A social media brouhaha replete with misinformation broke out this week in Summit County regarding a hiking trail that attracts large crowds during wildflower season.
The Acorn Creek Trail, a designated forest service trail 10 miles north of Silverthorne, sits at the perfect elevation for wildflower viewing in June when higher trails remain snow-covered or muddy. It begins at just under 8,400 feet, and a forest service description notes that it is “one of the first trails to melt out in the spring and be clear of snow.”
Over time, an unsanctioned “social” trail evolved as an adjunct to create what has been called the Acorn Creek Loop. Social trails are those that form organically from hiker traffic. They are not built, maintained or sanctioned by the forest service.
After the trail went viral on TikTok, a thread on Reddit this week claimed that the Acorn Creek social trail extension had been “closed” by the forest service. That’s not true.
David Boyd, spokesman for the White River National Forest, said the USFS asked the AllTrails app to take the Acorn Creek Loop down from the site, along with several other social trails in the White River. Instead of removing the Acorn Creek Loop, AllTrails kept it up but labeled it closed.
“We want people to stay on system trails, because those are designed to prevent erosion and all those things, but it’s not a closure,” Boyd told The Denver Post. “There are several social trails that looked on AllTrails like they were official trails. We just said, ‘Hey, would you mind taking those off, so there’s no confusion about what’s a system trail or not? But we didn’t close it. You can go up there and walk on it if you want to. It’s just like any forest service land.”
It’s not unusual for public land managers to ask AllTrails and other hiking and mountain biking apps to remove trails if they are social trails or are located on private land. Government agencies, including the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, have been meeting for years to address issues caused by these apps.
The Acorn Creek Trail remains on AllTrails, shown as open, and it attracted lots of hikers eager to see the wildflowers last weekend. As one Reddit commentator wrote, “It was stupid packed on Saturday. The police were there as well.”
Not police, actually, but Summit County Sheriff deputies were there enforcing parking regulations, according to Mike Schilling, a lieutenant with the sheriff’s department.
“All we had up there was a complaint about illegal parking,” Schilling said. “This time of year in Summit County, some of the trails are still muddy, and that is a more dry area. There were a lot of people there. We do enforce parking regulations on county roads, especially around trailheads.”
That, Schilling said, is for safety reasons.
“It’s like a snowball effect,” Schilling said. “The more people that come, and the more people end up parking on the road, the more the likelihood is that someone twists an ankle and there needs to be a medical or search and rescue response. We’re not out there to ruin anyone’s day, but for the safety of everybody, they’ve got to park in established parking lots.”
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