The Washoe County Public Lands Bill: Why It's Important to Legally Map Trails

Donny and Lacey recently attended two public meetings as well as a follow-up one-on-one private meeting with a manager of Washoe County with regard to the proposed Truckee Meadows Public Lands Management Act.  The website containing an interactive map and more information on this bill can be found at landsbill.org.

In summary, this bill (if passed), purports to support the area’s population growth.  The area surrounded by red on the map below is the proposed “disposal area” – meaning that the parcels of Federal land (aka: BLM land) would be eligible for future transfer or sale in the future.

BLM Land (dark tan); Unincorporated Washoe County Land (no color); USFS Land (green); City of Reno (light gray); City of Sparks (dark gray); Indian Land (pink and turquoise).

​Within this boundary, Washoe County proposes to acquire only a few handfuls of small parcels from Federal land for various infrastructure purposes, which are not areas of concern to us as dirtbike riders. 
 
What we are concerned about is not an immediate threat – but a future threat (regardless of whether or not this bill passes) to our favorite riding areas (BLM land in North Valleys and Moonrocks) if we do not act now to get ahead of the curve.
 
Let’s say in the future… 2 years from now; 5 years from now; 10 years from now… a developer wants to build near or on what we all commonly recognize as a riding area (or staging area thereto). If public land is transferred to another jurisdiction or private entity, and that public land contains officially mapped/identified public user trails, the transferee will be obligated to preserve access to those publicly designated trails.  
 
Well, this trail has been here for years and you can see it, so it's obviously a public trail... right? Just because a trail physically exists and is commonly known, does not mean the trail is legal or documented.  Transferees have to accept land with its current covenants, conditions and restrictions of record.  If our trails are not of record, then the transferee has no obligation to preserve our access thereto. At that point, it would then become an uphill fight with the developer (or whoever gets the land) to attempt to convince them to preserve an undocumented trail.
 
Currently, the Nevada BLM is decades behind with officially mapping recreational trails, which is referred to as a Travel Management Plan.  If you’ve ridden in some epic places like Moab, that is an excellent example of a travel management plan: trails that are preserved and designated for your braapy pleasure.
 
There’s a popular old-school rhetoric within our dirtbike community which opposes disclosing trails to public land managers, rationalizing “If we point out that trail exists, they will just close it!” and “This is the wild west! We have had all these trails for years without a travel management plan and there’s nothing wrong with it – just leave us alone, we don’t need one.”  We are here to tell you that this is an outdated and misinformed position to take in 2020.  We collaborate with public land managers – in fact, lots of them ride dirtbikes among us on these same trails. They are definitely aware they exist, and are in favor of making as many of them legal as possible.  
 
We are not protecting our trails by attempting to conceal them or by burning them in and assuming they'll always be there.  To the contrary, we are risking the future of our trails by not having them officially designated as “multi-use trails" by the land manager.  It is significantly more difficult to close access an established legal trail than it is to close access to an undocumented trail.  
 
Accordingly, we’ve been in touch with some local BLM managers to try to get this ball rolling and push to prioritize establishing a travel management plan in Reno's backyard and get our every-weekend trails on the map, legally.  If and when, at whatever point in the future they may be threatened, we will have some ground to stand on – literally.
 
This is not a quick process, and frankly it is going to take years to accomplish this with the BLM.  Ultimately, this is a longgggg race of the tortuous vs. the snail … Federal land transfers take forever… BLM mapping takes forever.  We are going to start our race now.