Designing Sustainable Off-Highway Vehicle Trails Part I

This online engineering PDH interactive presentation provides an updated version of the original “Designing Sustainable Off-Highway Vehicle Trails Part I”.

This report is the author’s collection of tools for the construction and management of off-highway vehicle (OHV) trails. The author brings together resources from a variety of sources, including the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, the U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service (NPS), private trail management organizations, the State of Alaska, and others. The author developed some of the tools based primarily on his experience managing OHV trails in Alaska.

Proper management of off-highway vehicle (OHV) trails is one of the most important tasks for trail managers today. In 2004, former Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth identified unmanaged recreation as one of the Four Threats to the Nation’s forests and grasslands. His example cited the nearly tenfold growth in popularity of OHV recreation in the preceding 30 years and indicated that even a small percentage of problem use can have a large cumulative impact.

This presentation presents sustainable trail design guidelines, and challenges of applying sustainable trail design guidelines. Further, it discusses the categories of the trail sustainability. In addition, many trail management concepts used by Federal land management agencies apply to off-highway vehicle (OHV) trails. Among these are five Trail Fundamentals refined and implemented by the Forest Service for all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), motorcycles, and four-wheel drive vehicles, collectively called OHVs, all are which discussed in this presentation.

This 1 PDH online interactive presentation is applicable to Transportation engineers, Forest Service employees and their partners, designers, managers, recreation professionals, and technical staff who are interested in ensuring inclusive outdoor recreation opportunities and designing sustainable off-highway vehicle trails.