Hiking Needs New Rules

Nestled among the Rocky Mountains, in a yawning stretch of sagebrush, granite rocks, and flowing hills near Gunnison, Colorado, is the Hartman Rocks Recreation Area, one of the first spots to clear of snow in spring. Which means that it is one of the first spots to give cooped-up humans a place to stretch their legs and fill their lungs—to ride their bikes.

Unfortunately for the Gunnison sage grouse, the seasonal rhythms that send cyclists outside coincide with the rhythms that make the birds start fanning and strutting like little brown peacocks, in a bid to reproduce. Back in the early 2000s, they were stuck flaunting their strange mating dance amid Hartman Rocks’ ever-more-popular trail system. The birds did not love loud noises and two-legged creatures zooming by on wheels. Stress made them mate less and abandon their leks, one more straw on a dwindling population’s back.

And so the Bureau of Land Management decided to limit spring disturbances such as motor and mountain biking. To balance the needs of bikers and birds, the agency posted signs telling riders to stay out of one portion of the trails—at least from March 15 to May 15.

As far as human activities go, outdoor recreation has seemed relatively benign in its impacts compared with building a subdivision, oil-and-gas field, or shopping center. But researchers are beginning to understand that it’s causing distress to wildlife all over the country. The signs ordering bikers to stay out of Hartman Rocks were an early example of an uncomfortable realization: Our fun and the future of wildlife do not always align.

Today, in the West alone, where some of the fastest-growing states contain some of the largest tracts of federal public land, bighorn sheep burn calories avoiding backcountry skiers, elk have a harder time raising their calves around cyclists and hikers, and grizzly bears appear to miss important meals because of lookie-loos. These problems exist precisely because the ways we connect with the planet—hiking, biking, trail running, skiing, climbing—put us in such close proximity to other animals, in some of the few spaces they now have left to roam.

Being outside benefits us and benefits the outdoors: Love the mountains, and you’re more likely to support biodiversity conservation and other pro-environmental efforts. But the wildlife we’ve pushed into nature’s corners is starting to bear the brunt of all that love. Recreation-without-consequences is coming apart at the seams.

“If we can really be smart about it, I think we can continue to enjoy the wildlife that we do,” says David Wiens, the executive director of the International Mountain Bicycling Association, which has worked on hundreds of trail-building projects across the globe. Being smart, he told me, requires restricting ourselves in certain places during certain parts of the year, where and when the well-being of wildlife depends on it. That would mean accepting new norms for even the lightest uses of this country’s more wild spaces—and at the same time recognizing just how many places we can still visit.

I’ve spent more than a decade as a journalist encouraging, cajoling, and even demanding that people just go outside. I follow my own advice: Someone asked me after a recent backpacking trip how many nights my young daughter has slept in a tent. I realized the answer was roughly a year, or about a seventh of her life. Camping, hiking, hunting, fishing, and otherwise existing outside of cities and towns can be sources of solace, peace, and connection to our place on Earth. We want her to be able to identify an elk track as easily as she can identify Frozen’s Elsa, because elk are a part of her world, one we want her to understand, to love, to eventually protect.

This idea is fundamental to the conception of natural spaces in the United States. More than a century ago, after settlers had run roughshod over the nation’s forests, grasslands, and prairies, environmentalists began arguing that the country needed a constituency for the outdoors. After national leaders began carving spaces for wildlife, nature’s new constituents flocked outside, and by using these places learned to love and protect them. Over time, the tracts of land managed by federal agencies became massive playgrounds, used all the more during the coronavirus pandemic. BLM land clocked 81 million visits in 2022—a jump of 10 million from just three years before, and a 40 percent increase over 2012. Visits to national forests and wilderness areas, too, increased by 18 million from 2019 to 2020.

Not every glimpse of an elk or grizzly bear in every location is disrupting the creature’s natural rhythms. Take lynx. Studies in some of the most ski-heavy areas of Colorado show that as long as skiers stay on predictable trails in relatively open areas, they don’t bother the wildcats all that much, John Squires, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula, Montana, told me.

Contrast that with grizzly bears who scarf ants as readily as they take down elk calves. Some bears in Wyoming and Montana flock to high talus slopes to munch on high-calorie moths in the summer. The moths can provide up to a third of the calories a bear needs to build fat for winter. But if people hike up near those sites, as quiet as they may be, bears often leave, Frank van Manen, the leader of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, told me. He doesn’t yet know the toll those moves take, but every day spent avoiding humans is another day not preparing for winter.

Most of these brushes, of people spooking bighorn sheep, elk, or deer, fall into the grizzly-bear category: Almost 60 percent of wildlife interactions with outdoor recreation are negative, according to a 2016 review of 274 scientific papers. Although the review authors acknowledged the research is limited, that finding would mean that after more than half of species-recreationist interactions, animals become more vigilant, move somewhere else, or stop eating, which over time can result in fewer babies, lower fat reserves, and even death.

But knowing we have an impact doesn’t mean we know its extent, or the solutions for varied species over an even more varied landscape, Kathy Zeller, a researcher with the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute at the Rocky Mountain Research Station, told me. She and Mark Ditmer, a fellow biologist at the research station, are studying the effect of biking and hiking sounds on wildlife. They know the sounds change how deer, bears, moose, and other wildlife behave, but not if those animals can tolerate those changes and still survive and reproduce.

Belief in America’s boundless plenty has caught up with this country before. Back when tens of millions of bison roamed its expanses, along with millions of bighorn sheep, elk, pronghorn, deer, and countless other species, wild animals seemed endless. Until they weren’t. By the early 1900s, those species numbers were dwindling, some with populations in the tens of thousands as a result of market hunting, meat hunting, railroad expansion, and environmental warfare against Native Americans.

The answer wasn’t to stop hunting forever. Hunters began backing license fees supporting state agencies that managed wildlife, and seasons regulating how many animals were killed in what places. The answer was limitations. Hunters became crucial advocates for maintaining some of America’s wildlife.

Unlike hunting, other outdoor recreation doesn’t rely on wildlife. Still, seeing a moose or bighorn sheep while hiking, or a fox or bald eagle while mountain biking, is part of what separates the experience from biking in a city or spinning on a Peloton. It helps transform these spaces that we use into spaces that we love.

The answer, again, could be limitations targeted to each species and area. Some trails in high-use places such as national parks and rafting trips down rivers already rely on permitting to manage use; more sites could start. Restrictions could last for full seasons—or only for certain hours of the day. By mid-morning, some animals such as sage grouse are often already done mating.

Getting used to the idea of limitations can take time. In Colorado, at first, those edicts to keep mountain-biking pressure off the sage grouse went largely unheeded. But Wiens found that when mountain bikers understood why they were supposed to keep out, eventually they did.

He understands the need to ride: He’s in the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, and his wife, Susan DeMattei, won an Olympic bronze medal for mountain biking. In 2006, he formed a local organization called Gunnison Trails to provide order and funding to often-haphazardly-built trails. He then realized that the new association could rally its own to follow the rules.

“It took a while for some of the late adopters to finally join in,” he told me. But in the past decade or so, during breeding season he’s seen almost no sign of bikers using the closed trails.

Rules require adjustments, sure. We want to just go for a hike and let our dogs run. We want to camp and play and not worry if we’re harming a bird we might never see. But we’re sharing those spaces with humans and wildlife alike.

There will always be places we can ride, too. The other 75 percent of the Hartman Rocks Trails aren’t closed in the spring. Better understanding how we’re affecting other creatures also means that we better know which areas host animals that are less sensitive to human presence, or which times of year or even times of day we’re least disruptive. We can advocate for conservation and still go hiking, skiing, and biking. We can also put our dogs on leashes and heed signs erected by land managers. Because if we want wildlife to be there, too, we might need to accept that the outdoors can’t be open everywhere, all the time.