I live on a semi-rural road where ranches are steadily turning into ranchettes and subdivisions. Our county plan called for a bike path to be developed along the road. As properties were subdivided, developers were supposed to dedicate an easement along the road for a trail.

But the angry rhetoric of private property rights rose to a fever pitch, foreclosing any opportunity to rationally discuss the costs and benefits of a trail. County commissioners backed away from the plan as quickly as they could. They erased the bike path from county maps.

I know we’re not alone in our predicament. I hear stories like this all the time. If it’s not planned trails being erased from maps, it’s actual trails being closed down by development of private property. We’re losing trails left and right as suburban development takes over the West.

As our economy and culture changes in the West, we’re relentlessly losing touch with the land.Young people rarely get the opportunity to spend a summer working on a farm or ranch anymore. The rural experience is becoming a luxury that only rich dudes can afford.

Trails made the West and made Westerners what they are. People are wanderers by nature but perhaps nowhere more so than in the West. When we shut down trails and paths, we become like caged animals, whether in our city centers or our gated suburbs.

Trails make healthy communities. Trails make safe communities. Trails make communities, period. Planners and developers know this. Look at how they incorporate trails within their gated enclaves. But we need more than this. We need trails that connect us to each other and to the land.

There is a strong counter trend to closing down trails. In many communities in the West and around the country, people are realizing that trails are part of the good life. They don’t have to conflict with private property. In fact, they can enhance private property values, in addition to our private and public lives.

There are people of all walks of life working for trails and paths. Although trails, like environmental issues in general, have become a partisan battleground, this is not a Democratic or Republican issue. Paths and trails are the oldest human ways of communication.

We need to start with a vigorous discussion of the costs and benefits of trails without allowing it to be shouted down by knee-jerk property rights and “not-in-my backyard” rhetoric.

I still have hope that my neighbors will see a way to open our neighborhood to a path before it’s really too late. I believe it will take a neighborhood-by-neighborhood effort to keep trails. But I know it will take more than that too. My neighborhood could easily become a chokepoint on a system of trails along the base of the Sierra Nevada. So we need to reach beyond our neighborhoods.

I hope you will join with your neighbors on a trail to the future. We need to keep trails and paths open through our communities and on to the land or something important will go out of the West.

Jon Christensen is a member of the truckee meadows trails association, P.O. Box 265, Reno, NV, 89504, 702/786-8154. If you know of other groups working on trails in the Great Basin, write to us and we’ll feature them in an upcoming issue.