• Name: James Moody
• Location: Burleson, Texas
• Contribution: Leads Sierra Club Outings service trips to Texas national parks

You've led dozens of service trips to Big Bend and Guadalupe Mountains National Parks. How did you first discover these areas? I was raised in Odessa, on the outskirts of the Trans-Pecos—that's what they call the northern Chihuahuan Desert out in West Texas. My parents took me to the Davis Mountains when I was about 10 years old, and I immediately fell in love. 

How did you get involved with Sierra Club Outings? In the mid-1990s, I went on some Sierra Club backpacking trips led by my wife's cousin. Then I went on a service project to Big Bend. The next year, I became the assistant leader for that trip, and in 1999, I started leading service trips in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. Now I lead both trips.

It must be rewarding to see the effect you and your crews have had throughout the decades. Over the years, we've torn down 85 miles of fencing in Big Bend, opening up a whole new area of the park. There are antelope herds and other animals that weren't there before. 

We've also done a lot of trail maintenance and revegetation. Now, there are some really nice areas of grass out there. 

What are some of the hardest projects you've worked on? In Guadalupe, the National Park Service wanted to make this long nature trail in Dog Canyon wheelchair-accessible. We had to get humongous boulders, roll them in there, fill in the gaps, and make a solid, even surface. Another time, we cleaned out an abandoned gas station. Everything had just been dumped in it—stoves, parts of cars, hundreds of oil filters. We had to get all the junk back out of a steep-walled ravine. Then we tore down the buildings. 

It sounds exhausting. Do you ever get tired of it? I love that area so much. Whenever I'm driving into the Trans-Pecos, I feel a sense of exhilaration go all through me. It transforms me. It just feels so good to be doing something there that helps out. 

What do you do when you aren't leading service trips? I walk about five miles every day. I read. I'm a frustrated lead guitar player. I love music—classical, classic country, and classic rock. I guess it just has to have the word "classic" in it. And I'm a Longhorns fanatic.

This article appeared in the May/June 2017 edition with the headline "A Desert Classic."