Naylor learned to master her mind.
“I was so worried that I would mess it up,” Naylor said of those early days in the mini excavator. “It seemed like the machine had so much power to change things and I didn’t even know how I wanted it to change things. The advice I got was to not worry about it, that whatever mess I make can be cleaned up. You learn by doing.”
Naylor started her own company, Valerie Naylor Trails Specialist, in 2011. Her business model is simple: low overhead, high quality of life. She operates out of a Subaru Outback, rents heavy equipment, and works primarily as a subcontractor for other builders and project managers. In this way, she can better optimize her work-life balance. Between the requisite travel and uncertainty of the next job, continuing to stoke the fire for building is challenging, although bikepacking helps.
Naylor’s favorite clients are the ones who share her love of the land and prioritize quality over feetper-day. Her projects have ranged from designing and planning a nine-mile trail system on the Qualla Boundary for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to building a black diamond technical ridgeline trail at Aspire Park in Clinton, Tennessee.
“I would say as a trailbuilder she just kinda embodies integrity,” said Becca McNeely, a fellow builder. “She doesn’t put up with anybody’s bullshit. If she sees something wonky she calls them out on it.”
“I WOULD SAY AS A TRAILBUILDER SHE JUST KINDA EMBODIES INTEGRITY. SHE DOESN’T PUT UP WITH ANYBODY’S BULLSHIT. IF SHE SEES SOMETHING WONKY SHE CALLS THEM OUT ON IT.”—Becca McNeely
In between stints of designing and building, Naylor is training the next generation of machine builders. For McNeely, who came to trailbuilding later in life at age 40 after leaving a career in education, Naylor’s matter-of-factness was intimidating at first. Like Naylor, McNeely only had volunteer trailbuilding experience when she started pursuing the trade more seriously. The idea of operating a machine on steep side slopes was daunting. But it was Naylor’s candid disposition that gave McNeely the confidence to push through the learning phase.
“When I’m doubting myself, she has no patience for that,” McNeely said. “It’s odd. She’s super motivating because she just assumes you can do it.”
That assurance is not something Naylor has always had for herself. Early in her career, she was often the only woman on a job and most certainly the only woman operating a machine. Her peers never doubted her; she’s always felt supported by her fellow builders. Yet Naylor still felt a tugging on her resolve, an insidious social conditioning that manifested internally as a lack of confidence. Time in a machine helped Naylor overcome her own misgivings about her abilities. The more she built, the more she felt like she belonged as a builder. Still, there were times she felt that she didn’t get jobs—or sometimes did—because she was a woman. Neither scenario sat right with her.
“I want people to hire me because they think I do a fantastic job,” Naylor said, “Not because of my gender.”
Naylor doesn’t think of herself as a leader. She prefers to be behind the scenes, more at home alone in a machine perched on a pile of rocks than sitting in a boardroom selling a potential client on a project. But in this way, Naylor leads by example. Through her steadfast dedication to craft, she is inadvertently empowering all builders, not just women such as McNeely, to master the machine.
“She’s an unintentional mentor to me,” Conner said. “She can get a machine through a crack in the rock with one tread hanging off a cliff and I’m not sure how she goes about that ... watching how she works was an invaluable lesson to me.”
You might not know a Naylor trail when you ride it, unless you know her. And that’s the point. In every trail she makes, there is an understated solidity that is as much a reflection of Naylor as it is of the land. Her trails ride like they were meant to be there, were always there.
“When I get to go back and visit [those trails], it’s like they’re my children but they’re grown up now,” Naylor said. “Other people are taking care of them and making changes to them and sometimes I love the changes and sometimes I don’t, but I don’t own them. That’s a cool part of the experience.”
