A Great Year

Today

In 2013, the Leave No Trace Center launched projects to support you and the other 140 million Americans that make outdoor recreation a priority. Today we are: 

  1. Working in thousands of classrooms across the country, developing tools for teachers to ensure that every child knows and practices Leave No Trace.
  2. Building active Leave No Trace communities by partnering with relevant organizations and outdoor leaders in their home areas.
  3. Laying the groundwork to ensure that there are more Traveling Trainers in your neck of the woods this year and beyond. 

Take a look back at what the Center recently accomplished accomplish:

  • From California to Maine, we revved up 87 local groups to give back doing trail work and cleaning up their home outdoor areas all while learning about Leave No Trace. Our Leave No Trace community stewardship initiatives resulted in 17,000 hours of volunteerism impacting over 60,000 people. 
  • Our boldest program, the Traveling Trainers, is touching lives in every state with close to 500 Leave No Trace educational sessions reaching 310,000 people last year. The result: more people are practicing Leave No Trace than ever before, ensuring healthier lands and a happier world.
  • When Friends of Fourmile approached us to help preserve over 100,000 striking, mountainous and high-use acres of recreational land in Colorado, we sent out a swift call-to-action. The outcome: our education of 200 volunteers, youth workshops for the adjacent school districts and training for land managers that ultimately impacted 695,000 community residents and visitors. The Fourmile initiative is a model of effective Leave No Trace in action. • State park visitors have been recognized as cross-over recreationists whose views are key to understanding how and why people practice Leave No Trace. We teamed up with Colorado State University and targeted Wyoming State Parks for a multifaceted research program to study peoples’ perceptions and practices of Leave No Trace. The results are helping shape our future programs.
  • One of the greatest goals is getting kids outside. Along with teaching Leave No Trace in schools and within youth organizations, we also created an online youth training. This new tool helps kids learn Leave No Trace and will be used by 120,000 kids in the coming months, growing our number of outdoor stewards.
  • Behind the scenes, we created new curriculum for frontcountry/urban areas, mountaineering and horse use. We continued training a national pool of volunteer educators by ensuring high-level, multi-day training for 3,040 people in the last 12 months.