Valerie Naylor is the Rock Queen. At least, that’s what Randy Conner of Contour Trail Design Company calls her. He’s seen her move rocks that weigh more than an excavator.

“I don’t know how she didn’t knock herself and the machine off the side of the hill,” Conner said, recalling a time at Concord Park in Knoxville, Tennessee when Naylor was lead machine operator on a project. “[The rock] was probably eight feet long, four feet across, a foot-and-a-half thick, and she just dragged it down the hill and dropped it straight where it was supposed to go. It’s like she makes up her own physics.”

There are no rocks at Naylor’s latest project, a half-mile of flowing trail in Knoxville’s I.C. King Park. At her job site early this spring, Naylor made quick work of the open hardwood forest, combing through duff with deft strokes of the mini excavator’s thumb. Although Naylor loves the intricacy of a technical build, that’s not why she’s a trailbuilder. The 52-year-old cyclist has been designing, planning, and constructing trails for nearly two decades. No matter the project, be it lift-serve lines in the Swiss Alps or rock sidewalks at Jake’s Rocks in Pennsylvania, Naylor feels it’s enough to know that any trail she creates will bring joy to others.

“Getting [on a bike] and away from the straight lines and the right angles and the built environment, that’s how I destress,” Naylor said. “When you think about how many people a year use the trails that you built and you think about how many years those trails are going to be there, you start to feel pretty good about what you’re doing.”

Born and raised in the New Jersey borough, Hightstown, Naylor was the youngest of four. Living in the shadow of New York City didn’t necessarily lend itself to an outdoorsy childhood. Her family did a little canoeing but never camped. All Naylor knew of the great outdoors she intuited through picking berries in her mother’s garden, observing the world from her perch in the backyard maple tree, or playing at an undeveloped lot near her house.

From an early age, it was obvious to Naylor’s mother Mary that her youngest daughter was endlessly curious, a studiousness that bordered on the serious. She was also stubborn as hell. Once, in middle school, Naylor rode her bike about 14 miles one way to her grandmother’s house on a busy commuter artery and didn’t tell anyone where she was going.

“She could be dreadfully adventuresome with that bike,” Mary said. “Grandma and a friend tried to insist [Valerie] let them drive her home, but she took off.”

Throughout her teenage years, Naylor dabbled in a little bit of everything—basketball, tennis, soccer. She managed stage productions and wrote for the school paper. If you’d asked her then what she wanted to be when she grew up, she might have said truck driver— “I decided I liked to travel.” Truth be told, she had no idea.

So, she kept dabbling after school, eventually moving to Tampa, Florida, and working as a production assistant on commercial photography shoots. But it was here, in a state with no mountains, where Naylor found mountain biking thanks to the Swamp Mountain Bike Club. Florida might not have any hills taller than 350 feet, but Georgia’s Cohutta National Forest and North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest did. Naylor traveled throughout the Southeast riding with the club. Once she’d ridden the mountains of western North Carolina, she couldn’t forget them.

In 2003, Naylor made a trip to Asheville, North Carolina to scope out the city as a place to potentially move. The visit would prove serendipitous on many fronts. Her first stop was a volunteer trail workday, led by veteran trailbuilder Woody Keen. In the span of that one afternoon, Naylor met her future employer (Keen), and the grandson of her future landlord.

“I got my karma points on that workday,” Naylor said