Rosario Resort will give you a discount for doing a little trail work

ORCAS ISLAND -- The mattock bites deep, revealing dark-chocolate loam.

"I can't stand yard work at my own house, so what am I doing here?" says Mindy Hardwick as she hacks a hemlock root with vehemence, then pauses. "But I love this trail. I come here in the summer and walk this path all the time."

So the 30-something Lake Stevens children's writer joined the Rosario Resort work party. Once a month, the grande dame hotel of Orcas Island offers a voluntourism package: a $69 room in exchange for a morning's labor in nearby Moran State Park.

The partnership began last winter, after December 2006's "storm of a decade" tattered the 5,252-acre preserve. Head Ranger Chris Guidotti explains: "I didn't think we'd clear the trails in time for summer. We couldn't have without the volunteers -- from Rosario and other groups.

		Mike Kane / P-I
	Glenn Parker, a retired Fed Ex pilot from Memphis, Tenn., looks over a book of historical maps in the library/museum at Rosario Resort.

"People really love this park and embrace it as their own. Once I was in the middle of nowhere -- up on the North Boundary Trail -- and heard a roar behind me. I looked back and saw a 70-something local out clearing brush with a heavy chainsaw."

Our tools are more analog: rake, pry pole and mattock, that fierce-looking union of an adze and hoe. (J.R.R. Tolkien armed his battle dwarves with these.)

Under a storm-whipped gray sky, seven Rosario volunteers cut into the hillside above Cascade Lake. Our mission: to reroute a segment of the loop trail, so hikers don't blunder through campsite 17. Two previous resort crews sketched a path through the brush and mossy rocks. We're doubling its width and leveling its pitch.

A gray-haired couple attacks the upper part. They're good at this. Really good. Clearly not amateurs. "We've got ringers here," someone jokes.

Rick Culwell grins underneath his Willie Nelsonish bandana and admits, "my first job was building trails down in Portland as part of the neighborhood youth corps. It's still the same tools, same aches."

Beside him, Linda Meriwood lines the path with rocks. "We have 20 acres near Gig Harbor, where we're building. We're used to clearing."

So why sign up for a busman's holiday? "We're scouting good campsites," she confides. "And it was a chance to check out Rosario."

The waterfront resort, anchored around a 1906 mansion, remains one of the San Juan Islands' most exclusive properties. Four volunteer hours knock 40 to 60 percent off room rates, depending on the season. It's a you-scratch-my-back, I'll-scratch-yours arrangement, which can attract two-dozen folks some months.

"Voluntourism" -- as the industry calls it -- is on the rise. Already three percent of U.S. travelers, nearly 3.5 million people, donate their time on vacation. Travelocity's 2007 poll discovered another 35 percent plan to jump on that bandwagon this year. And Lonely Planet just released its first volunteer-travel guidebook, just as CheapTickets unveiled an online booking engine and a volunteer savings program.

The trend attracts its share of skeptics. Travel e-zine World Hum recently asked: "Voluntourism: 'overpriced guilt trips' or a 'real chance to save the world'?"

But here on Orcas Island, the trail crew is all smiles -- except when confronted with a stubborn chunk of shale. Soon Guidotti and Ranger Reuben Stuart have it lassoed and tied to the trailer hitch of the park's one-ton pickup. The engine guns and the garbage-can-size boulder lurches down slope and wedges between two trees.

		Mike Kane / P-I
	A traveler looks through binoculars on a ferry from Orcas Island to Anacortes.

This is real work. Not some "green-washed" publicity exercise. Volunteers provided 85 to 90 percent of the labor on this trail spur.

The current crew starts the "Cool Hand Luke" jokes around the third hour. They've groomed the upper stretch until it resembles dark-brown velvet. Now everyone's concentrated on the stony bit. Rest breaks -- beside the basket of trail mix, water bottles and hand lotion -- grow longer. We trade tips on the resort's massages, since the package includes a 15 percent discount on spa treatments.

Erin Petrie, a 25-year-old Seattleite, shucks several layers of bulky winter clothes. "It's more aerobic than I expected."

Indeed. A study by Oxford Brookes University claims conservation work can burn more calories per hour than a step class -- almost a third more, in fact. And regular volunteers reported weight loss and better mental health, as well as a sense of accomplishment.

Guidotti agrees: "It's hard work, but the results are tangible. Thousands of people will use this trail, at least 7,000 each year. I love to see people get out in the parks. After all, it's your park."

That's thanks to Robert Moran. As Rosario's first owner, he donated just under 5,000 acres.

His life reads like a Horatio Alger plot. The New Yorker arrived in Seattle in 1875, a 17-year-old machinist with only a few cents in his pocket. He began as a logging camp cook and wound up the city's mayor. With his brothers' help, he built the Northwest's largest shipyard, which produced the battleship U.S.S. Nebraska.

Rosario's resident musician -- and marketing director -- Christopher Peacock unfolds this tale later in the evening, as he plays the 26-rank Aeolian pipe organ. "Doctors told Moran, age 46, that he had only a few years left on the clock. He retired to Orcas Island and built Rosario, where he recovered and lived another 40 years. Basically, he had an extreme case of executive stress."

Eventually Moran decided to share "this wonderful place to get back to nature ... to regain health -- physical, mental and spiritual." The Depression encouraged this gift to the public, as did his friendship with Sierra Club founder John Muir, which began on an Alaskan expedition. "Muir came down to the engine room and told him, 'Get out of your overalls, come onshore and see the important work we're doing,' " Peacock recounts. "Moran responded, 'Only if you put on overalls, come downstairs and see the important work we're doing too.' "

Moran caught conservation fever and helped propel the Washington State Parks into being. "There wasn't even a park service back then. He took his own tools and crew over there and started improving the grounds."

And that fine Rosario tradition continues today.

IF YOU GO

		Seattle P-I

Getting there -- Transit time is at least three hours from Seattle, including the ferry from Anacortes (passenger $9.85; car and driver $28.75; 888-808-7977; wsdot.wa.gov/ferries). Skip the Interstate 5 traffic and tedium with a floatplane from Lake Union directly to Rosario Resort (one-way $81-$107 during winter; 866-435-9524; kenmoreair.com).

Volunteering -- Join the park cleanup team on the first Saturday of each month (9:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m.), October-May. Rosario Resort offers a $69 room rate to voluntourists, as well as snacks, water, hand lotion, work gloves, shuttle service and 15 percent off any spa treatment (800-562-8820; rosarioresort.com). A nonprofit group also organizes work parties and maintains a summertime gift shop atop Mount Constitution, the highest point in the San Juan Islands (friendsofmoran.com).

Park life -- Puddled by five lakes, Moran State Park contains 38 miles of hiking trails in its 5,252-acre grounds. Reserve a campground in summer ($7 booking fee; 888-226-7688; www.camis.com/wa/). Sites are available on a first-come, first-served basis Sept. 16-May 14.