Trail Etiquette

If you get out and enjoy public land, hunting, fishing, using trails, or whatever, you’ve probably had an overwhelmingly positive experience. America’s public land legacy really is one of the best things about this country, and against a backdrop of an emerging police state that keeps stolen children in cages, it stands out even more.

Foreign and domestic policy in this country is quickly fitting the dictionary definition of “blowing it,” but somehow public land protections are emerging as a silver lining of bipartisan progress. Now, don’t get me wrong, I would never say that we’re not blowing it. Our climate “policies” are the least funny jokes outside of an Adam Sandler movie. This Administration’s forestry and energy directives seem to be convinced that the year is 1884. And there is an ongoing, and increasing threat of privatization of America’s west.

But at the same time we just permanently reauthorized the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which is our strongest conservation tool. We’ve passed large scale conservation and public access bills nationally. And public lands have emerged as a unifying issue for the left and the right. Hunters and hippies, united at last.

Please don’t booby trap trails should probably be included in any etiquette guide, I guess?

It turns out people love to go outside, and will actually vote about it when you tell them they can’t. This is great. Outside is where we go to recharge our batteries, and have fun, and be alone for a while. Outside is important, and it’s worth going to the mats for.

Of course if everyone is outside, at some point they’re going to have to see one another, even though sometimes the whole point is not to see anyone at all. When this happens, you would be forgiven for thinking that folks who see other folks doing pretty much the same thing with their disposable time would more or less get along. And oh boy would you be wrong.

It turns out that even though spending time on public land is the great common denominator of the American West, we can still spend our entire lives fighting about it. Complaining about trail use and etiquette is now the most popular use of public land in four states*, if you can believe that.

And there are a lot of schools of thought behind how to deal with this. Some merry bands of misanthropes would modestly propose that if we would all simply recreate the exact same way that they recreate, then everything would be fine. Others prefer a rigid, bureaucratic flow chart for each trail user to keep in their pockets and reference when encountering another user.

I would like to propose a third way, wherein we recognize that we are different, and all just try to be nicer to each other**.

The reality as that most anxiety around public land and recreation management is rooted in narcissism. Consider your own behavior. When you’re out on the trails, do you expect that you won’t see anyone else (looking at you, headphones people)? Do you feel like the way you enjoy outside is more pure, more rooted in heritage, or somehow better than another way of enjoying outside? Do you define the best use of a place in terms of your own experiences? Think about that.

I mean, I don’t like seeing people out there either. That’s a big part of going out there. To be alone. To be small. To be shocked from our daily status quo of bustling, and competing with the Joneses, or whatever. But the whole point of wide open spaces is to remind ourselves that not everything is about us. In the era of Strava, and Instagram, and self-righteous letters to the editor, that is easy to lose.

So get out there. Have fun. Try not to be a dickhead. And let’s build a tradition of trail etiquette from there.

*this is a made up fact.

** this may also work in other places, such as when driving, talking to customer service employees, and on the internet