Leave No Trace - The 7 Principles

So last year I made a pledge to myself to do more to promote "Leave No Trace" principles in my social media posts. Considering I haven't updated this blog in over a year...yeah I kind of fell off the wagon. My life spiraled into a bi of chaos, a bit of laziness, and I just haven't been writing. I'm going to try and fix that.

"Pic for attention" LOL

I've still been hiking, but I've been having difficulty motivating myself to actually write any trip reports or guides, so I'm going to take a dive instead into Leave No Trace principles. Some stuff is research backed and I'll cite my sources, some of it is my opinion, but I'm going to look at each of the seven principles over the next few posts.

What are they, anyway?

According to the Center for Outdoor Ethics, there are seven LNT principles:

• Plan ahead and prepare
• Travel and camp on durable surfaces
• Dispose of waste properly
• Leave what you find
• Minimize campfire impacts
• Respect wildlife
• Be considerate of other visitors

They're pretty straightforward, and can typically be summed as "use common sense" and "don't be a dick", but in my hiking forums there's a lot of contentious points about some of the LNT principles, especially that last one. You would think that basic principles to help balance preservation with recreation would not cause such an issue, but the various Facebook groups I am in would beg to differ. Those poor admins have locked commenting on countless threads over petty stuff.

So here we go. Over the next few weeks, look ahead as I dive deeper into each one and outline what I believe is acceptable behavior, what is definitely not, and how you can be a good outdoor steward while still getting that awesome Instagram shot. Let's dive down this rabbit hole (but not literally, as we want to respect the wildlife).

PS: I do plan to eventually get back to hiking guides. My life is still a crazy tumultuous tumbleweed right now. I'm using that stress to get these posts churned out, but the light at the end of the tunnel is clearly a glowing neon sign reading "Burnout" so bear with me if I go silent again while I try to bring order to the chaos.