STAY THE TRAIL!
You've heard it...we've said it.
But do you know what the exceptions are (there are ALWAYS exceptions)? Well, Patrick wrote up a great explanation. He wrote this up for Colorado, but the information is good for almost any Forest Service or BLM area too. Read on for some great information by Patrick McKay.
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Legal Situations Where Off-Trail Driving is Allowed
- Private property - On private property where you have permission to be, such as a pay-to-play offroad park, you may drive wherever the land owner allows.
- Open OHV Areas - Certain areas on public lands (most often BLM lands) are designated as Open OHV Areas where cross-country driving is allowed and you can drive wherever you want within the area's boundaries. Examples include Sand Mountain (Sand Hollow) and White Wash Sand Dunes in Utah, or the Grand Valley OHV Area and North Sand Hills in Colorado.
- Dispersed camping access - On most Forest Service and BLM lands, you are allowed to drive a certain distance off designated routes to reach a dispersed campsite. These distances are normally found on Forest Service MVUMs or BLM travel maps or resource management plans, and they vary significantly between different Forest Service ranger districts and BLM field offices, from one car length up to as much as 300 feet. Forest Service roads that allow dispersed camping are often (but not always) denoted on MVUMs with dots next to the road. In districts with the 300 foot rule, this allows you to drive a pretty substantial distance off designated roads to reach a campsite. While creating new campsites is allowed, generally you should stick to established sites and not create new sites and campsite access roads. Note that in districts with more restrictive distances like one car length, there are often still many long-established campsites that are farther than one car length from a designated route. These are a gray area, but if they haven't been blocked off or signed as closed, it's still generally acceptable to use them.
- Parking or passing within one vehicle length of a designated road - Land management agencies consider the distance within one vehicle length of a designated route to be part of the road prism, and you are almost always allowed to park or pull one vehicle length off the road to pass another vehicle. This should be common sense, but it's amazing how many times I've seen people yell at others for parking alongside a road. If you need to stop, parking off the road is not only legal but the courteous thing to do so you are not blocking the road. It's always best to use existing wide spots or pull-outs when available, and you should avoid parking off-road if it would cause major resource damage like running over a bunch of thick vegetation. But unless signed as no parking, you can park off-trail, even above timberline. There is no general rule that you are not allowed to park on tundra, though that should be avoided if there is a reasonable alternative.
- Game retrieval - Certain National Forest districts in Colorado allow limited cross-country driving by hunters to retrieve an animal they have killed. There are usually strict rules and vehicle limitations for this so be sure to follow all applicable regulations.
- Reservoirs - Some reservoirs in Colorado {and Montana} allow vehicles to be driven along the shoreline or in dry lake beds below the normal water line when water levels are low. This would depend on the rules for that specific lake.
- County roads - Keep in mind that not every legal road is shown on Forest Service MVUMs. They often leave out roads under county jurisdiction which are still legal to drive. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell the difference between an unauthorized road and an unmarked county road, which often cross federal lands. You may have to research specific routes to be sure.
- Existing roads on BLM lands with no travel management plan in place - Several BLM field offices in Colorado and Utah have not completed travel management plans for the entire field office. In areas where no travel plan is in place, they restrict motorized travel to "existing routes." This can be extremely confusing. For example, the Royal Gorge Field Office in Colorado has completed travel plans for some areas like the Arkansas River corridor and Fourmile Travel Management area, but not others. The Saint George Field Office in Utah has no travel plan so you can drive any existing route unless it is signed as closed. Other Utah Field Offices such as the Price Field Office have incomplete travel plans where they designated some routes as open but did not designate any routes as closed and only considered an incomplete route inventory. This is true in the San Rafael Swell, where a more thorough travel plan is currently in-progress. In such places, you can generally drive on any established route that is not signed as closed on the ground, marked as closed on an official map, or in a Wilderness area.
- Roads across private lands subject to un-litigated prescriptive easements - In Colorado mining country, there are numerous old mining roads which cross various private mining claims and other private lands. If there is no Forest Service land in the area, they won't be shown on MVUMs, and it is often unclear whether they are legal to drive or not. In many cases, these roads have been traveled by the public for so long they are likely subject to something called a prescriptive public easement, which is the easement equivalent of adverse possession. There's no way to know for sure unless a court has ruled on it, and private landowners sometimes will sign and gate these roads as private with no warning. Then it's up to members of the public to sue the landowner to prove there is a prescriptive easement. Many large areas like the Leadville Mining District are full of roads like these that are of uncertain legal status. Usually the best you can do is assume the road is public unless there is a gate or no trespassing sign, and respect those if present.
- Long established play areas - Certain trails have long established play areas which, while they are much wider than a typical trail, have been tolerated by the land manager for decades and have never been signed as closed. Examples include Mini Moab off Flake Road in the Rainbow Falls area of Rampart Range or the play area along the Mount Rosa trail off Gold Camp Road near Colorado Springs. Unless legally designated as an open OHV area, they are technically illegal and could be closed off at any time. But until then they are generally considered fine to use as long as you don't go outside of the already disturbed areas.
- Trail braiding - Many designated roads (especially above timberline) have over time split into several paths at various points where it is hard to know what is the official road and what is technically an unauthorized route. Off-road clubs partner with the Forest Service and BLM to block off unauthorized bypasses all the time, but there are always plenty more out there. Technically the only legal path is the one shown in the official GIS records for the agency, but that is not always accurate, and sometimes agencies do actually allow bypasses even if they are not shown on official maps. You often just have to use common sense and use whatever appears to be the main path. Agencies won't normally fault people when it's impossible to tell which path is actually legal.
Those are the main situations where you may legally drive off-road vehicles off a designated motorized route. Also keep in mind that certain types of terrain like water crossings, desert washes, sand dunes, slickrock slabs, or heavily overgrown trails can be legal routes even though they don't look like an obvious road in photos. Hope this helps, and please be nice when you suspect someone of driving off trail rather than jumping to conclusions when you can't tell if one of these situations applies. It never hurts to give someone the benefit of the doubt and ask first.
Written by Patrick McKay
shared with permission
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