I was on Welsh Way once, about four autumns ago, with this guy from Rome who likes nothing better than to climb Pittsburgh's hills, and I found the street so steep I wondered if balls ever stopped rolling there.

I never thought to ask about tires.

Members of the South Side Slopes Neighborhood Association filled me in. They're preparing for one of the sweatier fundraisers in town, the ninth annual StepTrek on Oct. 4. (The even-sweatier Fineview Step-A-Thon Challenge will be held that same morning, just two river crossings away.)

Over a glass of wine, some chicken and pasta in Bev Boggio's Pius Street living room, she and her tireless neighbors were filling me in about the now-tireless city steps on Welsh Way -- and also outlining my task as honorary chair of this year's StepTrek.

My job, unlike their preparation for the event, is simple: Say a few words and make sure I don't fall down the stairs.

Their task is to spiff up a neighborhood for hundreds of walkers, and as they told me their stories of StepTreks past, it became clear that takes more than a quick dusting.

Had I been on Welsh Way only a couple of years before my walk in October 2005, I wouldn't even have been able to find the city steps. They were overgrown with Japanese knotweed, which in turn hid several decades worth of dumped tires.

But you know how you never really clean up your house until you know company (or the G-20) is coming? It's the same with neighborhood events, which is why the StepTrek course rotates each year. Joe Balaban, who has lived on the Slopes since 1992, included Welsh Way in 2003 precisely because he wanted the city to begin including these steps in its regular maintenance. He put it on the course map and a couple of weeks before the Trek he asked Ms. Boggio to take a look.

When she saw the urban forest had essentially swallowed Welsh's steps, handrails and all, "I went into a panic mode," she recalled.

She grew up a country girl in Ohioville, Beaver County, near the West Virginia and Ohio borders, but has been committed to this city's slanty side since she moved to the Slopes at the end of 1990. She never has worried much about getting her hands dirty.

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Brian O'Neill's book, "The Paris of Appalachia: Pittsburgh in the Twenty-first Century," is available in the PG store.

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A call went out on a Saturday night and she, Mr. Balaban, Elvio Viana, Matt and Will Schaefer, Claudia Hart and Dennis Berry swarmed in with a Weedwacker and work gloves the next morning and bounced 82 tires down those steps. It took only three hours, and Guy Costa, then head of the city's Department of Public Works, answered the call to haul the debris away. The steps have been a neighborhood asset since.

Thus does a city progress: citizens not waiting for the government to do something; citizens doing something and then calling a strapped city only to fill in the blanks.

The city's 712 sets of outdoor staircases aren't important to everyone, but they're essential to some. Peggy Sullivan, who has lived on Pius for 11 years, says she can walk up to her home from the boisterousness of Carson Street and, in about 10 minutes, be in her quiet haven above the bedlam.

Step events are a bit like Tom Sawyer's trick of getting his friends to whitewash his fence. The ideal Sunday for many is horizontal, not vertical, yet hundreds attend these moving celebrations of Pittsburgh's neighborhoods and vistas each year. StepTrek is $15 the day of the event and the five-mile Fineview event -- with more runners than walkers -- is $18. Better advance rates and more information can be found for the former by going to www.StepTrek.org or calling 412-488-0486.For Fineview, go to www.fineviewpittsburgh.com or call 412-231-0330.

You could, of course, walk any of Pittsburgh's 45,000 outdoor steps for nothing any day, but occasionally it's nice to get a souvenir T-shirt and be among people who love this quirky city as much as you do.