Calm Down About ATVs And Hunting In National Parks

There’s a propaganda war being waged for the hearts and minds of low-information Americans. The best way to win it is to understand it.

Did you hear that Trump authorized off-road vehicles and hunting in national parks?! Does that mean the unwashed masses are going to be running over bison?! Will a pack of bloodthirsty hillbillies start murdering endangered species?! The reality, as with most things from this administration, is just some propaganda told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, but with very little actual significance. Here’s what you need to know about all this, plus what else is new on public lands this week.

Off Road Vehicles In National Parks

Want to know how Trump convinces dumb people to vote for him? It’s because he has a feral instinct for sniffing out ways to activate grievances between social classes.

Late Friday night, the White House announced an executive order revoking Nixon and Carter-era bans on some “off-road vehicles” on some roads in national parks. Note those quotes and the word “road.”

Both Nixon’s and Carter’s EOs defined “off-road vehicles” as: “…any motorized vehicle designed for or capable of cross-country travel on or immediately over land, water, sand, snow, ice, marsh, swampland, or other natural terrain; except that such term excludes…any vehicle whose use is expressly authorized by the respective agency head under a permit, lease, license, or contract.”

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is responsible for classifying different types of vehicles subject to federal regulation, defines an “off-road vehicle” as any that has four-wheel drive (AWD had yet to be invented when this rule was written in the 1960s, and here meets the definition despite the fact that it powers only a single wheel), or a gross vehicle weight rating of at least 6,000 pounds. In addition to one of those factors, a vehicle needs at least four of these five additional features: an approach angle of at least 28 degrees, a breakover angle of at least 14 degrees, a departure angle of at least 20 degrees, and either 7.8 inches of total ground clearance or 7.1 inches of axle clearance.

As I explored at length for Outside in 2023, that NHTSA definition has since been used as a regulatory loophole by virtually every automaker, and interpreted strictly, would mean that your one-wheel drive Subaru Crosstrek shouldn’t technically be allowed to enter a national park.

That’s obviously not the case, so most agencies, including NPS, just interpret “off-road vehicle” to mean anything not wearing a license plate. And that then creates a further problem because everyone knows we’re talking about ATVs here, but those can be issued license plates making them road legal in Arizona, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Idaho, North Dakota and Oklahoma, while they exist in a sort of legal gray area in many other states. And since NPS adopts traffic regulations from the state in which a given park is located, that’s just created an immense amount of confusion.

The other thing that people miss about “off-road vehicles” is that you can’t legally use them off-road. Rather, on any form of public land they’re only able to be used on the same roads and designated motorized vehicle trails as any other vehicle, just in some cases such roads and trails aren’t paved. ATVs are subject to the same speed limits, noise regulations, and other laws as any other vehicle operated on those roads and trails.

A strict interpretation of Trump’s EO would simply be that it’s doing what its says on the label, and clarifying these very outdated, very confusing regulations.

But of course it came from Trump, so it’s intended to cause as much controversy as possible. The kind of people who prefer to visit national parks in their Priuses are getting all upset that the kind of people who prefer to visit national parks in an ATV don’t look, sound, or smell like them. And in reverse, Trump is able to take that grievance, hold it up to the kind of people who like ATVs and say, “See, these people hate you.” And he’s not wrong.

Hunting In National Parks

What I think a lot of people miss about the National Park Service is that it doesn’t just manage Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. Nationwide, it manages 433 separate units, across 50 states and four U.S. Territories. Those range from tiny, urban units like the 7.7-acre Stonewall National Monument in downtown Manhattan, to enormous units most people will never get anywhere near, like the 729,000-acre Big Cypress National Preserve in Florida.

Speaking of Big Cypress, according to an EO issued in January that’s just now starting to see individual regulations changed in some of those park units, alligator hunting within the preserve’s boundaries may become legal for the first time.

Did you just clutch your pearl necklace so hard that you’re now scrambling on all fours to find where all those tiny oyster secretions rolled? Take a break for a second and consider the fact that NPS already allows hunting for deer, turkey and wild hogs within that preserve’s boundaries. Adding alligators to that list, which are already hunted immediately adjacent to the preserve’s boundaries, and the take of which is strictly governed by state and federal regulations, really isn’t going to change much. Except maybe in creating headlines that Trump can hold up as proof that some Americans hate other Americans.

Just to be abundantly clear: there will be no hunting in anything most people consider a National Park. This is simply an expansion of the types of hunting already allowed in some of those more obscure, remote, lesser-visited units managed by NPS, where it makes sense to charge hunters to perform animal conservation, rather than bill taxpayers for the same. As with all hunting in America, that will continue to be a highly regulated activity that works in benefit of both the species subject to hunting, and ecosystem health as a whole.

This is part of a larger playbook that the administration has been using since its first attempt at an autocratic takeover. Hunting is a highly regulated activity that’s governed by literal books full of rules and laws. Trump’s Department of the Interior has a pattern of cleaning up some minor part of those regulations—clarifying the definition of “daylight,” or something similarly irrelevant—then making some big announcement about how it’s “opening up hunting opportunities” across some obscene amount of acres, when all they’re really doing is changing one word in one of thousands of sentences in those regulations. No one would ever notice any difference if we didn’t all get so upset about every little thing, then allow these assholes to take advantage of that to win elections.

Do Bears Shit In The Woods?

From The Daily Interlake: “Grinnell Glacier Trail is closed after what Glacier National Park officials described as a surprise bear encounter Thursday afternoon.”

“Park personnel and emergency services responded to the incident, but officials would not confirm whether anybody was injured in the encounter.”

“Park officials also declined to comment on the number of hikers involved, whether any victims were transported for medical care and if a deterrent like bear spray had been deployed. The park did not identify the species of bear involved and the nature of reported bear activity in the area prior to the encounter.”

“News of the incident first surfaced through a Facebook post in which user Devin Dufrene described encountering a distraught hiker running down the Grinnell Glacier Trail near Lake Josephine, screaming that there had been a bear attack.”

“He did not slow down. He did not stop to talk,” Dufrene told the Daily Inter Lake on Friday. “We tried to stop and talk to him. He wasn’t stopping.”

“Dufrene used his cell phone to connect to satellite and contact emergency services. His party then turned to head back toward Many Glacier, only to find a bear with brown fur strolling along the trail toward them. Though curious, Dufrene said the bear was unaggressive and looked smaller than a full-grown grizzly bear. His hiking party climbed a nearby hillside, and the bear passed by them without incident.”

“As they continued toward Many Glacier, Dufrene saw a helicopter fly overhead and passed two crews of park rangers hiking up the trail with stretchers.”

One of the points I try to make when I talk about the misleading propaganda around bear spray is that we can’t rely on anecdotal evidence of its efficacy. Did this very frightened individual spray what very much sounds like a juvenile black bear before fleeing in a panic, and will someone hellbent on misinforming visitors to Glacier jot that down as a “success”? And why does every encounter a tourist has with a bear have to be so stupid?

Honestly, this would probably be good fodder for Trump. I can see the Truth Social post now:

SO-CALLED “locals” in iceberg park think your STUPID. All REAL Americans know that beautifully applying bear spray before any hike is the ONLY PATRIOTIC way to stop the polar bears who many people who know are saying are rapists and murderers from illegally crossing SLEEPY Joe Biden’s OPEN border in caravans from Canada. I will IMMEDITELY be calling on our great secretary of WAR to close the border and RAIN HELL on these Canadian bears committing crimes in our great and beautiful national parks. Nancy PELOSI may say its impossible but MAKE NO MISTAKE: Trump-branded Bear Spray is the best and most beautiful option. Thank you for your attention to THIS matter DJT!!!!

Make National Park Entry Fees Corrupt Again

Speaking of National Parks, The New York Times reports that the administration is rerouting entry fee revenues to fund beautification efforts in Washington DC ahead of the UFC fight Trump plans for his birthday.

While that’s going on, another Times story reports that DOI is quietly soliciting corporate sponsorships for the same purpose, promising donors private access to the President once he finishes stroking the sweaty bodies of the fighters.

While a waste of funds and hopelessly corrupt, this isn’t necessarily as big a problem as you might think. 80 percent of entry fees stay in the parks where they are collected, while the remainder are already dedicated to helping fund parks like the National Mall that don’t collect those fees.

It’s worth noting though because it continues a trend that began during Trump 1 of treating park entry fee accounts like a slush fund that can be spent on optics rather than needed impacts. Then, and in the last shutdown those fees were illegally diverted to cover park operations even while appropriations lapsed.

I’ll pick this back up as part of a larger story on financial mismanagement at some point.

Reconciliation Package

E&E News reports that congressional Republicans plan to race to include as many pro-drilling provisions as possible in some sort of policy package they hope to pass through budget reconciliation before the August recess. Since they can’t get anything meaningful past the Senate Filibuster otherwise, look for any harms they hope to do to public land to be included.

This will likely be a heavy focus for my coverage this summer, and wanted to highlight it here so you can start paying attention.

Since the mid-terms are now only five months away, and Trump can no longer threaten lawmakers with a primary opponent from the far-right, I’d expect them to try and stay clear of any easily-communicated stuff like large-scale sell offs of public land. But that just makes insightful coverage of public lands policy even more important. I’ll be breaking through the jargon and the complexity and explaining what really matters, hopefully enabling all of us to hold these assholes accountable at the ballot box this November.

Top photo: NPS

A journalist with more than two decades of experience working around the world, Wes Siler is here to cut through the outrage and disinformation to bring you the factual, insightful, actionable reporting you need to understand what’s going on. Upgrading to a paid subscription supports this reporting, and buys personal access to Wes, who will help you save money on gear, plan outdoor adventures, and prepare for real life, and who promises he’s less salty in real life than he sometimes comes across as on the Internet.