I started this website while sitting at a desk in a city, dreaming of being on the trails, bummed that I was so far removed from them. I wanted to find trails around the area, ride them, and spread the word so that others like me, in towns like the one I was living in, could find places to ride. That eventually morphed into trying to get the word out about the ridiculous amount of trails back home (now home again) that had little to no information online. Coal Country’s economy has been decimated over the years and I full heartedly believe adventure tourism is the golden ticket, so I want to help.
You know what they say about the best intentions?
The off-road community is seeing a proliferation of users and information. Too Much Information, it seems. There aren’t that many secret spots anymore. For responsible trail users like myself, today’s access to information is a godsend. Unfortunately, it’s not just responsible users that have access to that information.
This blog from UTV Driver, “The Closing of Tennessee’s Nemo Tunnel - How disrespectful off-roading can be the death of our favorite trails” has been making its rounds within the Southern off-road communities, and those with much broader reach. The blog is about the closing of a section of trail in Tennessee that was known to locals only up until not that long ago. The word got out, some chaos ensued, and now this coveted trail is closed, not long after the public discovered it.
I’ve written about it before (Please Tread Lightly!). This isn’t a new thing. This isn’t a Tennessee thing, a Kentucky thing, a California thing, or a Utah thing (Moab, yes, that Moab, is in a large battle to keep trails open), or any other particular region. It’s an everywhere thing. Trail closings used to be a well known thing in the off-roading community- it’s now a well known issue for the general public, because it’s happening so much.
Folks take advantage of the feeling of isolation when out on trails. A beer can here, a tater chip bag there, what’s the harm? Driving around a gate, wallering out a mud hole, blasting up a hillside, “it’s just me/my group”. But it’s not just you or your group. That chip bag, those ruts will be there for the next group to see and to follow behind.
Especially here in southeast Kentucky and southwest Virginia, our communities trail ride a lot on privately owned property. That’s our neighbors’ land, roads, trails, streams and woods. Even the newly forming trail systems here use mostly private land (most folks just don’t realize it). It takes a LOT for those trail systems to get an agreement with a landowner to allow public use, but it doesn’t take much for a landowner to shutter that access. How would you feel if that were your land being littered and destroyed? Why not treat it as our own?
The access to trail information is a big driver in bringing folks to these places, spending their money here, and spreading the word further. But that information also comes with a cost: Recreate Responsibly and Tread Lightly. Smokey Bear said it best, “Only YOU can prevent trail closures.”