On a smoky September morning at the Rattlesnake Trailhead, Mark Reinsel was strapping on his helmet and adjusting his pack. A lifelong outdoorsman now in his 70s, Reinsel has biked these trails nearly every week for the past 15 years.
Back then, the trailhead rarely filled. But since the pandemic, he’s noticed use skyrocket.
“Starting in 2020, weekends were much busier, and now weekdays seem about as crowded as weekends used to be,” he said.
Even so, he doesn’t mind the company. Over the years, his tolerance for sharing the trail has grown, keeping pace with the steady rise in people drawn to the Rattlesnake.
His perspective matches the data. A new University of Montana study, drawing on more than three decades of visitor surveys at the Rattlesnake National Recreation Area, found that while people’s preferred number of trail encounters has stayed steady since 1989, their tolerance for seeing others has skyrocketed. Americans may still crave solitude, but they’ve clearly adjusted to busier trails, experts say.
The study, led by University of Montana professor Will Rice and U.S. Forest Service researcher Chris Armatas, revisited survey questions first asked of trail users at the Rattlesnake in 1989. Thanks to digitized archives, the research team was able to compare today’s visitors with their counterparts from more than 30 years ago.
The most striking finding, Rice said, was just how much people’s tolerance has grown.
In 2022, visitors reported a maximum acceptable number of 30 encounters with other people on a trail in a day, up from 16 in 1989.
For hiker groups specifically, tolerance jumped to 13 groups in 2022 from just five groups in 1989 — a more than 150% increase.
Tolerance rose across other activities as well. The number of accepted dogs rose to 21 in 2022 from 11 in 1994. Joggers rose to 23 from 19 and bikers to 21 from 16.
Preferences, by contrast, remained relatively stable. The ideal number of total encounters hovered at 11 in 2022 and nine in 1989. Similar trends were noted across activity types.
It is important to note that these increases in tolerance come alongside a similar upward trend in Missoula’s population. Many of these new residents moved to Montana from places more densely populated than here. And they brought with them their perceptions of how many people make a trail “crowded.”
For the Forest Service, which manages the Rattlesnake, these changes in visitor perception are more than trivia. They help shape how trails are managed — from whether to expand parking lots to whether to impose permits. At Yosemite’s Half Dome, for example, a permit system was added after similar surveys showed climbers’ thresholds for crowding had been exceeded.
But the Rattlesnake is not Half Dome. Here, conflicts between user groups have eased rather than intensified. “We actually found fewer issues than anticipated between mountain bikers and hikers,” said Rice, who added that bikers tend to cluster on some trails, while hikers and runners favor. “People have kind of figured it out — self-zoning over time.”
Still, not every group has thrived. Equestrian use has declined since the earlier surveys, which Rice says may suggest that some riders may be going elsewhere in search of solitude. That reduction, Rice noted, could be a concern: “You want to make sure you’re not displacing too many people who want a specific experience.”
One solution to potential conflict is designating certain trails for specific uses. Another is improving signage and etiquette education. Missoula County’s “Slow & Say Hello” campaign encourages bikers in high-use areas to slow down and greet those they pass. Those sorts of campaigns have been shown to be effective in lowering the temperature on some of these recreation conflicts.
For Reinsel, the growing number of trail users has only added to the experience, not taken away from it. “I enjoy seeing other people on the trail,” he said. “I can always find solitude if that’s what I want, but I like to see people out doing healthy outdoor activities.”
