Leave No (Digital) Trace?

The boundaries of Alaska’s Denali National Park and Preserve contain six million acres, an area larger than eighty-six of the world’s countries and five of the United States. Within this vast protected space are a mere handful of designated trails. And yet in 2015, park rangers took the unprecedented step of asking visitors not to publish, share, or follow GPS coordinates of routes or campsites on social media, for fear of overuse in the most popular areas.

Farther south, on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, the Vance Creek railway bridge was abandoned by Simpson Logging in the 1950s and over the years attracted a slow trickle of adventurous hikers, who’d been tipped off primarily through word of mouth. By 2014, thanks to posts on Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Facebook, the span had become one of the most popular destinations on the peninsula, with visitors from all over the U.S. and Canada arriving to snap pictures. Alarmed by liability concerns—the bridge looms almost three hundred fifty feet