Leave No Trees

Title: Leave No Trees

General Information about Item:

Informant Data:

Scott Bohn is a male Dartmouth student in the class of 2018, from Minnetonka, Minnesota. Scott was born in Mexico, but raised in Minnesota. At Dartmouth, he studies Computer Science and History, and plays club hockey. When he is older, his dream is to live in a cabin in the woods in Minnesota, next to a lake, with a dog. In his freshman summer, he participated in trail crew, a group of trail maintenance people based out of a cabin next to the Moosilauke Ravine Lodge. As a result, he went on many week-long backpacking trips in the outdoors to help repair trails for the Dartmouth Outing Club.

Contextual Data:

Cultural Context: In the outdoors, there is a strict policy of “Leave No Trace”, which is a principle used to leave the natural outdoors the way you found it without altering it so that others can enjoy it as well. Hikers and backpackers in nature are supposed to carry in everything they carry out, and try not to disturb what occurs in nature without human interference.
Social Context: When trail crew was performing trail maintenance and cutting down trees, they would say this joke. Often, trail crews try to preserve the natural beauty surrounding the trail but they may make mistakes sometimes, in which this joke would be said as it is sometimes inevitable.

Item:

“Leave No Trees” was a joke told among the trail crew for when they cut down trees to repair and maintain the trail. It is derivative of another motto, or saying, in the outdoors, “Leave No Trace”, which is a nature conservation policy. It is a pun, as the two sayings sound very similar, and also has the same abbreviation of LNT.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

Relevant portion: [5:45 – 6:15]

Transcript of Associated file:

“I can start with a joke. One of our jokes was kind of a derivative of the Leave No trace policy of outdoorsmen. Um, where, for the benefit of the interview, where you’re not supposed to leave any evidence that you were there, you’re supposed to leave it as it were. But as trail crew, we are kind of a natural disaster as we go through and repair stuff so it turned into Leave No Trees for us. Still the same acronym, but a different connotation.”

Collector’s Comments:

I found this joke hilarious because the Leave No Trace policy is taken very seriously in the outdoors and they creatively edited it to fit their trail crew well.

Collector’s Name: Kyu Kim

Tags/Keywords: Rule, Verbal, Joke, Nature, Preservation

Dartmouth Folklore Archive