Wildland Road Closures Spreading Across the American West
Roads in the places most people call "the middle of nowhere" are closing at a breakneck pace -- all thanks to exposure online, outdoor fads, and a new wave of land users and managers.
There are a few kinds of people in this world – those who are centered in the human domain, those who do best at the perimeter of the human domain, and those who are centered outside the human domestic spaces of cities and fencelines. Most of my life has been spent mentally elsewhere, outside of the urbanized spaces where people scrape the land and remake a familiar, safe, and coddling human jungle.
Because of that, and how I spend all of my free time outside of my indentured servitude (my job), I understand the spaces outside the domesticated realms best – the places that urbanites call, “the middle of nowhere.” In what will become a main pillar of content on this site, there is change coming to the places that outsiders call “nowhere” and say “there’s nothing out there.” The change is the domestication of everything, even places that were once remote, to make them safe and accessible.
Right now, you hear a lot of chatter about people getting into this new “overlanding” sport. In America, there was probably a time when overlanding may have been possible — Overlanding is a vehicle-supported exploratory activity that got its namesake in Australia, and has caught on like wildfire in the U.S.
Hilariously, in Australia, there is enough land (more than we have here) and few enough people (a tenth as many) and resources (there’s even less potable water than in the U.S.), that they can do this completely differently than we can here. Anymore, there are barely a couple places in the continental U.S. that you can reach in a vehicle without a gas station and lodging being within a few hour drive. In Australia and Africa, overlanding is about self-supported travel for weeks in spaces where there is no resort-like rescue services, no gas stations, water stations, or other infrastructure.
So, the rise of overlanding in the USA is a bit of a misnomer – we took the word, but disregarded the meaning of the word. In the U.S., overlanding is a novice-user coopt of the word, and what most people are doing is simply car camping.
The rise of this new language around vehicle supported forms of travel appears to be entirely driven by social media posts, new apps that make location discovery and filtering easier, and a whole new market of goods where someone can nickel and dime themselves to financial death with an endless array of knickknacks that cost anywhere from hundreds to many thousands of dollars — all to make their experience outdoors novel, distracted, Instagrammable, and more like what they saw on social media1.
In this new iteration of car camping, the old saying, “the more you know, the less you need” is totally off the table and forgotten.
The funny part? Many of us rooted in the West are from families that have been exploring open spaces and camping out of our vehicles since before our vehicles had motors, and long before it was labeled a sport or had any industry behind it. Not to mention the fact that all of these roads and knowledge of them came from mining in the region, since all of the roads used for “recreation” today were for natural resource exploration in the past (i.e., mining - for uranium, metals, woods, fuels, etc., and not ‘likes’.)
The integration of social media with the overlanding fad is the crux of this post. The imagery of American overlanding is staged almost solely with the American West as its backdrop2. We have novice users with hundred-thousand-dollar vehicles, tens of thousands of dollars of new equipment strapped to special racks on the outside of the vehicle, and huge, drag-inducing tent assemblies put on the rooftops of vehicles. And what this all appears to be for are social media pages, novel identity curation (adventurer sheek), and machismo / machisma – whether YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, or whatever will replace these mostly idiotic platforms.
The explosion of the overlanding trend, intersected with social media and the rise of apps intended to provide location recommendations and information without any mapping or actual exploration to find special places, has opened an entirely new era for public lands.
That era is effectively the exposure of places that were once unknown to the masses, invisible to anyone without an app, and once took years and generations to get to know. Now, novice users with a brand new Ferd Donkey SUV with the Inexperienced Ape Package fresh off the lot, and the user, fresh out of Chicago, Illinois, can go find a place that has no infrastructure on it and camp, without any training, skills, or ability to find these places on their own, without putting any personal investment, skin in the game, or acculturating to any of the ethics of use of public lands. Just an app on their phone and some gear they just bought at REI, and photos from the app to help them know the place is worth going to.
What’s the problem? Well, let’s get into that; The problem is that public lands across the West are now a landing pad for anyone inspired by what they’ve seen on social media from anywhere in the country, and with any skill level - which appears to be uniformly “novice” - to come to the West and try their hand at overlanding and other varieties of being outdoorsy (an urbanite word for wearing special clothes and being outside of domestic walls, away from cities).
There’s no longer an ethic that is formed and forced by the land to shape someone to be able to explore places without leaving a trace, and to center their lives on investing and putting skin in the game to be able to go wander and explore open land as a pastime. It’s now just … anyone with a car, an GPS-enabled phone, and a GPS app to walk you through how to get there. And then …
In-comes land-use regulations…
After spending my entire weekend and vacation-time life roaming open public lands, I recognize those tendencies and skills are inherent to me, and that I am complacent and unaware of how different my skills are to that of an acculturated city-dweller. I also realize that I have been following remote pathways on public land my entire life, and inherently leave some level of trace by default of moving across the land. But another thing I know is in how the lands and spaces change as more people come into them – and what happens when mainstream America starts coming into a place.
I grew up in the shadow of Rocky Mountain National Park – of which I have spent very little to no time. RMNP now has a reservation system, where you reserve weeks or months in advance, your date and time to be there – like a restaurant in New York City or San Francisco. You drive in on a paved highway, you pull into a kitschy parking lot with museum info signs and a bathroom, and you walk an established and engineered path to some viewpoint. You turn around, and go back, with clear regulations in place about what you can and can’t do – and with so many eyes watching, you’ll be turned in and ticketed for violating any of them.
Rocky Mountain National Park isn’t wild nature – it’s a museum.
Canyonlands National Park near Moab, UT, was once considered “remote” – it has 100+ mile dirt roads that were once unmaintained, and required some skill to get through. Now, these roads are so frequently trafficked with tour companies, bicycle sag wagons, and wannabe overlanders, they’re untravelable to anyone with any level of discernment in what adventure really means. Broken down and unprepared in any of these parks, and you’ll encounter someone within minutes who will lend a tool, tow, or notify the park rangers to come and rescue you – just like the ski patrol at a resort.
Canyonlands isn’t wild anymore either – it’s a museum hybridized with a theme park.
I’ve watched these changes happen over the course of my life, and my parents watched the same kinds of changes over their lives. These places have become taxidermied versions of what they once were. As more and more people frequent them, the land management agencies add more infrastructure to “protect” them. Then, they add more and more to the numbers of people who show up, thereby fundamentally altering the character of these places.
Recoveries and rescues of people and vehicles lead to changes to the land to protect the people – and to protect the land. People comment to the land agencies and bring their worldviews into the mix – and now you need pavement on the tundra, wheelchair accessibility to the lakes, and reservation systems to keep all the tourists happy. Look at some photos from Arches National Park at its inception, when Edward Abbey was mad about what was happening, and look at it now … you’ll see what I mean.
These changes are late-stage impacts of places making it onto “the map” – the one where the whole of America becomes aware of its existence and all 360,000,000+ Americans now want to go see for themselves – even if they’ve seen professional photographs and videos of it a million times.
The late stage that leads to the museumification of these places has precursor stages, which is what this post is about.
America’s national land agencies shape their infrastructure differently
In the spaces outside National Parks in the West, you typically have private property, State- or County-owned lands; And National Forest, and BLM lands. The Federal national land agencies are as different as Bloomingdale’s, Target, and Sam’s Club – they’re that different. In that metaphor, Bloomingdale’s is the National Park Service (NPS). And those lands are where you get a guide, a concierge on where to go, and with a small fee, even get a turnkey guide to the latest and greatest places to go in today’s hottest outdoorsy fashions.
In NPS lands, there aren’t really any unmaintained roads – even in the U.S.’s last National Park with some chance of encountering an unmaintained route, you’re still in a highly managed place. In that park, you have to carry a chem toilet (something to poop in so you can carry it out), you can’t camp outside of designated sites, and you’ll probably be visited by a park ranger to make sure you’re not an outlaw who hasn’t paid the Park’s fees, or walking outside the perimeter of the camp site.
On the other extreme, the only places that still retain some wild character don’t have road graders coming through and clearing out the scary bumps and rocks in the roads. They don’t really have manufactured trails, as in National Parks, and they don’t have a lot of signage. Why? Because there isn't a need, because there aren’t enough people going there, and those going there are going in self-supported, and ready to handle their own recovery if something goes wrong3.
It might sound like a stereotype, but if you look at public land users prior to about the 1990s, the only people wily enough to go a few hundred miles on unimproved roads away from gas stations, people, and infrastructure, were really getting out there – they’re extremely different from today’s public lands users.
There was real risk before the parkification of everything and the resourcing of the land agencies to grade roads, provide signage, trails, and search and rescue. If you broke your vehicle’s suspension, axles, or engine in 1975 in the back-roads of Utah, you had no cell phone, no satellite messenger, and no car computer reader to tell you what was wrong, and your chances of seeing a person were probably one in every ten days … you were likely to suffer or die for being out too far without intensive self-rescue, vehicle repair, and outdoor skills and equipment.
But there are still remote roads, trails, and areas – they’re just disappearing at an alarming rate.
The American West’s disappearing roads
I have this crash camp that I use as a place to stop after a long drive on my way to or out of the desert. It’s great, because it’s just far enough off the beaten path where people won’t stumble on it, and it requires a little bit of know-how to get there. I’ve been going to this spot occasionally for the better part of my life. The area didn’t have a name on any recreation maps, no signage to get there or along the way, and has an extraordinary view.
Unfortunately, I can’t take credit for using my navigation skills to find this place – my parents took me there. The place is basically one of the tree roots of my life – it’s a place I’ve always known, and a place I can always get to thanks to the traditional knowledge handed down to me.
I went to this place a couple weeks ago after more than a year of not visiting. What I found hit me like a line-drive baseball straight to the chest.
The BLM had come in, graded the road, scraped the desert to put in a parking area, added signage to help the common tourist to find it, used surrounding trees to barricade the old road to the end, and used a small grading machine to cut a level, six-foot wide walking trail to the cliff-edge where I used to put my tent or truck. They even spent time gathering rocks from the desert to line the sidewalk-like path to make sure the new visitors would know where to walk, since the only way to know where to walk is with a lined, sidewalk-like path … (sarcasm)
The recent history of this place has been interesting — It hasn’t been all wilderness and desert solitaire forever. In recent years, signs of the place being found by the masses has been on a sharp uptick.
In recent years, the old-growth pinion pine trees have started having their limbs lopped off to make camp fires. Camp fire rings have shown up, as more people have decided to camp in the place. I never made a camp fire there, but I never do since I’m covered in incredible, modern, outdoor gear made of wondrous materials, rather than living off a horse and out of a wool bed roll that only kinda works. Signs of ‘discovery’ have been mounting for a long time, and clearly came to a breaking point, causing the BLM to react and parkify it.
When I got home, I started doing some research – what happened to this spot? Why was a parking area, graded roads, signs, and a space to take an Instagram photo better than an old road that meandered across the land, and just stopped at the cliff edge?
Well, I figured out why.
YouTube started to populate with videos about this place. All in the last two to five years. Instagram started to get this place geotagged4 as a location to go see, and it started circulating in the 'overlanding' pages on forums. And, best of all, it turns out there’s a 4x4 tour guide company out of Moab that recently started up and started driving people out there to see it – in carloads of 3-10 vehicles full, multiple times per day, everyday.
The place has now been shared, publicized, and coveted for its character and imagery.
An even deeper dive reveals why I’m seeing this pattern all over the areas around places like Moab … The area field office is directed by what appears to be an eastern-raised transplant out of Chicago, Illinois. If there’s one thing we Westerners know about people out of the eastern U.S.A., it’s that they love their infrastructure. They love quaint signage, that kitschy “Park” feel, and to remake everything around them into something familiar. And, they definitely don’t want to feel like they’re out too far and away from help and comfort …
Domestication of the last open spaces
The story above is about only one little road that has been taken by over-publication and overuse. I have notes and maps showing countless others. Roads across the American West are being closed and “reclaimed” by the land management agencies due to multiple factors that are being driven by one thing: Sudden overuse and misuse.
I know, it’s odd to hear that you can overuse or misuse a dirt patch on a cliff edge, or a spot of dirt among pine trees in a mountain valley. But it’s why we’re seeing these changes – the overuse and misuse is thanks to masses of people finding these locations and applying their own intuition to how to use non-domesticated lands.
Some people go West and think there’s no poop on the ground because nature takes care of it … so they poop on the ground (the “John Denver Dump” as it’s called). Some people think you can have a campfire at the base of a tree to shield it from rain … and they burn the forest down. Some people think that since a road was difficult for them to travel that nobody but them can get to that spot, so they leave their garbage wherever it falls … even though it’s a road and a sign that people travel there frequently.
Then, there are others, who simply drive to a remote spot, park their vehicle, sleep in the back or a small ground tent, don’t have a camp fire, then neaten the place up as they leave, to leave no trace. But this method takes a lifetime to arrive at for some reason — and makes others mistakenly believe that a place is untouched — causing them to leave their mark.
In future posts, I’ll talk about other road areas that are being shut down in-mass. But this one is particularly interesting, because it’s been changed entirely thanks to exposure on the internet, new users, and the BLM’s interest in grading every road in the desert to make sure that every CUV can get to a place without any preparation, effort, or know-how.
Remote roads across the West are disappearing at an alarming rate. The irony is that all of those coming to visit are inspired by those who press out to remote areas at their own risk, yet when they arrive, they expect the space to be made safe for them to move about. It’s a direct indicator that in front of every adventurous tourist is a road grader and signage, and behind them, a park ranger or bystander to save their life.
Next time you’re out and about, ask yourself if the place you’re in is framed for your enjoyment and safety. If it is, it’s probably more of a domesticated space intended to curate an experience out of what was once truly wild5. The museumification of the American West’s wild spaces is spreading like wildfire, silently, and at the expense of the local people who have been traveling and exploring these places for generations. And it is all being driven by novice users armed with gear, equipment, and location information they had no hand in innovating – they’re consumers, here to grab imagery to construct their false identities online — even if it leaves a wake of destruction behind.
The Fleeting West is written by a rooted Westerner with a lifetime of experience wandering public lands, and deep concern over the museumification of places sacred to fellow, kindred locals.
Footnotes and Citations
We know where the knicknackification is coming from:
Here’s a little about how the West is being used as a staged backdrop:
SAR (search and rescue) agencies in the American West are being hammered right now, thanks to the social media-inspired influxes of urbanites…
Here’s a bit more about why geotagging and social media are responsible for this closure:
Wilderness is a Federal policy, wildness is the character of a place …