He picks up a Pulaski axe and takes a whack at the ground. The dirt is soggy from the morning rain, making it easier to clear the duff from the hillside.
After several more swings, Chic Burge has cleared a good 5 feet of groundcover, the first step in digging a new trail in the McKenzie Conservation area, a 421-acre stretch of protected land that lies a mile from the Idaho border in Newman Lake, Wash.
Chic is one of 13 volunteers to join the Saturday morning trail-building effort organized by the Spokane Mountaineers. A longtime volunteer and member of the conservation group, Chic has spent much of his life hiking, building and preserving the region’s trails. It’s hard work, especially in the rain and especially at 72. But Chic doesn’t view it as work.
“It’s about conservation,” he says. “It’s a real big issue. None of our managing agencies have the resources to do this stuff. If it wasn’t for volunteers none of this will get done. So why not, and it’s exercise.”
But anybody who knows Chic will tell you, it’s about more than conservation and exercise. Getting out, building trails and hiking them, too, is what makes Chic tick.
He lives and breathes the outdoors. He hikes, bikes, kayaks, climbs mountains and skis, still with the same vigor and passion that has fueled him all his life. And he has devoted years getting others to do the same by organizing events that get people outside and moving.
“My firm belief is if you stop moving, you stop moving,” he says. “If you sit down too long you become a mushroom, and you can’t live as a mushroom.”
Chic was bitten by the outdoors bug early in life.
He was just a toddler when he was introduced to hiking. There was always much to see and learn. As he got older, his interest only deepened.
“It’s just a thrill to be out in the woods, to be calm and quiet,” he says.
Around the same time, he learned to downhill ski. It wasn’t the kind of bunny hill lesson most youngsters get. Chic’s uncle took him to the top of Mt. Spokane and then let him fly down the mountainside. He was 5.
“I shouldn’t have been there,” Chic says, with a laugh. “But you learn fast that way.”
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When he was 9 years old, his uncle took him cross country skiing at St. Regis Lakes and gave him his first camera, both of which would serve him well throughout his life.
Chic got into mountain climbing, too, but an accident on Chimney Rock slowed him down.
“I got up about 15 feet, looked at the crack and looked at the protection, and when I grabbed my piece off I went,” says Chic, who was in his 40s at the time.
He bounced down the mountain, and right over his belayer’s head. He was out of work for two years. It would be three years before he could ride a bike and four years before he could hike again. He didn’t hang up his ropes, though.
“Oh, I still climb. I just don’t climb at the level I was,” he says. “I was doing hardcore stuff and that wasn’t wise.”
Chic does his own thing his own way. He always has.
Growing up in a privileged household, he could have gone into the family’s restaurant equipment business and secured a more-than-comfortable lifestyle. But that wasn’t Chic.
Getting out refreshes the brain. It soothes the soul.
After his parents died from health complications, the 16-year-old Charles Jan McClure Burge had to make some quick but important decisions. Among them was changing his name.
“I went by my middle name Jan,” he says. “I got teased a lot. Chuck doesn’t work for obvious reasons in grade school, so Chic. Drop the k.”
He became his own legal guardian, graduated high school and set off to find himself.
Chic’s always had a bit of wanderlust. “A nomad, a gypsy … I’ve been called that many times,” he says.
He gravitated to anything outdoors and along the way took on a variety of professions that interested him at the time, including a band manager and owner of a hydroponic herb business. He would eventually land at the Camera Corral in downtown Coeur d’Alene, where he worked for 21 years before retiring. It’s where he combined his love of hiking with his enthusiasm for photography.
He’d organize Photo Fun Days events designed to help photographers discover new places and photo techniques. All sorts of people turned out for those weekend hikes, Chic says.
“It got a lot of people in the area out and some are still out there doing photography.”
While Chic enjoys taking people along with him on his adventures, he often ends up on his own.
“At least 85 percent of hiking, kayaking, skiing and biking I’ve done by myself,” he says. “If I’m walking around, and it’s 1,000 feet up and no trail, well you’re not going to get a girlfriend to go up there.”
Most of his hikes are local ones. But he’s hiked the American Selkirks and Cabinet Mountain Wildernesses and even backpacked through Patagonia.
He enjoys wandering off the trail, photographing things that catch his eye. He’s first to admit nature easily distracts him, which can turn a short hike into a long one. But he eventually makes his way back.
“I’ve never been lost,” he says. “But I’ve been misplaced.”
In the mid-80s, Chic heard about the Spokane Mountaineers, the organization devoted to the conservation and enjoyment of the outdoors. It sounded like the perfect fit for Chic, so he became a member. He quickly got involved in ruffling his conservation sensibilities.
During the Spokane Mountaineer’s Wednesday night hikes, Chic tries to get to the trailhead first to clean up trash in the parking lot and around the trailhead.
“Somebody has to,” he says. “I’m there, so I do it. Besides, it leaves the hiking group … with a clean path.”
The rain doesn’t let up as the volunteers continue building the one-mile trail section that will connect to the McKenzie trail system.
Conditions worsen, and Lynn calls it.
“We constructed a good piece of trail,” Lynn says. “I figure we put in over 400 feet of new trail and roughed in or brushed out another couple hundred feet.”
They’ll be back to finish the work another time. Chic is satisfied with what they’ve accomplished. He not only completed his two 10-foot sections, but he took on a challenging stretch others didn’t want to touch. Working through a sore back, he spent an hour breaking up two downed rotted trees with his axe and digging a ditch beneath the 20 feet of log to allow water to drain off the trail.
“The day before, I skied and crashed,” he says. “My back was out of adjustment, but swinging a Pulaski soon put it back in place.”
That’s Chic. Little slows him down.
“What’s the song?” He says, recalling a line from Neil Young’s “My My Hey Hey.”
“I’d rather burn out than fade away.” N
By Kristina Lyman
Photography By Joel Riner & Chic Burge
As Featured In: 2018 Summer/Fall CDA Edition
