Future of Recreation: The Problem with Rogue Trail Building

Zander Strathearn photo of a fully authorized trail in Whistler. 

How to combat a significant threat to the future of recreation

When Scott Veach and Ben Haggar started trail building on Blackcomb Mountain, they had no idea they were digging up a controversy. It was 2015 and the two friends had discovered “a beautiful forest with amazing terrain and good climbing access,” Veach says. “We saw it as a really good area to build a mountain bike trail. We thought we were being respectful.”

They built Dark Crystal with their own sweat and muscle, and mountain bikers loved it. Unfortunately, Whistler-Blackcomb and the Whistler Off-Road Cycling Association weren’t so stoked. By building rogue, Veach and Haggar had got themselves in trouble and were endangering the future of riding in Whistler.

The rules for creating a trail from scratch vary depending on jurisdiction and land ownership, but almost everywhere there is a process for doing it legally. For a variety of reasons – everything from ignorance to rebellion – many trail builders don’t bother. 

“Even if rogue builders build an amazing trail, they 100 per cent do damage,” says AJ Strawson, the former executive director of the International Mountain Bike Association’s Canadian chapter and now the lead trail builder for the Squamish Off-Road Cycling Association. “I’d argue the outcome of building a trail is not as important as the process of how it got there.”

Strawson figures there are three main types of rogue trail builders. The first and most common are the ignorant. They don’t know they need some kind of approval to build a trail. 

The second group arises out of the process of trying to do the right thing. Building a sanctioned trail will likely require an environmental assessment, community and stakeholder consultations and landowner approval. The process can take years.

“Just finding out who owns the land can be challenging,” says Strawson. “You have to jump through a bunch of hoops to do it the right way.”

Somewhere along the way, many trail builders give up and just get to work. And others, the third type of rogue builder, are so disillusioned and frustrated by the regulatory process they choose to ignore it completely.

Hard work by recreation clubs across the province has reduced the amount of rogue building going on, but unsanctioned building continues.    

When researchers from Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative and the University of British Columbia compiled official and unofficial trail data around the southern B.C.-Alberta border region they found 27 percent of trails, 6,000 kilometres of 22,000 kilometres, were unofficial and unmanaged. 

Rogue building is more common in the mountain bike and off road motorized vehicle communities, likely because enjoyment focuses on the user’s relationship with the trail, so there’s a higher demand for new experiences. Hikers and horseback riders are more focused on the landscape and their relationship with the horse and so tend to be more content with established trails. But it still happens.

Take the Campbell River Lookout Trail. Built on a private woodlot north of the city of Campbell River, the anonymous trail builders felled trees, built a bridge through a salmon stream and bolted chains into rock to climb a particularly steep section.

“It’s a mess of bad trail practices because they didn’t work with us,” says Graham Cameron, the local recreation officer for Recreation Sites and Trails BC.  

With his input Cameron says they probably could have found a route through public land, built better bridges over the salmon stream and avoided the cliff section, eliminating the need for the chains all together. 

In addition, building without permission means no one considered First Nation title and rights or potential conflicts with other recreational users or stakeholders, like forestry. They didn’t consider maintenance budgets and building standards. And rogue trail builders rarely have the big picture of the trail network or the full suite of community recreation in mind. 

“There’s a whole bunch of stuff going on on the landscape that a trail builder might not know about,” Cameron points out.

On the other hand, his office has worked closely with recreation clubs like the Back Country Horseman Society of BC and Four Wheel Drive Association of BC on successful projects and just helped the River City Cycle Club invest $800,000 into mountain bike trails in the Snowden Demonstration Forest. 

“We would like to connect with trail builders and their passion,” Cameron says. “We want to work with them.”

One area clubs and land managers are focusing more and more is on recreation’s potential impacts on wildlife, he says. (The ORCBC held a webinar on this topic in July.) Human-wildlife relationships are complex and not linear – recreation can be detrimental to some species and an important piece of biodiversity conservation for another, at the same time. Researchers continue to gain new insights and it is important for trail builders to consider the evolving best practices.  

At the same time, Strawson says, it’s important that the conversation goes both ways. Illegal trail builders is a message that something is missing from the local trail offering, a disconnect between the land managers and the trail users or both. 

More support for recreation clubs could help on all fronts: speeding up the approval process, helping with First Nations and other stakeholder consultation, funding scientific research and more. 

Change is happening. Recreation Sites and Trails BC is amending the Section 57 process, the main mechanism for legitimate trail building on Crown land. The changes will make the application process easier to fill out and simpler to review, which should bring clarity to the process and help recreation officers make decisions faster. (Read more about the coming changes on our blog.)

Back on Blackcomb, things worked out for Veach and Haggar. They sat down with Whistler Blackcomb, the land owner, and WORCA, the trail manager, and professed their ignorance. Everyone agreed to move forward and adopt Dark Crystal into the greater trail network, on the condition Veach and Haggar committed to maintaining the trail – a 120-hours-a-year investment.