My day was spent painting the bathroom, huffing the fumes, and my evening was spent playing pickleball, creating fumes of my own. By the time I arrived back home, ate, put the bathroom back together, and showered, I remembered I made no photograph nor wrote any words. I suppose I’ll start this off by sharing a photograph I finished recently. Taken on the final night of my beach vacation, it is already printed and framed, ready to be hung on the wall — the quickest turnaround for a photograph of mine in quite some time.
I suppose that’s simply because I knew, at the time of capture, exactly what I wanted.
While I edited a few other variants of this photograph — none of which were as good — I noticed writing on one side of the shop that mentioned something about go-karts. This, paired with today’s pickleball playing, got me thinking about outdoor recreation. More specifically, outdoor recreation that has negative consequences and harms the environment, often without us even thinking about these effects.
In 2023, toward the end of July, and through the first week of August, my father and I ventured to Lake City, Colorado for the first time. Just the two of us, each with a fourwheeler and a motorcycle. We planned to explore the small town we were staying in, primarily through use of the Alpine Loop. For the unfamiliar, this sixty-three-mile trail system connects Lake City, Ouray, and Silverton, allowing access to these areas while utilizing four-wheel drive, high-clearance vehicles as well as various types of ATVs.
Now, I grew up riding dirtbikes and fourwheelers on my family’s property. I am very comfortable on either, and I quite enjoy the thrill of racing around on them. As I reflect on their use on the Alpine Loop, however, I have begun to understand why Coloradans are not always fond of their use. For one, they are noisy, leading to the disruption of wildlife — the very thing, often, you are hoping to see while on the loop. This noise isn’t helped by the fact that so many ATV riders want to rip through the trail as fast as possible, kicking up excessive amounts of dust and creating even more noise than normal.
There’s also the devastation that riding on the loop does to the environment. I’m not talking about the fuel emissions or any of that. I mean the damage done to the earth itself, causing subsequent repairs using heavy machinery which further disrupts. That’s without mentioning that alpine soil takes hundreds of years to form and even longer to recover if driven or walked over. Why would anyone who claims to care about the environment want to utilize such a system if they know this?
As I sit here typing this, I wonder what other outdoor recreation I participate in, or have at one point, which is causing harm to the environment I hold so dear to my heart. Most people feign ignorance or justify their actions by claiming everyone else is doing the same, so why can’t they. That shouldn’t be the case. If we want to protect the world in which we inhabit, if we want to continue to benefit from nature for years to come, we should be thinking about the consequences to each of our actions — and altering them as is appropriate.
— C