The Lake Mary Trail, which reopened Sept. 29 after being closed for three years, was in large part funded by a $2,500 grant that SOC received from REI, Parry said.

With shovels, rakes and axes, about 12 SOC volunteers helped volunteers from other organizations to rebuild the trail.

"It's manual labor," Parry said.

The Forest Service did most of the work and paid for a big part of it, too, Parry said.

SOC started working with the Forest Service four years ago to help maintain trails because there were so many people calling SOC, asking if they could volunteer, Parry said.

Now SOC doesn't publicize when it's going to do trail maintenance, because the Forest Service can only supervise so many volunteers, Parry said.

"We're actually afraid that we're going to get too many volunteers," she said.

Volunteers do many other things, Parry said, like research and write about important issues, set up tables and pass out literature, bookkeeping for SOC and picking up trash along the two miles of highway that SOC has adopted in Big Cottonwood Canyon.

In fact, SOC is run by volunteers, Dick said. It only has a staff of two. Up until about five years ago, it was a loosely held together volunteer organization, he said.

They decided to make the change to a more organized group so they could accomplish more, Dick said. Now members pay dues: $15 for students, $35 for regular members and $50 for a family. SOC is run from donations and the membership dues.

"It took awhile for us to figure out what we could do except run around in circles and go AHHH!" Dick, who helped start SOC over 30 years ago, said.

But they did things in the early years, too.

Save Our Canyons was formed in 1972 to stop the Forest Service from allowing Snowbird to build its resort, Dick said.

They saw Snowbird as part of the "urbanization" of the canyons, and the resort was also going in a favorite backcountry ski spot, he said.

"We're all skiers," Dick said. "We were never anti-skiing or anything like that. We just didn't like the direction things were going."

As part of its goal to keep urbanization out of the Wasatch Mountains, SOC has been active in the forming of wilderness areas.

It had a lead role in forming the Lone Peak Wilderness Area in the '70s and also helped form other wilderness areas, including the Twin Peaks, Olympus, Timpanogos and Nebo wilderness areas, said Kelner.

SOC is now trying to get about 30,000 more acres of Utah designated as wilderness area. Some of the acres were originally cut out of other wilderness area proposals. The other areas are already being treated like wilderness area, so they might as well be classified that way, Dick said.

Wilderness area cannot have any wheeled vehicles, roads or airplanes, he said.

"So basically, it's keep it wild," Dick said.