When President Biden signed the EXPLORE Act into law earlier this year, it seemed the entire outdoor community celebrated. Billions of federal dollars would now being earmarked to fund recreation on public lands, ostensibly a response to the ever-growing outdoor economy’s contribution to the American economy as a whole. In 2024 the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR) pinpointed that contribution at roughly $1.2 trillion.

For years now, outdoor media and the outdoor industry generally speaking had been concentrating on encouraging more people to recreate on public lands. County, state, federal — didn’t matter, just get out there, get hiking, biking, climbing, or whatever your particular passion is, the more the merrier. Part of that encouragement took the form of lobbying lawmakers to put together legislation reducing barriers to entry in the outdoors, often in remote, backcountry areas.

Incredibly, the EXPLORE Act, a bipartisan piece of legislation from the start, passed with unanimous consent, a rarity even for simple, smaller bills. 

“I’m just so excited that it was truly bipartisan,” Jessica Wahl Turner, President of the ORR, told the Traveler. “It set the precedent that the [outdoor recreation economy] is important for the country. We’ve never had a package like this just for us, developed by us, before.”

The EXPLORE Act combined a number of proposed public lands bills into one giant omnibus package. As the Traveler recently covered, it included legislation like the Bicycling on Long-Distance Trails (BOLT) Act, which cyclists had long championed. It also included the Protecting America’s Rock Climbing (PARC) Act, which effectively instructed the Department of Interior to recognize rock climbing as a federally protected act in designated wilderness areas. It also contained provisions to make it easier for guides and outfitters to secure permits. It promises to modernize and streamline reservation and entrance processes. In addition, there are a number of programs in the bill geared toward making it easier for more people in more places to get outside and in green spaces, especially those from low-income areas.

But not everyone was happy to see the EXPLORE Act pass. 

Groups and individuals primarily concerned with protecting wildlife and designated wilderness areas, for example, saw the EXPLORE Act as a package of bills aimed at encouraging consumption of nature, of wilderness, rather than conservation. 

   Wilderness, The Last Frontier

A particularly controversial example was the PARC Act, which made allowances for the responsible installation of fixed, permanent climbing anchors (small bits of metal fixtures bolted to rock climbers rope into for safety) in federally designated wilderness areas, even though the 1964 Wilderness Act specifically forbids permanent installations. While climbing anchors are invisible on the face of rock wall until you’re right next to them, for many groups they violate the nature of the Wilderness Act and potentially open the door for more activities previously illegal in wilderness areas. 

“Fixed anchors were our number one concern with the EXPLORE Act,” Katie Bilodeau, legislative director and policy analyst for Wilderness Watch, told the Traveler. "For the first time in the Wilderness Act’s history, it's made an exception for a recreation group to do something that involves tools or equipment in wilderness areas that the Wilderness Act would otherwise prohibit.”

Bilodeau pointed out that Congress frequently introduces bills that attempt special exemptions for activities in designated wilderness areas that don’t comport with the Wilderness Act.  

“In the aggregate, that starts to really weaken our concept of wilderness, what we expect when we walk into wilderness, and sometimes even the wildness of wilderness,” Bilodeau says.

Groups like Wilderness Watch wonder where that ends. 

Federally designated Wilderness areas make up only about 2 percent of public lands in the lower 48. Add Alaska to that, and the number bumps up to about 5 percent. The vast majority of the country’s public lands allow all sorts of human impact, lots of which is permanent, motorized, or extractive. EXPLORE Act opponents made the case that these dwindling wild places deserve more protection, not a gradual erosion of the safeguards that exists for the sake of recreation. 

“We're talking about letting recreationists do these incompatible activities in these last vestiges of these wild landscapes we have,” Bilodeau said. “This [the PARC Act] opens the door for all sorts of other recreationists that want their little piece of the wilderness pie. I think the recreation industry can see that if you put enough money into something, you can get Congress to make an exception to the Wilderness Act. I think other groups are going to try.”

PARC Act proponents, like Access Fund, a climbing advocacy non-profit, disagrees that, at least in the case of climbing, designated wilderness areas are threatened by the EXPLORE Act. 

Part of Access Fund’s mission is to promote “sustainable Wilderness climbing,” especially as climbing has made popularity gains in recent decades. 

“We can’t just fight for access, we have to be seen as respectful stewards,” Heather Thorne, Access Fund’s executive director, told the Traveler. “We have to be doing everything we can to mitigate human impact on the landscape. We educate climbers for low-impact behaviors. But we don’t believe in shutting off access altogether.” According to Thorne, Access Fund sets up programs and practices that minimize impact, like taking note of bird nests and re-routing climbers to avoid known nesting sites. 

Thorne points out that her interest in conservation was sparked by her experiences high up on rock faces in remote places. Something she says is both common and as a kind of conservation recruitment tool.

“My passion for conservation came from being 12,000 feet up in the air at the top of a peak, seeing the beautiful plants there, watching peregrine falcons, and learning to tread lightly,” she said. “We believe in access that minimizes impact.”

One thing Wilderness Watch points out is recreation does not equal conservation. The two concepts seem related, as recreationists often support conservation in the sense of fight for more backcountry access and fight against pollution, resource extraction, construction, or other damaging intrusions on public lands. 

But, according to Bilodeau, those who consider public lands as a kind of natural playground can often ignore, or simply don’t consider, the impact human presence has on wildlife and ecosystems as a whole, and what the Wilderness Act was written to protect. 

And that presence is increasing. 

In 2021, Yellowstone National Park hosted 4,860,242 visitors, the busiest year in the park’s history, according to the National Park Service. That number was nearly equaled in 2024, Yellowstone’s second busiest year on record. That’s tens of millions of tourists in just one national park just in the 21st century alone. 

The Park Service estimates that roughly 325 million people visited a national park in 2023. The entire U.S. population is roughly 340 million people. That’s effectively the entire country hiking, biking, riding, rafting, and driving in areas preserved for their natural beauty and character. Even those with a light impact are still making their presence felt. 

Emigrant Wilderness, California / Justin Housman file

Joel Berger, a wildlife biologist at Colorado State University, has written extensively on the impact recreationists have on wild animals in protected areas. 

“While nature-based tourism supports local communities,” Berger recently wrote in an essay for PBS Nature, “we cannot ignore the well-being of species or health of the ecosystems that attract us.”

In the essay, Berger uses southern Utah as an example. The area around Moab, which includes national parks, national forests, and Bureau of Land Management properties, sees a massive influx of outdoor visitors in the spring. That coincides with when desert bighorn sheep females are nearing the end of their pregnancies. When they encounter people hiking, riding bikes, or, worse, motorcycles, they tend to flee, using up a huge amount of calories they’ve stocked up for healthy fetal development. They may abandon productive feeding grounds. When a climber spooks a sheep that scrambles away over the next cliff, it may seem harmless, but that can have detrimental effects on the baby sheep about to be born. 

“Wild areas and wildlife are definitely getting squeezed,” Berger told the Traveler. “It’s a constant battle.”

Turner suggests the EXPLORE Act may end up alleviating some of the pressures that come from overcrowding particular backcountry areas. 

“Within a couple years, the average public lands user will have a more streamlined experience,” she says. “They’ll be able to see in real time if lands are busy, see where the less busy places are, and head there instead, spreading out demand. Overcrowding can come from lack of knowledge.”

The Wilderness Act wasn’t necessarily designed to carve out wide swaths of perfectly untrammeled wilderness. When it was written, it was, as most legislation is, a product of compromise. Grazing and mineral extraction for example, were allowed in certain areas, grandfathered into the legislation. But it cemented the idea among lawmakers that true wilderness is precious, irreplaceable, and deserves protection. 

“We need to maintain the wilderness we have, and restore what was lost,” said Berger. 

Bilodeau argues that wilderness designation is there to protect the species and ecosystems in wild places. Not necessarily to safeguard the public’s right to recreate in those wild places.

“We try to keep in mind more than just the solitude and what humans can gain from wilderness,” Bilodeau said, “but also keep in mind the animal inhabitants — it’s their home. If they're forced from it, it's by necessity a reaction to us.”