Dillon Osleger > Quotes

“If anything could be gleaned from the varying vintages of maps and countless pages of government fiscal reporting I had collected, it was that the grand majority of trails in the United States do not meet government standards for use. It did not help that the bar for those standards was set as low as it was, amounting to little more than structurally safe bridges, minimal trash, some vegetation management, and maintenance of trail tread and drainage to function for intended use. In fact, on average over the last several decades, only 26 percent of our nation's recorded trail system has met these standards. The other three-quarters of our nation's history lies under encroaching brush, fallen trees, and eroding hillslopes, and that's not to mention the trails that had been erased from current maps. My hunch that they were erasing trails because of funding issues was confirmed through a Freedom of Information Act request for the USFS's strategy to attend to deferred maintenance—a request that returned a nine-page PDF outlining a "purposeful use of scarce funding to deliver the agency's mission and reduce the size of the portfolio, which will result in a reduction of the backlog of deferred maintenance in the long-term." The report itself conveniently erased 7,000 miles of managed trail from the 158,000 that had been noted in the report six years earlier. They called this process "rightsizing.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“Our public lands are sold in ways that benefit neither the public nor the land.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“Stewardship is appreciating exactly what we have and wanting to preserve the same sense of joy for everyone else. It is allowing others to forge an appreciation for nature for themselves, built from informed histories to which they can relate. Stewardship in outdoor recreation requires reverence to place, where our experiences are woven as thread into the story of the land.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“The presence of a trail on paper is no guarantee of its survival on land.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“How much revenue the USFS actually generates from timber harvests compared to the environmental costs of road maintenance, habitat disruption, and fire suppression is unknown. Furthermore, there is ongoing debate about whether these programs genuinely contribute to long-term forest health or merely serve short-term economic interests. What is clear, however, is that the USFS continues to build and maintain roads that are primarily used for logging activities, which fund its operations through both fire prevention thinning and timber production. The department currently manages roughly 375,000 miles of roads—some paved, some dirt—vastly outnumbering the nation's 47,000 miles of interstate highways by nearly eight times.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“Today, more than forty million Americans report camping or hiking in a given year. The outdoor recreation economy adds between $500 billion and $880 billion to the GDP annually—nearly ten times the economic contribution of the timber industry. But while extraction industries receive continued subsidies and targeted investment, recreation lags behind. Between 2010 and 2020, US Forest Service funding for recreation dropped 23 per-cent, and per-visit spending declined to a paltry $3.37 per person. In the same period, funding for grazing and fossil fuel extraction on public lands increased by more than 100 percent.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“The BLM today manages more than 8,000 miles of trail under a recreation budget 25 percent lower than 2006 levels, and with 20 percent fewer staff. Over the same time period, visitations to BLM lands--largely at national monuments--have increased 46 percent. The USFS, whose 168,000 miles of trail have seen a 17 percent increase in visitation since 2010, operates on a budget 23 percent lower than 2010, leaving 120,000 miles of trail in unmaintained condition and with 29 percent fewer staff to restore them. These statistics and cuts are merely part of a decades-long period of declining funding that is largely aimed at separating people from public lands.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“The federal government is struggling to keep up. By 2018, the backlog in trail maintenance had swelled. The American Hiking Society reported that 193,138 miles of trails on federal lands faced a maintenance backlog estimated at $886 million, echoing similar figures across Forest Service-managed land. Nationwide, only about 25 percent of trails meet minimum condition standards, and it remains the case that less than 4 in 10 miles receive any maintenance in a given year.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“The word usufruct, both in its original Latin meaning and in the way Thomas Jefferson employed it in his writings, refers to a form of use that allows one to derive value from land without diminishing or damaging the resource itself. It implies that reserved lands belong to the living generation only insofar as they are cared for and passed on intact. Yet even by 1789, the year George Washington was elected president, this principle—meant to ensure that future generations inherit land of equal quality—was already regarded as a relic, an ideal abandoned a century earlier. Over the next hundred years, the concept—perhaps only truly honored before the onset of colonialism—was further eroded. For some, this abandonment was inadvertent; for others, it was deliberate. The result has been an ever-growing intergenerational debt, incurred to satisfy short term interests. And this debt continues to haunt efforts at genuine conservation and preservation, undermining any lasting vision for public lands as shared, enduring commons.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“Modern trail systems often expand in places that already boast high recreation value. Meanwhile, landscapes with few or forgotten trails are rarely afforded the attention needed to uncover or maintain them. As a result, the worth of a trail increasingly hinges on its economic impact rather than its potential to cultivate connection between people and place. In this imbalance, we risk forgetting that a trail's true value lies not just in the destination but in the stories it carries and the care we offer in return.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“The USFS simply does not have the capacity or funding to maintain the trail mileage they have built up, and so as the deficit piles up, it is easier to erase trails in the name of "safety" and "sustainability" rather than find solutions that rely on Congress increasing funding for recreational use of our forests. And the USFS isn't alone in this. The GAO, which accounts for the National Park Service (21,000 miles of trail), and the Bureau of Land Management (8,000 miles of trail) outlined the exact same history and forecast of issues regarding underfunding and the loss of recreational access.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“According to the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC), the number of wildfires in the United States has increased from an average of 140,000 in the 1980s to an average of 200,000 in the decade since 2010. Not only are more fires occurring, but the fire season is extending, increasing by an average of seventy-eight days—nearly an extra quarter of a year—further straining our capacity to fight burns. This increase in numbers of wildfires has coincided with an increase in burned acreage, and that has also come with a larger economic impact. The West Coast, the Great Basin, and the Rocky Mountains now lose upward of five thousand miles of trail per year to forest fire. The economic cost of wildfires in 2020 included $3 billion in suppression costs, $20 billion in insured losses of infrastructure, $1.3 billion in healthcare costs in California alone, and an untold figure in loss of tourism revenue and environmental restoration needs.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“Climate change dictates when, where, and if we can access the backcountry. It has become a force not only of erosion but of exclusion—shortening seasons, draining budgets, and shifting the very idea of what trail stewardship means.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands

“Public lands are struggling—not for lack of love, but for lack of reciprocity. In the collective imagination, recreation is benign. We do not consider hiking, biking, birdwatching, or skiing to be extractive in the same way as mining, timber harvest, or livestock grazing. And yet, we extract all the same--from scenery, solitude, opportunity, and access—without returning anything close to an equivalent investment. Unlike resource industries, recreation is rarely held accountable for the wear it places on public infrastructure or for the environmental footprint of its own growth.”
― Dillon Osleger, Trail Work: Restoring the Paths and Stories of America's Public Lands