This commentary is by Rex Madden, co-founder of Greater Nederland Area Riders (GNAR), a mountain bike advocacy nonprofit based in Nederland.
A recent opinion piece published in Boulder Reporting Lab argues that Boulder County’s alternating trail-use pilot can balance safety, access and conservation. But the argument is largely unsupported by the evidence and, in several key respects, contradicted by the county’s own data and statements from county officials. At its core, the proposal reads like a thinly veiled argument for excluding one user group from public land based on the preferences of another.
Boulder County Parks and Open Space’s own documentation defines trail conflicts as “values conflicts,” instances where visitors interfere with one another’s goals or preferences, not safety incidents. The systemwide conflict rate is 4%.
I asked Chief Park Ranger Bevin Carithers at the May trail-use pilot open house whether the county has recorded data on collisions or accidents between mountain bikers and hikers. He acknowledged that no such data exists to substantiate a safety concern.
What we have, then, is a 4% rate of reported preference-based discomfort. Designing a major access policy around that is a disproportionate response to a preference issue, not a documented safety problem.
The opinion also repeatedly refers to these properties as “hiking trails.” They are designated multi-use trails. That distinction is not semantic.
Calling them hiking trails implies a hierarchy of ownership that does not exist in the designation and frames mountain bikers as guests rather than equal members of the user community these trails were built to serve. That framing reflects the very philosophy this pilot would institutionalize.
On the ecological argument, the opinion piece cites no studies and references no site-specific data for Heil Valley Ranch, Hall Ranch or Betasso Preserve. The broader scientific literature also does not support the hierarchy being implied.
A 2003 study by researchers Audrey R. Taylor and Richard L. Knight of Colorado State University found wildlife exhibited statistically similar responses to hikers and mountain bikers, with no biological justification for managing mountain biking differently than hiking. Two additional studies — one by Swiss researchers Hans Gander and Paul Ingold in 1997, and another led by Christopher Papouchis in 2001 — found mountain bikers caused less wildlife disturbance than hikers.
Research on bald eagles found they were most likely to flush when recreationists stopped to observe them and were less alarmed when cyclists passed quickly at constant speed.
The Sierra Club has published findings that hiking often disturbed wildlife more than motorized recreation, because animals interpret a silent approach as predatory. Taylor and Knight also found wildlife reacted more strongly to off-trail users than trail users, supporting the argument that purpose-built trails reduce ecological disturbance compared to the unsanctioned proliferation that results from inadequate sanctioned infrastructure.
The conservation argument used to justify restrictions also helped create the very problem it now claims to solve.
The proliferation of unsanctioned trails across Boulder County is evidence that sanctioned infrastructure has failed to meet legitimate demand, not that mountain bikers are bad actors. The conservation case for building more trails is stronger than the conservation case for restricting the ones we have.
A department that does not update its approach to reflect changing populations, changing recreation patterns and evolving best practices is not conserving anything. It is preserving institutional inertia.
Boulder County Commissioner Claire Levy’s constituent newsletter states the purpose of this proposal is to “better support hikers and horseback riders,” not to reduce conflict or improve safety, but explicitly to benefit other user groups at mountain bikers’ expense.
Levy also recently told 9News that Boulder County Parks and Open Space acquires land primarily for conservation, not recreational use. If that is official policy, the public deserves clarity about it, because voters have long been voting to fund open space taxes under a different assumption.
It is also a choice, not a necessity.
The county could acquire land with recreational development as an explicit goal. It could identify areas within its existing 100,000 acres suitable for purpose-built trails. It could partner with volunteer organizations ready to plan and build. These are decisions the county is refusing to make.
Trail designer Joshua Rebennack, who works nationally on shared-use trail systems, submitted a detailed letter to the commissioners this month documenting how similar conflicts have been addressed elsewhere through trail design and user-management techniques, not exclusion.
Shared singletrack operates successfully in New York City, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh and Duluth without restricting any user group.
Meanwhile, the world’s largest bicycle manufacturer just signed a lease to move its U.S. headquarters to Boulder. IMBA, PeopleForBikes, Pearl Izumi and Outside Inc. are all here, alongside many other smaller cycling-related businesses.
Boulder County has been chosen by the cycling industry as its home. Yet the county’s open space department continues to restrict the trails that helped build that reputation, with no plan to create meaningful alternatives.
Mountain bikers are not asking for special treatment. We are asking to be treated as the equal constituents we are, on land we funded, managed by a department that should be serving all of us.
The pilot is not balance. It is a policy choice made on behalf of one group’s preferences, dressed in the language of conservation, by an institution that has not meaningfully updated its philosophy in decades.
