Owning 38 Million Acres

Last winter, Nathan, Wren the Adventure Hound, and I pointed the truck east and drove from southern Utah to Nashville. We crossed through New Mexico and into Texas, and somewhere along that long stretch of highway, the landscape shifted in a way that felt bigger than geography.

Growing up in Kansas, I didn’t have language for it. Kansas ranks 50th in the nation for percentage of public land. Less than one percent. Texas is 49th. I had simply accepted fences, posted signs, and the quiet understanding that if you wanted to roam, you needed permission.

Living in Utah for the past decade has spoiled me in the best possible way. So much of this state is public that it becomes dangerously easy to take it for granted. We truly get to live like kings and queens here. Nathan and I own a modest, affordable home right off the highway in Kanab. We run All Ways Adventure from a home office squeezed into a corner of our bedroom. Our overhead is low. Our needs are simple.

And when we are tired, we can disappear.

We can camp on any of the roughly 38 million acres of public land that belong to all of us. Depending on the land manager, you can often camp for free for up to two weeks in one location. No hookups. No amenities. Just stars, sandstone, and silence. For climbers like us, two weeks in one place is perfect. Wren comes with us. We bring firewood from home and build campfires when conditions allow. We sleep well. We are largely unconcerned about someone disturbing our things.

Public land means we collectively “own” millions of acres without being billionaires. Through our tax dollars, we all get access to wildness. We all get a shot at that deep exhale that only comes when the horizon is wide and unbroken.

I knew this intellectually. But driving through states where that access is scarce made it land differently in my body.

No shade to Texas. Okay, maybe a little shade. If you want to ride a dirt bike, rock climb, or hike with your dog there, you have limited options in a state larger than many countries unless you own land or know someone who does. Once land is sold into private ownership, that decision is nearly irreversible. The ecological and cultural impacts linger for generations.

Back home in southern Utah, I started thinking about responsibility.

Nathan and I are decidedly child free. Somewhere along the way, I convinced myself that meant I was off the hook. No kids. No inheritance of guilt. No direct stake in what kind of world we pass on.

But that drive changed something in me.

I started thinking about the people who chose to protect these landscapes long before I ever tied into a rope here. The Indigenous communities who stewarded this land for thousands of years. The relatively recent visionaries who, as the country was being parceled off and sold, had the foresight to set aside enormous swaths as public. They were not my ancestors. Someone else’s grandparents and great grandparents did that work. They invested their time, their political capital, their energy so that I could camp for free with my dog and wake up to a canyon wren singing.

That realization hit hard.

Public lands here are not without pressure. In Utah, conversations about privatization and transfer flare up regularly. It would be easy to make this political. But to me, it is more personal than partisan.

A few years ago, one of the retired shuttle buses in Zion National Park carried a quote from Edward Abbey that has grown with me over the last decade: “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit.”

That line feels truer now than ever.

When I think about what public land actually does, I think about climbing. About being on lead, above my last piece of protection, heart pounding, brain spiraling. Ten years of consistently stepping into that space has rewired me. I have trained my mind to believe that I am safe. I trust that I will not fall. And if I do fall, I trust the protection I have placed. I trust my partner. I trust that I will make good decisions even in the split second when gravity takes over.

Seventy five percent of the time, I do not fall. Ninety nine percent of the falls are uneventful. But the transformation is not about the statistics. It is about the internal work that happens in wild places that demand presence, humility, and reverence.

That kind of growth requires landscape. It requires open space where exploration is possible. It requires places where failure is survivable and learning is constant. Public land is the classroom.

These experiences shape the kind of people I want leading our world. People who know how to assess risk. People who understand consequence. People who can sit with discomfort without panicking. People who have felt small beneath a desert sky and come away steadier for it.

We do not have to have children to have skin in the game. We are already beneficiaries of someone else’s courage and foresight. That inheritance carries responsibility.

At All Ways Adventure, our business depends on these lands. But even more than that, our humanity does.

Thirty eight million acres. They are not mine. They are not yours. And somehow, they are both.

Let’s treat them like the priceless gift they are.