The West's recreation trails are now a multi-use nightmare year around
The West's trails were wilder, friendlier, and more travelable before the multi-use melee began ... now, it's disorganized circus.
Posts on The Fleeting West are written and posted quickly and are often edited for clarity and quality later. For the best experience, see the copy on the website for the most up-to-date version.
Recreation and backcountry access routes in the West were once dominated by a couple modes of transit in the summer, and a different subset in winter. The users were pretty well organized by default of fewer users and options, and norms arose around these modes of transit for decades. Then, it all flipped.
In recent years, the modes of transit have increased in number, the users have increased in number, and any intention for positive integration with existing norms has disappeared entirely1.
The effect is a mishmash of incompatible modes of travel, many of which didn’t exist prior to about 10 years ago, and you have a mishmash of people who never bothered to learn the ways of the local people in doing things, or the guidelines meant to facilitate the situations you will encounter in these spaces.
Let’s pack together multiple modes of transit that aren’t compatible with each other …
The current state of recreational trails in the West is nothing shy of a total shitshow. You have people walking trails with mountain bikes, electric bikes, trail runners, horses, and heck, even “dirt boards” in the warmer months. Some are acoustically isolated from their environment with headphones blaring, and some have never hiked a trail before and don’t know what to do when someone approaches from behind. Others don’t know to signal they’re approaching from behind, because all they did was buy the latest widget and decided to go use it — no learning needed — just push on through and people will get out of your way.
In winter, you have trail skiers, snowshoers, snow bikes, snowshoers with dogs, snow bikers with dogs, resort skiers with heavy plastic setups, and then the occasional demented tourist post-holing in snow in running shoes and jeans2. Now, they might be carrying a Bluetooth speaker, forcing you and everything around them to hear their music (and really, at this point, why even be here?).
If it’s not clear from those lists of seasonal user modes of transit; Very few of these things are compatible with each other.
They are especially not compatible with each other when you cross all these new uses with the short time period by which they all got introduced, along with most of the users not having any sense of the norms the forerunners established; And the fact that most of the new users disregarded every opportunity to learn the regulations that arose from those norms.
The end result is an abomination of poor manners, trail conflict, frustrated users, and and no way to ingrain norms.
I keep using the term “norm”, because it’s how all human societies establish behavior patterns around a thing, a place, a set of actions, and these are established with some ethic at the core.
Norms take time to establish, they are often established invisibly and unknowingly by groups of people with an extended history in a place or space. There is no established council for setting norms, no governance around it, it’s just a way of operating that starts to make more and more sense with time and practice.
It didn’t used to be this way, it worked really well
What we have in the West is a condition where norms were established, and they worked remarkably well prior to mass exposure and mass visitation of these places. Trails in winter belonged to the skiers who broke trail, and skiers yielded to whomever needed right away, whether coming down or going up. There were no snowbikes who both needed the skiers to compact the snow, and who also destroyed the skiers trails. And trails in summer were hiked and ridden by horse, and hikers knew how to be courteous to riders and their animals.
In comes the outdoor technological explosion, the novice invasion, and the popularization of the great outdoors as something “new” to do and consume. The norms are off the rails, the locals who invented these spaces for recreation have now been moved aside and trampled by a very typical urban tourist mentality.
That mentality being that if they’re there, it must be there for them to use in any way they see fit. And these places must be for doing novel things that are fun, and not arduous or requiring skill, acculturation, or practice to join in on. Go get it, and get it all for some likes on social media.
In winter, many of the deeply rooted people of the West utilized our environment in ways that were previously regarded by dainty urban folk as laborious, not fun, and something that only the “unwashed” would do. And they were kind of right — many of us didn’t have any understanding of the groomed, hoity-toity urban Neverland experience, and just did what we grew up doing, exploring our local areas by whatever means we had. Due to the interior West’s extremely dry and powdery snow, we typically either needed to stay indoors in the Winter, or we needed to find a way to float over the top of the snow.
The backcountry of Colorado and our neighboring states were all entirely traveled by either old cross country ski methods and equipment, or they were left entirely alone. At the point where snowmobiles started to become more common, that certainly arrived on the scene at one point, too, which was largely curbed by the installation of Wilderness Act-controlled areas where motorized vehicles of any kind, including bicycles, are prohibited.
Until snowshoes hit mass market sometime in the late ‘90s, the only ways to get around our mountain areas was by paved road, cross country skis, and perhaps at a point, snowmobiles for some users.
Everything we’re seeing today is a new arrival, and you’ll notice we’ve gone from two modes of travel, to adding snow bikes, snowshoes, foot-travel, all of which create intensively different surfaces than the prior methods did, and are all entirely incompatible with the historically established norms.
In the winter, skiers once left two side-by-side tracks that allowed for a highly efficient experience for those following behind the person who “broke trail.” It was an ideal situation - one use, one set of norms, everybody has almost inherent alignment thanks to all of their needs being the same, including their support network in the event of a gear failure resulting in a need for assistance.
The users and modes that made this space are the ones getting wedged out
Now, snowshoers immediately trample the ski track, then a snow biker comes along and runs a wiggly trench down the track, then more snowshoers come along with dogs that pockmark the trail (causing grip for skiers to disappear and become highly unpredictable), and then the tennis shoe hiker comes along and drops three foot deep holes the shape of their foot and leg down the trail, until they either break something in their legs, or get too exhausted and turn around. And, hell, then you get the one in a hundred skier who is skiing with their dogs, pocking the trail as they leave it behind, too. Too many brushes for one canvas …
Sure, people are going to be people, they’re going to invent new things, and not everyone wants to go ski on fresh snow, or agree upon an optimal method for transit in these spaces. We definitely don’t want to listen to and try to follow the crazy locals who have been skiing these trails since they were young children … that’s just not in the cards.
So we have to look at the change in multi-use spaces for what they now are. These trails no longer belong to the local people who curated them from invisible lines on the ground, and have become something recognizable and approachable to a new wave of people. These multi-use spaces are now a commodity that is expected to be shared with anyone who arrives, and by any means they wish to travel3.
Well, except motor vehicles, of course - It’s far more noble to drive your city car to a trailhead parking lot, turn it off, then snowshoe the next couple miles to get your nature virtue feels in for the week (Smell the sarcasm?).
We have yet another situation where the local people of the West have been moved aside to give way to a circus-like scenario where anyone with a buck and some social media inspiration can come and make a mockery of these spaces the local people carved out, established norms for, and then opened up to the whole world (pretty much anyone with an internet connection, influencer inspiration, and a car to get there.)
The new modes aren’t even fun, they’re insanely inefficient, and they’re expensive
These areas are now more dominated by modes of transit that don’t require any skill to participate in. There is nothing that makes sense about a bicycle with a 3-5 inch wide tire on interior Western snowpacks that will allow a person to sink up to their belly when not on a compacted trail4.
Ironically, these users are never able to ride fresh snow that skiers and snowshoers didn’t compact beforehand, anyway, and so they ALWAYS find a ski trail and ride on it due to there being just enough compaction to ride on for at least a little while.
The irony there is pretty glaring … your mode of transportation requires another mode to make possible, you follow those people, and your mode fully bulldozes and ruins their experience and the track they made … this is the embodiment of the logic and behaviors that we’re facing on public lands in the West today. And it’s ludicrous.
The scene evolved, but not in a positive way
In the end, this is a wicked problem in the purest sense — it’s complex, there are policy dimensions, social dimensions, all existing norms have been diluted and shoved aside, and there’s no reasonable way to set it straight. The scene just started evolving on its own and is now entirely off the rails, all of which is amplified by the outdoor industrial complex that has built megacorporations5 out of offering new widgets and tchochkes to go explore Nature™ with6.
From the perspective of a rooted local, the fast and group-think-born changes are an abomination. It’s made spaces we carved out untravelable to … us7. Given that these spaces don’t really belong to us in a sense that we own them with a deed or title, most of us also know that our rights to impose our prior cultural norms on people now here is both an impossible task, and one where even a rightly chosen battle is a lost one.
In the end, we just get displaced because the only solution to this wicked problem are fights that can’t be had in any constructive or organized way. Some might say, this is the evolution of outdoor recreation, but I very strongly view it as the de-evolution of a previously culturally-rooted space and set of practices. It’s an aggressive hijacking of the outdoor recreation space without vision, direction, or alignment with the philosophies that led to the rise of this space in the first place.
What can you do when millions of people suddenly arrive and decide that your home area is ripe for them to dominate and control as their own? It’s the same option every displaced and overrun people have always done … either leave, or start a war and hope you win against greater resources and numbers.
The Fleeting West is written by a rooted Westerner embedded with generations of experience on our lands and how to navigate them respectfully and effectively.
Footnotes and Citations
Novice users aren’t an inherent problem, but in a public space with no acculturation, they’re a force of nature. More about that here …
Anyone wondering why calls for SAR in Colorado and the West have skyrocketed? The answer is pretty obvious. More here:
In addition to land appropriation, these folks drive infrastructure development like nothing I’ve ever seen:
Yet more implications for wildness in the West and the antithetical nature of invasive tourists and their behaivors here:
Here’s how it happened — the well-intentioned, but lacking foresight, group who decided to put all their places online for anyone and everyone to find:
The Lakota have no written language. Maybe there’s a tale similar to your writings, which serve as a testament to the enshittification of our habitat.