Happy Trails to You

“Leave the road. Take the trails,” advised the mathematician Pythagoras more than two thousand years ago. Had I known of his fondness for trails, I might have paid closer attention in geometry class to the man who unlocked the secrets of the right triangle. Then again, at age fifteen, I was far more interested in escaping the classroom than in mastering triangles.

Trails have always been part of Idaho’s DNA: The Nez Perce Trail, the Lewis & Clark Trail, the Oregon Trail, the Centennial Trail. They’ve all helped define the state, literally and spiritually.

Some of Idaho’s 19,000 miles of trails are in great shape. Many are not. Others have vanished, lost to wildfire, downfall, erosion, overgrown brush, and neglect. Most trails are on federal land where trail funding continues to shrink. Many forest districts now rely heavily on volunteers just to keep their most popular routes open. Over the decades, Outdoor Idaho has returned to this subject again and again, in programs like our 2000 "Outdoor Volunteers" and the 2012 “The Foothills” program. 

Forest Service trails manager Jay Dorr summed up the problem in our 2020 program “Sawtooths on My Mind.” He called it the upside-down pyramid. "Yeah, I guess I’m cynical. They add more stuff in the Supervisor's office or the Washington, D.C., office and cut positions on the ground where folks are actually doing stuff. It's always been that way.”

Now things are even worse, said the man who joined the Sawtooth National Recreation Area trails crew in 1971. "We used to get to most trails every few years and the high-use trails every year. And now with fewer crews, bigger wildfires, and bug kill, you don't get to a trail for four or five years. Instead of clearing three miles of trail in a day, you're doing half a mile of trail in a day. And the backlog just keeps getting bigger and bigger."

We met Jay Dorr at Imogene Lake. He wanted to show us the oldest tree in the Sawtooths, an impressive 1,200-year-old specimen, killed by western pine beetles and standing as both monument and warning. As we interviewed him, Jay began to tear up. It wasn't the backlog of trails that moved him, but all the young men and women he had hired and mentored over five decades in the backcountry. Many of them went on to lead remarkable lives, and that, he told us, was his real legacy.

Outdoor Idaho stepped into the fault lines of trail use in 1991 with a program called “The Politics of Trails.” For one segment, we brought together a hiker and a motorized rider at Fourth of July Lake, near the edge of the White Cloud Mountains. It’s an easy two-mile hike, popular with families. That day, Lynn Stone hiked in. Clark Collins rode in. Our camera waited for them in the rain.

“You’re trying to tell me that the uses are all compatible,” said an incredulous Lynn Stone, who had written a book about hiking the trails of the White Clouds. “And all I have to do is put up with the noise, plug my nose so I can’t smell the fumes, and jump out of the way of these machines whenever they come up, and I can live with you?”

Clark Collins was the executive director of the Blue Ribbon Coalition, whose goal was to protect trails for motorized users. “And on most of the trails, the level of use is such that it wouldn’t change your experience that much,” countered Clark. “There are only a few trails left available for motorized use. And it seems that we are continually being asked to give up access to those trails, with no compensation.”

Lynn Stone: “In Idaho, we have a chance in the Boulder-White Clouds to keep the peace and to keep the wild.”

Clark Collins: “And we’re willing to concede the majority of the Boulder-White Clouds to Wilderness designation, but we’re not willing to concede all of it.”

Lynn: “What about Fourth of July Lake trail, Clark? What do you think? Isn't that quiet nice right now?

Clark: “What are you willing to trade?”

                                                           

It may be only a narrow ribbon of dirt winding through Idaho's backcountry, but trails have become one of the state's most contested landscapes. We got a taste of that reality in 2007 with “Motorized Sports.”  It was a well-crafted show, a look at the people of all ages enjoying the backcountry on trail bikes, snowmobiles, jet boats, and sand buggies. People who loved those machines loved the program.

Others did not. The backlash arrived almost before the credits finished rolling. Some longtime viewers felt we had crossed a line, joined the enemy, and violated a sacred trust. It didn’t matter that motorized users were increasing in number. That was exactly the problem, argued the angry letter-writers and the phone callers. Why encourage it?

The battle between motorized machines and pedal-only bikes reached a climax in the White Clouds with the push to make the range an official Wilderness area.  Serious bikers had already discovered the White Clouds’ primitive trails, high peaks, and clear lakes, and the chance to see goats, elk, wolves, and maybe even a wolverine.

I remember stepping aside as a pack of elite women racers flew past us on their cross-country bikes on the way to the other side of the White Clouds. Twenty miles out and back was just another day’s ride for them.

We were there to get footage for several programs, including our 2014 “50 Years of Wilderness.” I can’t think of a piece of legislation that contains language as memorable or poetic as the Wilderness Act of 1964: “A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.” 

There was no mention of mountain bikes in the 1964 Wilderness Act. The modern mountain bike did not exist at the time of its passage. As wilderness historian Douglas Scott explained, mountain bikes are “exactly the sort of mechanical transport the law intended to prohibit in Wilderness.” Quiet and primitive recreation had become the historical definition of Wilderness after 1964. It didn’t matter that mountain bikers had been riding the White Cloud trails for decades.

Attorney Geoff Baker, an avid mountain biker, had been actively pushing for mountain bikers to have more say in the final version of Congressman Mike Simpson’s White Clouds Wilderness bill. That didn’t happen. “I think at the end of the day, they didn't really need the mountain bikers. When it came down to brass tacks, the motorized lobby and the non-biking conservation community said, We got what we wanted, and let's move forward.”

When Congress finally passed Simpson’s White Clouds Wilderness bill with a unanimous vote in both the House and the Senate, many mountain bikers felt betrayed. Geoff was one of them. “Why would any mountain biker ever want to support Wilderness again? The one group that you’d think would support Wilderness now feels their interests are not respected. They would be idiots to ever get behind another Wilderness bill.”                                                     

The 2026 fight at the national level to weaken the Wilderness Act of 1964 would have a direct impact on Idaho’s trails. Some say it could be done in various ways, like allowing Forest Service officials to open up certain trails to mountain bikes in their jurisdiction if they deemed it appropriate. I personally think it would be unfortunate to have mountain bikes in some of our favorite Wilderness areas, like the Sawtooth Wilderness or the major trails in the White Clouds Wilderness, but should mountain bikes be kept out of all trails in all Wilderness areas? What about making exceptions for new Wilderness areas? Should decisions about trails be determined by those closest to the action on a case-by-case basis?

This issue has serious long-term ramifications. If we ban their machines, will a younger generation walk away from Wilderness in favor of the less restrictive national monument status as a way to manage the West’s special places? To better understand the growing divide between wilderness advocates and pedal bikers, we turned to the late Professor John Freemuth. The executive director of the Andrus Center for Public Policy at Boise State University knew that the passage of the White Clouds Wilderness had created a significant split among mountain bikers. He also knew that the law speaks to “mechanized” means of travel, not “motorized." So as currently written, the Forest Service simply could not allow mountain bikes into the wilderness.

“You can look at all the language around wilderness,” said John, “and much of it is poetic. It's spiritual. It's 'go experience it, but on its own terms.'  Much of the language of mountain bikers is about the country as thrill, as someplace to have fun, gnarly, and not wilderness. Is that going to become a dominant position in the next 30 years?  I think it's hard for some of the old wilderness warriors to realize how their perspective is aging. Younger folks may not quite see it the same way.”

Another challenge to wilderness comes not from mountain bikes but from something far less glamorous, fallen trees. Downed trees make it maddeningly difficult to travel the trails of the largest forested wilderness in the lower 48. One helicopter reconnaissance discovered more than 80,000 downed trees along a key 150-mile stretch of trails in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness.

The issue of chainsaws in Wilderness has been brewing for some time. In 2019 the Great Old Broads for Wilderness and Wilderness Watch sued the Forest Service for allowing chainsaws in two wilderness areas in Colorado. “Wilderness exists for its own sake,” argued attorneys for Wilderness Watch. “It is not the role of the Forest Service to alter wilderness to appease impatient managers or visitors.”

In 2026 the Forest Service allowed gas-powered chainsaw use on up to 542 miles of specific trails in the Frank. Somewhat surprisingly, the Idaho Conservation League agreed, but only if limited to the Frank, with experts, for certain hours, and only for three years. Even then, many ICL members saw this as a slippery slope that undermines the intent of the Wilderness Act and imperils the very reasons people value wilderness: solitude, primitive recreation, and connection to something much larger than us.

 

One person who does not appreciate chainsaws in what she calls “the Big W” is Patti Stieger, a trails-crew boss for more than 30 years, much of that in designated Wilderness. She got her start by literally begging a Forest Service trails supervisor to take her on as a volunteer. “I love to play in the dirt,” she told me in a phone conversation in 2026. “The trail boss must have been impressed with me, the way I put my head down and went to work, because soon I was hired on as a paid employee.” In short order she was managing her own trail crews, often in the Payette National Forest.

When she retired in 2015 after three decades learning pretty much everything there was to know about trails, she then volunteered with Idaho Trails Association. Trails really mattered to this woman!

“Some of the young people on my trails crew were there because their parents wanted them to experience the wilderness. Some were there because it beat being in jail. We took them all. Some arrived with headsets and cell phones, and I told them they couldn’t use them while they worked. They didn’t like that, but that was just the way it was. They needed to be able to respond quickly to danger, so it was for their own good.

“I was always flabbergasted when someone would come up to me years later if they saw me in town and say things like ‘I loved it. It was the best week of my life.’ One young man took his family out into the wilderness to show them what he had done, he was so proud. I talked with one person the following year after his trails experience and he told me he was going to college in forestry. He wanted to continue doing this type of work.”

Patti especially liked working with females on crews. “A lot of them didn’t think they could do the work, but they could. I told them there was no reason to take a back seat to anyone, that what they were doing was important. I think all the young people appreciated the community feeling, being out there with like-minded people, knowing they were doing something that needed to be done, and learning new skills.”

Working on trails is not for everyone. One young girl was there because her parents told her she had no choice. “One day we saw some wolves, and the girl said, ‘this isn’t what I signed up for, being out here in the middle of nowhere.’ She left a few days later.”

Patti sees no reason for chainsaws. “They like to argue with me, and I tell them to look at the Wilderness Act. I get the need to open trails. So maybe those who are making money taking clients into wilderness should hire more help and work with volunteer groups. I also think we need to educate people on what the difference is between the Big W and other areas in the forest.”

When Congress chose to seriously shrink the Forest Service, and virtually eliminate the ones on the ground doing the necessary trail work, Idaho Trails Association rose to the challenge. This impressive volunteer organization relies upon knowledgeable crew leaders and volunteers of all ages, including an active youth program for teens aged 14 to 18 who can sign up for regularly scheduled projects all summer long. ITA knows how to get things done. An energetic, well-fed volunteer crew can easily clear 15 miles in a week.

In 2025 crews cleared 401 trail miles across Idaho, both within and outside wilderness, through more than 16,000 hours of volunteer time. When I talked with the leaders of ITA, they weren’t interested in picking fights with outfitters and others wanting to “open” the Frank Church Wilderness. The problem of downed trees is just too daunting, and it’s only getting worse.

Everyone knows Mother Nature has the upper hand. Wildfires burn hotter. Powerful windstorms can topple entire hillsides of timber, and trails disappear beneath tangles of fallen trees faster than crews can clear them. In the battle to keep Idaho's trail system open, there is no final victory, only another season, another storm, another trail to clear.

If you love a place, you have choices. You can keep it a secret, or you can introduce it to the world and hope enough people come to love it, too. When Margaret Fuller published Sawtooth and White Cloud Trails in 1979, she produced Idaho's first comprehensive hiking guidebook. Today, dozens of guidebooks and websites describe trails in virtually every corner of the state. Being first came with a price. Letters to the editor in the Idaho Statesman accused Margaret of exposing fragile places to crowds of newcomers, all to sell a few travel books. The critics weren't entirely wrong. Her guidebooks undoubtedly introduced more people to places like Alice Lake in the Sawtooths and the Big Boulder Lakes Basin in the White Clouds.

When I attended Margaret's 90th birthday celebration in 2025, I was struck by something else entirely. People whose lives had been shaped by her work packed the room and everyone seemed to have a Margaret story. When I later posted a photograph from her party on social media, the responses poured in: gratitude, admiration, and respect from people across Idaho. It was clear how profoundly she helped shape our modern understanding of public lands, trails, and the freedom to explore them.

Perhaps Margaret's greatest contribution was confidence. Knowing that she had meticulously hiked and documented these routes with her children in tow gave countless families the courage to venture out on their own. Her books transformed uncertainty into possibility. Mom and dad could look at a trail description and think, "Maybe we can do this."

To Margaret and others like her, trails are more than lines on a map. They are the arteries of the landscape. They carry people into wild country and connect them to something larger than themselves. When the world begins to close in, trails offer an escape route to a different rhythm, a different perspective. Without them, much of Idaho would remain inaccessible, and its value diminished.

At her birthday party, I spoke with her husband, Wayne, perhaps Margaret's biggest admirer. Smiling, he ticked off the surgeries she had endured over the years, to her knees, back, and wrist. "It still hasn't slowed her down,” he said. He knows his wife could leave him in the dust on any of the more than 6,000 miles she has logged on Idaho trails.

One can argue that Margaret's passion for trails has been a double-edged sword. During the filming of our 2021 program “Off the Beaten Path,” several of us followed a faint, nearly forgotten trail over a modest ridge in the Sawtooths. We had a beautiful alpine lake all to ourselves. Meanwhile, a Forest Service employee told us that on the same weekend, roughly fifty people had hiked the 9-mile round trip to Goat Lake and dozens more had made the 9.7-mile out and back to Sawtooth Lake. Margaret's books undoubtedly contributed to those numbers.

 

Let’s not forget another lesson. People rarely protect what they don’t know. Castle Peak, the highest peak in the White Cloud mountains, is barely visible from the highway. Advocates saved it only because they introduced people to it. They photographed it, hiked around it, and wrote about it. A photograph by conservationist Ernie Day appeared in Life Magazine as well as the Wall Street Journal and the Idaho Statesman.     

Sometimes building a constituency is the only way to save a place, even if it means sharing the trail. Margaret sold some guidebooks, and she also helped generations of Idahoans to care deeply about the state's wild places. When she first heard about our plans to hike in the Boulders, she offered a concise assessment: "I think you're nuts." That was all the encouragement we needed.

America's newest wilderness had a reputation for having few trails and even fewer visitors. Created in 2015, the Hemingway-Boulders Wilderness was one of three new wilderness areas designated that year, along with the Cecil D. Andrus-White Clouds Wilderness and the Jim McClure-Jerry Peak Wilderness. To us, the lack of trails was part of the attraction. Mystery still lived there. In 2016, I assembled a group of experienced hikers to cross the Boulders from West Pass Creek to the edge of Ketchum and Sun Valley. It didn't take long to understand Margaret's warning.

“There was a trail coming up initially, but then it turns into a goat trail,” explained Dan “the Goat” King. We nicknamed him that because of his willingness to hike anywhere. “There really are goat trails, so you follow them because goats know where they’re going. They give you advice, but not necessarily the best advice.”

"We haven't done one hike on this trip that hasn't been challenging," observed Rick Gerrard. "This is the most vertical environment I've ever spent time in." As we hiked further, the creek washed out the trail. A small cairn pointed us toward our base camp, and then the trail largely disappeared into a sea of rocks. If Dan the Goat had his way, no cairns would exist in wilderness. “Figure it out yourself” was his motto.

We made camp at 8,800 feet in a small patch of level ground four tough miles from our vehicles. For the next three days this would be home, near clear streams, wildflower meadows, waterfalls, and a ridge of crimson rock that seemed to rise directly from camp. The trails, however, remained elusive.

I've long believed that good food can compensate for bad trails. The dehydrated pork chops I ate on early backpacking trips still haunt me. Anyone who has camped with me knows what's eventually coming: chicken piccata. Chicken breasts pounded thin. Lemons, capers, butter, white wine, chicken broth, hand-gathered morel mushrooms, served over rice. I usually make it before we leave for the hike, but not always. I prefer to make it on the second or third night, when hungry hikers are most appreciative. “Not that I’m complaining, but why does Bruce only know one recipe?” asked hiker and volunteer photographer Tim Tower.  "Bruce knows lots of recipes," Terry “The Mule” Lee commented, "but they all taste like chicken piccata.” “I’m waiting for his book Cooking with Butter offered Rick Gerrard, who usually brought the liquid refreshments.

When we set out to traverse the Hemingway-Boulders Wilderness, climbing Ryan Peak wasn't really part of the plan. Then we reached West Pass. The pass sits at just over 10,000 feet. Nearby stood Ryan Peak, the highest mountain in the Boulders at 11,714 feet. Less than 1,700 vertical feet separated us from the summit. The sky was cloudless, the temperature perfect, and our water bottles were full. What could possibly go wrong?

Joining us was Chadd Cripe, then the outdoor writer for the Idaho Statesman. Chadd described himself as a car camper. He had never been in wilderness before. "I'm different than most of you guys," he told me. "I'm a trails guy. I like to know where I am and where I'm going.” I can only imagine his concern when our group was at West Pass, each operating GPS units and trying to figure out which peak was Ryan. "I was absolutely willing to bet a dollar that I was looking at Ryan Peak,” Rick Gerrard later admitted. “Turns out I was looking at nearby Kent Peak. Fortunately, someone talked me out of the wager, and we headed in the right direction.”

Chadd hid his concern well. He was excited and convinced that the climb would be memorable. With Chadd along, the rest of us were sure it would be memorable.  "And then there was a mountain goat," Chadd recalled later. "By the time I took a picture of the goat, most of my friends were going up the hill, so I followed them up the face of Ryan Peak. The first third was fine, and then it got spooky. At one point I lost my sweatshirt. It was only ten feet away, but I wasn't going down there to get it. It's still there somewhere. We joked that maybe a goat is wearing it."

 

Videographer Jay Krajic wasn’t wearing a sweatshirt, but he was carrying the camera and the tripod and a small backpack filled with camera gear. “Up two steps and back three.” That was his remembrance of the loose rock of Ryan Peak. “You had to really be careful and test out the rock. We staggered everyone so if a rock did come down, it wouldn’t hit somebody.” Jay climbed the other side of the rock face, away from Chadd. I tried to keep up with Jay. At one point I yelled to him, “Let me carry the tripod!” Apparently, he didn’t hear me.

As the slope steepened, the hikers discovered an unlikely ally, lupine. The blue-violet flowers somehow manages to thrive in the loose, rocky soil. Someone above shouted, "Just follow the lupine!”

"I'd never given much thought to lupine before," Chadd laughed. "But I discovered you could grab onto it. You couldn't trust the rocks. They'd come loose in your hands. The lupine wouldn't budge. They became my new best friends."

Eventually even the lupine disappeared, leaving only steep slopes of loose rock and a lot of scary exposure. "For a long time I was afraid of heights," Chadd admitted. "You get that vertigo feeling. There's a huge drop over here and another one over there. That was probably the scariest part. You start kicking rocks down the hill and thinking, Rockslide! Am I going to become a rockslide?” His companions talked him through it, and eventually he stood on the summit. There were high-fives all around. We spent nearly an hour on top, bracing ourselves against the wind and trying to commit the view to memory. It seemed as though all of central Idaho lay beneath us.

Chadd had climbed Ryan for a few reasons. He wanted to write a column for the Idaho Statesman. And I imagine he wanted to face his fears. Dan King had lost twenty pounds preparing for the trip. He was up for anything. Colleague John Crancer reached the summit despite chronic foot and back pain, cancer, and Lyme disease. Linda Olson stood on top barely a year after having both knees replaced. “Two years ago, before I had the new knees, I couldn’t hike anymore.”

"The view was definitely worth it," said John. “I wasn’t going to miss this for the world!”

Dan King commented on what spread out before us. “You can see the Pioneers, the Lost River Range, the Sawtooths. It all ties Idaho together, and we’re in the middle of it all.” Tim Tower and Rick Gerrard began taking photos as soon as they reached the summit. It’s why some of our shows are so well-documented.

They all tell me the camaraderie, the difficulty of the journeys, the humor, and the campfire discussions bring them back to volunteer. I think they’re just too embarrassed to admit it’s the chicken piccata.

Back at camp that evening, the conversation drifted to trails. Someone observed that trails are promises, not guarantees. A trail could be there in June and gone in August, an unfortunate result of rockslides, floods, and wildfires. Another person noted that the world becomes more intimate when you're traveling slowly. You notice things you would otherwise miss—a waterfall hidden in the trees, the fragrance of a flower rooted improbably in stone, the astonishing persistence of life in harsh places.

No one was disappointed by the day's outing. We had come looking for trails and found something more valuable. The trail wasn't merely showing us where to go. It was teaching us how to go. In a world that grows louder, faster, and more distracted by the year, trails offer an alternative. They ask us to slow down, pay attention, and accept uncertainty. Not everything worth finding is marked on a map.