What We Lost When We Started Optimizing the Wild
On the quiet cost of treating every trail, river, and ridgeline as a resource to be managed.
Last February I spent eleven days on the Elkhorn Traverse in central Idaho, a route that sees maybe two hundred hikers a year. On the fourth morning I found a trail register bolted to a lodgepole pine. The last entry was from three months prior. It read simply: “Still quiet out here. Good.” That anonymous hiker understood something our land management agencies are rapidly forgetting.
The Metrics Trap
Since 2019, federal land agencies have deployed visitor counters on over four thousand trailheads across the American West. The data feeds into dashboards. The dashboards inform budgets. The budgets fund more counters. Somewhere in this loop, we stopped asking whether a place was better for being visited and started asking only how many people showed up.
“A place untouched by optimization is not wasted. It is doing the oldest work there is — existing without justification.”