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Comment by ianlevesque | Hacker News Reader

Wow I feel attacked. Its hardly Disney-esque, there are some delineated trails for safety and restrictions to prevent them from being destroyed by the millions of yearly visitors. If you want federally owned but chaotic there's millions of acres of BLM land, particularly in the west. Not every American is a blithering idiot.

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National Forests are a nice balance between the two. Most trails are lightly trafficked, especially when you get more than a couple of miles from the trailhead.

That's true I forgot about the third designation.

Don't forget National Wildlife Refuges!

And the National Grasslands.

And the Wilderness Areas.

One of my personal favorites: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_Waters

If you portage in far enough, you can be the only person/people on a lake, with no cell phone service. On the other side of the Canadian border is Quetico Provincial Park, which is a Canadian canoeing wilderness. The million acres of BWCA and 1.2 million acres of Quetico join to form a massive wilderness full of lakes and wildlife. Native Americans left pictographs which are still visible, and French Voyageurs used this area extensively to travel from Canada to Lake Superior. I highly recommend a trip if you ever get the opportunity.

And there's more! Many government agencies are responsible for managing our huge amount of public land.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_land#/media/File%3AUS...

Last week I camped for the entire week in a national forest and didn’t see another camper the entire time. The issue is we have high demand national parks that “everyone” visits and lots of national forest and BLM land that is very sparse.

I think what OP is referring to is that it seems like every year or so we hear that someone knocks over some balanced rock in Bryce or Moab or jumps into the grand prismatic pools in yellowstone.

And yeah, those areas are really full of idiot tourists walking around everywhere.

What I think a lot of people don't understand is that is 0.00001% of all the beauty that BLM/NF lands in the US offer. I have my own favorite trails in Oregon, Arizona, Utah (that I won't share anywhere) but some of them see 1 person per day. I'm sure there are some folks that know about trails visited once a year. It's those areas that are definitely NOT Disney. (Especially on June 21 when you'll have thousands of naked people hiking everywhere)

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