Geotagging, social media, and the complicated question of loving wild places.
Geotagging. Social media. They are often blamed as the reason our favorite places are changing. We love to hate them.
Those of us who've spent years in the outdoors have watched beloved places change. That change is shocking and real. I vividly remember once hiking in the Three Sisters Wilderness and running into a ranger who said in the previous week they had had several hundred hikers per day on one trail. Yikes.
We blame the increased number of people for ruining the tranquility of nature. Remembering through rose-colored glasses the peace of the past. Once, I was talking to an older gentleman who helped run Oregon’s Clear Lake in the early 90s. I remarked that it must have been so much nicer then, to which he replied, “No, it was just as busy then as it is now.” Then you pick up any book about Oregon’s early history, and you realize that Mt.Hood has long been a climbing, filming, and vacation destination. The Mazamas mountaineering club was founded on July 19th, 1894. Famously, 155 men and 38 women fought through a snowstorm to hold their first meeting at the summit. A group of 350 started the ascent in 1894. Through years of research and recreation, I began to understand that this is a long-standing problem.
I understand the sentiment. I have picked up and seen disgusting amounts of trash and waste in the wilderness. It’s easy to fall into the trap of, “Well, no one should be out here. I am the only one who should know about this place.”
Except, what actually happens if people don’t go out to these places? As someone who documents abandoned state parks and federal lands, I can tell you firsthand that it often leaves them vulnerable in other ways. That being said, I am not advocating for posting the location of every place. We have all seen locations loved to death.
The Historic Power of Visibility
The history of conservation is filled with people who used art, photography, and storytelling to help others see the value of places before it was too late. Famously, Ansel Adams spent years photographing the incredible Yosemite Valley, creating photographs to help Americans feel the wonder and importance of protecting such an awe-inspiring place. 38 miles away, its sister valley, the Hetch Hetchy Valley, was lost to the Tuolumne River being dammed. It is now the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and supplies drinking water to millions of Californians. June Drake of Silverton, Oregon, long recognized the value of the much-loved Silver Falls. He spent years advocating, taking pictures, and helping people see its value even after its trees had been cut and there were just fields of stumps.Andrew P. Hill photographed and advocated for the redwoods in the early 1900s, helping build the movement that led to the creation of the Big Basin Redwoods State Park.
Visibility and advocacy have reached across demographics and political lines. In the summer of 1969, then-Governor Ronald Reagan rode horseback deep into the backcountry to look out over the proposed site of a trans-Sierra highway. By championing the protection of this unbroken wilderness corridor, he successfully halted the commercial highway project, ensuring that the 250-mile-long John Muir Trail remained intact. Nearly every location you enjoy recreating in was made possible by people relentlessly advocating, sometimes for decades, for its protection and responsible use. Gatekeeping is often an easy answer to a complicated question.
The Real Threat: Slashed Budgets and Disappearing Wilderness
Today, our desire to connect with nature rests on what remains. Ancient forests, intact meadows, wild rivers, and old-growth ecosystems have become fragments of what they once were. The strain on public lands is not new. Demand for outdoor recreation surged to eye-popping figures in the post-World War II boom of the 1950s, and again within the last 15 years. As stated in the USDA Forest Service Research study on Urbanization, the population is expected to grow by another 40% by 2050, with deforestation associated with this growth expected to exceed 20 million hectares. Shockingly, even with an increased demand, the federal land management recreation budgets have been continuously slashed. Documented in the 2026 High Country News Article, “Our Nation’s Trails are Disappearing”, The Forest Service manages roughly 160,000 miles of trails, yet according to a 2013 Government Accountability Office Report only about 25% of these trails met agency standards. In the same article, it points out the fact that many of these regional agencies are missing up to 80% of their trail and recreation workers. Often, leaving one employee to oversee hundreds of miles of trails. At the same time, Congress has dragged its feet to pass new wilderness bills and increase recreation funding, ignoring a large public demand.
These challenges suggest that the strain on public lands is not simply a story of more visitors, but also of fewer resources to care for the places people increasingly depend on. When only a fraction remains, every remaining place becomes precious, crowded, and vulnerable.
Truly ancient old-growth trees in Oregon are hidden secrets with no one (rightly) wanting to share any specific location of where to find the few that are left. When Euro-Americans first arrived in the fertile, productive valleys, these giant sentinels reached into every major river drainage from the mighty Columbia to the wild Rogue. To quote the Forest Service December 1993 resource bulletin, “Old-growth occupied about half of the forest area when the first comprehensive forest surveys were made in the 1930s and 1940s”.In 1993, 20% of that was left, now less than 10% of our heritage trees in their ancient ecosystems remain. In many places, all that's left are rotting stumps, reminding us of a landscape that once stretched across entire watersheds.
A Collective Burden
Perhaps geotagging isn’t the real problem at all. Perhaps it’s simply the way we’ve chosen to argue about an old problem.
Responsibility for our wilderness is a burden we all must shoulder every day. As a collective, we must balance the fact that public lands belong to all of us and that the land has an intrinsic right to exist by itself. We have proven that we can do better; now is the time to show up.
The wilderness can change you if you let it. Will we be the type of people the wilderness deserves?
- Sources & Further Reading
USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station. Old-Growth Forests in the Pacific Northwest. http://www.fs.usda.gov/pnw/pubs/pnw_rb197.pdf
Oregon Encyclopedia. Silver Falls State Park. https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/silver_falls_state_park/ National
National Park Service. Hetch Hetchy Valley Archives. https://npgallery.nps.gov/YOSE/SearchResults/132ead75-74be-4234-ab45-0233dc358c2a?page=2&view=grid&sort=default
Mountain Parks Foundation. Big Basin Redwoods. https://www.mountainparks.org/our-parks/big-basin-redwoods
Mount Hood History. Mount Hood Chronology. https://mounthoodhistory.com/mount-hood/mount-hood-chronology/
Ronald Reagan. The Man on the White Horse who Save the Sierra Nevada. https://snowbrains.com/the-man-on-the-white-horse-who-saved-the-sierra-nevada/
Mazama History. Oregon Encyclopedia Mazamas. https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/mazamas/
Urbanization in the US. U.S. Department of Agriculture. https://research.fs.usda.gov/treesearch/38751
High Country News. The Nations Trails are Disappearing. https://www.hcn.org/articles/the-nations-trails-are-disappearing/
Recreation and the U.S. Forest Service. Forest History Society. https://foresthistory.org/research-explore/us-forest-service-history/policy-and-law/recreation-u-s-forest-service/
Wilderness Designation on Federal Lands. Federal Forest Resource Coalition. https://fedforestcoalition.org/wilderness-designations-on-federal-forests/
Mountain West Voters Show Growing Concerns Over Public Land Protections Heading into the 2026 Elections. Colorado College State of the Rockies. https://www.coloradocollege.edu/other/stateoftherockies/conservationinthewest/2026-poll-data/cc-national-press-release.pdf
Old-Growth Forests. Oregon Wild. https://oregonwild.org/resource/old-growth-forests/
Trans Sierra Highway. National Park Service. https://www.nps.gov/depo/learn/historyculture/trans-sierra-highway.htm