New gates across our local trails - another dead canary in the West's tourist mine.
The "resort" mentality is born from country clubs, ski resorts, and other managed spaces ... and the hiking trails of the West are now being managed by the same mentality.
I went for a little walk at a place I've been hiking since I was a kid on a recent weekend and found some recent infrastructure additions. The additions are brought to us by our new community of complainers who seem to believe that every experience outdoors should be just like they had on the ski resort slopes, their canned National Park vacation; And thanks to our new batch of land managers, who are all urban transplants (don't ask me how I know...)
The dominant, in-power vision is apparently to turn every last land opening in the West into a highly managed experience to maximize multiple forms of revenue from this new form of mining for social media likes, identity capital, and nature-virtue feels.
The new infrastructure are steel gates across every trail access point, which happen to be popping up all along the Front Range of Colorado. These gates are opened and closed when there are "adverse conditions", like mud.
Yep, mud.
The new steel gates are great. They lock, they swing across the trail, they keep the bad guys out (you and me). They protect the land museum from the people who aim to harm the land with their feet. They protect the trail infrastructure from damage so it can look pretty for Instagram photos and not look “damaged.”
Anyone else notice how “protection” might be one of the most overused and subliminally rotten propaganda terms of our current time?
It's interesting because this trail network, which I won't name in the spirit of not spreading overuse and misuse, really just started as a worn-in path on some land our county purchased near the edge of town as a moat from encroaching urban consumption. And, lesser known, it was purchased to protect vital water infrastructure where water is pumped through the mountains, across the continental divide to feed the metastasizing urban cancer on the eastern side of Colorado’s mountains where there’s not enough naturally available water to support 2.5 million people, much less the 5 million here today.
A parking area showed up a couple decades ago, then it got some more infrastructure as more people visited, and then more, and now more. Now, on a weekend, you can’t even park within a mile of the ~50-car trailhead due to the hordes of newcomers using it. See the trend?
It's interesting that this type of management seems to be sweeping the West, even in places that don't seem to be experiencing vertical trend-lines in overuse like we're seeing at every single trail on the Front Range of Colorado and every other rapidly urbanizing area throughout the West1.
The organization managing this area is our county government, and they seem to have lots of money for custom gates, signage, and labor to manage the aesthetic. They also seem to be motivated by a very different philosophy than those who established the trails in the first place.
There's an old verbally-shared ethic that you should only use hiking trails when they're dry, so to not damage the trails, and not ride your bike in mud either. Most of us raised from these soils live by that, and have for generations, yet the standing ethic is clearly not enough. The Neverlanders2 never really abide by ethics anyway because they haven’t been here long enough to acculturate3 to them.
Every so often, some yahoo comes along and slogs through miles of muddy trail anyway carrying 10 kg of mud with every step. Then, you get pock-marks, people noticing that the optic isn't great in these high-use areas -- and you hope they only did this because they were caught off-guard during a freak rainstorm. That can happen, though it really should be a rare/freak occurrence.
The addition of gates to block off usage of our local trails is a key indicator of what's changing in these areas, and why. It's an indicator that our land managers now view these spaces as something to be protected from foot traffic, and it's an indicator that the places are no longer spaces that are free to evolve on their own4.
Instead of going for a nice little local hike to get some fresh air, we now have to know whether we're allowed into the land museum or not. We need to know if it's slightly muddy, and if it is, we're likely blocked out completely.
I know why this is happening…
There are fully five times as many users on these trails as there were just ten years ago. Most of the new users don't know the ethic that we're supposed to stay off the trails when it's muddy if we can. As anyone working at any level of local government can tell you; A tourist or invasive-tourist5 on a muddy trail with muddy shoes is a guaranteed vitriolic complaint phone call about the total lack of attention and management of these lands and their experience ... no joke, it’s absolutely real and it’s absolutely insane.
Basically, it appears that all this new recreation infrastructure is part of a grander vision to turn all of these places into highly managed, behavior-curbed areas that prevent you from damaging them, and prevent them from damaging you. That calls into question what we're all doing in these places, and immediately drags these spaces into the urban environment as a form of novel urban infrastructure, like a bowling alley with the gutter rails up.
The new gates are really just an annoying and minor observation in the grander scheme, but I hope it's clear that we're facing a huge cultural paradigm shift when it comes to these outdoor spaces that were carved out and paid for by the locals, and are now being re-imagined by our new colonists.
Is this is the kind of managed experience we Westerners want in our backyards, and does this support or conflict with the image of what the new colonists think they're doing here?6 They all seem to think they’re on some wild adventure, yet every single place they touch seems to turn into a social media post, new taxes, and new infrastructure to make the place feel safer and more familiar. All to help manage their experience so they can look like they’re living the Western life, but with all the accoutrements of their home cities.
I think it's a sign that the resort mentality is bleeding outward from the cancerous urbanized resorts, and nothing in this region will be untouched by demand for more resort-like spaces. Instead of adapting themselves to the place, the newcomers will continue to force the place to adapt to them and erase every last bit of character that lured them here in the first place.
The Fleeting West is written by a rooted Westerner with a lifetime of experience on our local trails, watching as changes turn every last space into a resort-ified museum.
Footnotes and Citations
More about rampant changes to how our land looks and feels with the new wave of land managers, resources to add infrastructure, and demands that the new wave of novice tourists put on pretty much everything they touch …
Acculturation - I use this term frequently because it has a deeper meaning; It means that you’re entirely steeped in the ideas and beliefs of a people, their environment and economy, in such a way that you are embedded in the place and space as a fundamental and inherent part of it. Of course I could write a better definition, but for expediency, let’s go with that for now.
More about this in this prior Fleeting West post…
Invasive tourist is another word I use for transplant or exurban migrant, or whatever word you choose to apply to those moving here against the will of the people already here.
They think they’re doing “adventure,” based on what they were sold. More about that here…
I’ve said before, your home is being gentrified. I often wonder when I can move part time and keep my left turn signal on four months at a time. Pave paradise put up a parking lot.
Look up the saga of Vinod Khosla and Martin’s Beach.