Trails Offroad's Stance on the Roadless Rule

There is something deeply American about loading up a vehicle and going somewhere simply to see what is there.

The road trip. The family camping trip. The dirt road that disappears into the mountains. The old Forest Service road that leads to a fishing hole, a trailhead, a campsite, an overlook, or a place you have never seen before.

For generations, motorized travel has been part of how Americans experience this country. It is how families have explored National Forests, crossed deserts, reached remote campsites, hunted, fished, visited historic places, and discovered corners of the country they might never have experienced otherwise.

That spirit of exploration is part of what connects all of us at Trails Offroad.

It is also why we support repealing the 2001 Roadless Rule.

For us, this is not about paving forests or building roads everywhere. It is about preserving the public's ability to have a meaningful voice in how public lands are accessed, managed, and enjoyed.

Too often, the debate over public lands gets reduced to an us-versus-them fight. And too often, the loudest voices are backed by well-funded organizations with large donor bases, professional advocacy operations, and teams of attorneys.

But having more money, more lawyers, or a louder microphone should not give any one group a greater claim to public land. All of us have paid for these lands. Generations of Americans have funded their protection, maintenance, management, firefighting, roads, facilities, and stewardship through taxes and public investment. 

We often call them government-managed lands, and that distinction matters. The government manages them. The people own them. That means the camper matters. The hiker matters. The hunter and angler matter. The horseback rider matters. The four-wheel-drive enthusiast matters. The family that wants to drive a quiet Forest Service road and find a campsite for the night matters too.

There should not be an automatic hierarchy where one form of recreation is treated as more worthy than another.

Public land management has to account for wildlife, watersheds, wildfire, forest health, conservation, and many other legitimate concerns. We support taking those responsibilities seriously. But recreation is also one of the fundamental reasons these lands matter to the public, and too often its value is treated as secondary or left out of the conversation altogether.  

Recreational value is subjective by its very nature. A challenging four-wheel-drive trail may be the highlight of someone's year. A quiet dirt road through the forest may become a family's favorite camping trip. Someone else may value that same road because it provides access to a trailhead, hunting area, fishing spot, historic site, or scenic overlook.

Those experiences can be difficult to quantify, but that does not make them less valuable.

How do you put a number on taking your kids camping for the first time? On reaching an overlook you have wanted to see for years? On exploring an old mountain road with your father? On turning down a dirt road simply because you have always wondered where it goes?

This may be deeply rooted in the American experience, but the desire to explore, discover, and experience new places is fundamentally human. Those experiences have value.

And that is where this connects directly to the Roadless Rule.

The Roadless Rule is a federal regulation adopted by the U.S. Forest Service in January 2001, at the end of the Clinton administration. It applies to designated Inventoried Roadless Areas within the National Forest System and generally restricts new road construction, road reconstruction, and certain timber harvesting across roughly 58.5 million acres of federal forest land. The rule was intended to preserve the undeveloped character of those areas and protect values such as watersheds, wildlife habitat, scenery, and recreation.

We agree with BlueRibbon Coalition's position that decisions affecting roads and access are better made with local conditions, recreation, forest management, wildfire risk, and actual public use considered together rather than through a sweeping nationwide approach.

Public lands vary enormously from one place to another. So should the conversations about their future.

More importantly, those conversations should include the people who actually use these lands. Public policy should come from an open process where recreational access has a real seat at the table, not from a contest to see which side can afford the most attorneys or generate the most pressure.

Why Trails Offroad Goes to Such Lengths to Document Roads

This belief also explains a lot about how we approach our work at Trails Offroad. We do not believe responsible motorized recreation means simply drawing a line on a map and telling someone to go drive it.We want people to understand where they are going before they ever leave home.

That is why we document difficulty. We photograph obstacles. We identify legal routes. We point out seasonal information, campsites, trailheads, scenery, important intersections, and the conditions drivers are likely to encounter.We also take the extra time to identify illegal bypasses and routes that are not part of the legal road system.

That distinction matters.

Sometimes the difference between someone traveling responsibly and unintentionally causing resource damage is simply having accurate information.

We also want people to find the experience that is right for them. One person's perfect trail may be another person's terrible day. A technical rock-crawling route may be exactly what one driver is looking for. Another person may simply want a scenic dirt road, a quiet campsite, and a place to spend the weekend with family.

Our role is not to tell people which experience has more recreational value. Our role is to document the roads as accurately as we can so people can make that decision for themselves, arrive prepared, stay on the legal route, and enjoy public lands responsibly. That same philosophy shapes our position on the Roadless Rule.

We believe public lands should remain something Americans can actively experience, not places where a road remains on the public map while a locked gate becomes the reality on the ground. We believe decisions about roads and trails should be transparent, rooted in the realities on the ground, and made with meaningful participation from the public. Because these lands belong to all of us.

And the simple freedom to pack the vehicle, turn onto a dirt road, and go see what is around the next corner remains an important part of the American experience worth protecting.