Tag, You’re Not It
The first sign it’s going to be crowded is the trailhead parking lot. Or, rather, it’s the overflow of Subarus, Jeeps, and roof-rack-sporting minivans lining the access road to the parking lot. Still, you think, maybe there’s a chance for solitude. After all, your friend’s geotagged Instagram posts, which inspired this particular outing, showed an empty trail snaking through ponderosa pines and a panoramic high-alpine vista without a soul in sight.
After a handful of miles and several hundred feet of elevation gain, however, you’ve exchanged more polite hellos with strangers than you would with your office mates on a pre-pandemic Monday morning. As you leave the treeline behind for the final push to the summit, your hope for a quiet communion with the outdoors fades for good: There’s a queue to take carefully cropped summit selfies. It’s only when you’re back in cell service, scrolling through potential photos for your own feed, that you realize the old adage is true: Even in the wilderness, you’re not in traffic. You are traffic.
It’s an increasingly common scene across the Mountain West. Since at least 2015, people have been pointing to social media and geotagged photos, which include the name or geographic coordinates of where an image was taken, as a major driver behind the exploding popularity of our public lands. You may Michelle Kerns, deputy superintendent for Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which oversees the site, attributed the increase in large part to Horseshoe Bend’s trendiness on Instagram.
