Ground Truth: The Terrain Crisis Facing Riding Culture
The Riding Collective — Research Study 004
Dr. Maren Solvik, Chief Researcher
April 2026
Introduction: You Cannot Archive a Powder Run When There Is No Powder
Every entry in The Riding Collective's archive — every legend, every sacred site, every timeline marker — is attached to a physical place. A wave. A slope. A trail. A stretch of concrete. The archive preserves the culture, but the culture does not exist without the ground beneath it.
This is the fact that the riding world has been slow to confront. We document traditions. We celebrate pioneers. We argue about style and authenticity and which generation had it better. But beneath all of that argument, the terrain itself is disappearing. Not metaphorically. Physically. The glaciers that feed the snowpack are retreating. The reefs that shape the waves are bleaching. The trails are being closed. The open lots are being paved. The coastlines are being reshaped by water that will not stop rising.
I have spent fourteen years documenting environmental change — first as a glaciologist in the Arctic, then as a coastal researcher in the South Pacific. I have watched ice shelves calve into the sea and measured the pH of water killing coral. I did not come to riding culture research expecting to find the same crisis. But it is the same crisis. The terrain that riders depend on is subject to the same forces that are reshaping every landscape on earth: warming, development, extraction, and policy failure.
This study exists because The Riding Collective has committed 30% of its Guardian fund revenue to terrain defense. That is not a small allocation. It demands justification. It demands specificity. It demands that we name the places being lost, measure how fast they are going, identify who is already fighting, and determine where money and attention can make a material difference.
The six chapters that follow move through the four elements of riding terrain — snow, water, dirt, and open space — and then turn to the people defending them and the mechanisms that work. This is not a comprehensive environmental audit. It is a terrain-specific assessment written for riders, about riders' places, with the explicit goal of making the terrain defense fund feel not like charity but like survival.
Because that is what it is.
Methodology
This research was conducted between September 2025 and March 2026, drawing on four primary source categories.
Climate and environmental data. I referenced peer-reviewed studies from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (2021-2023), the World Meteorological Organization's State of the Global Climate reports (2023, 2024), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's coral reef monitoring data, and the European Environment Agency's Alpine climate assessments. Snowpack and glacier data were drawn from the World Glacier Monitoring Service, the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service SNOTEL network, and the Swiss Federal Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research (SLF). Sea level and coastal data came from NASA's Sea Level Change Portal and NOAA's tide gauge records.
Site visits. I visited fourteen locations across eight countries: Chamonix, Zermatt, and Verbier (Alps); Niseko (Japan); Tromsoe and Lofoten (Norway); Pipeline and the North Shore (Oahu); Teahupo'o (Tahiti); Hossegor (France); Whistler and Squamish (British Columbia); Moab (Utah); and Sedona (Arizona). In each case, I walked or rode the terrain, spoke with locals, and documented conditions against historical baselines.
Interviews. I conducted thirty-one interviews with terrain advocates, land managers, resort operators, trail builders, park designers, conservation attorneys, and riders who have watched their home terrain change. Interviews followed The Riding Collective's consent-first protocol.
Organizational research. I reviewed the published work, financial reports, and campaign records of twelve organizations actively engaged in terrain defense across riding disciplines, including Save The Waves Coalition, Surfrider Foundation, International Mountain Bicycling Association, Access Fund, Protect Our Winters, and the Trust for Public Land.
Limitations. This study focuses disproportionately on North America, Western Europe, and the Pacific — the regions where both the data infrastructure and my interview access are strongest. The terrain crises facing riders in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and South America deserve dedicated studies. I also acknowledge that a six-month research window cannot capture the full complexity of any single terrain crisis. What follows is a map, not a survey. It is meant to orient action, not to be exhaustive.
Chapter 1: Snow
The Glaciers Are Not Coming Back
I grew up in Tromsoe, above the Arctic Circle. The glacier at Langfjordjokelen, ninety kilometers east of my childhood home, lost 60% of its area between 1966 and 2024. I have the photographs. My grandfather's photographs show a valley filled with ice. Mine show rock.
This is not an anecdote. This is the global pattern. The World Glacier Monitoring Service reported that 2023 marked the most negative glacier mass balance year since records began in 1950. The European Alps have lost approximately one-third of their total ice volume since 2000. The Aletsch Glacier, the largest in the Alps, has retreated more than 3.5 kilometers since 1880 and lost over 350 meters of length in just the last two decades. The glaciers that feed the snowpack of every major European ski region are in irreversible decline.
What does this mean for riding? Start with the numbers. A 2023 study published in Nature Climate Change by Hugonnet et al. found that under a 2 degree Celsius warming scenario — which current emissions trajectories make likely by mid-century — approximately 53% of the world's ski resorts will face insufficient natural snow cover to operate a viable season. Under a 4 degree scenario, that figure rises to 98%. These are not projections for the year 2200. They are projections for the lifetimes of people who are learning to snowboard right now.
The compression is already visible. In the European Alps, the average ski season has shortened by approximately 34 days since the 1960s. Resorts below 1,500 meters of elevation are increasingly unviable without artificial snow. Kitzbuhel, one of the most storied resorts in Austrian skiing, now relies on snowmaking for nearly the entire Hahnenkamm course. The Streif was not designed to be manufactured. It was designed to be skied.
In North America, the pattern is the same. California's Sierra Nevada snowpack — the foundation of Tahoe's entire riding economy — has seen its April 1 snow water equivalent decline by roughly 20% since the 1950s, with the most dramatic losses in the last two decades. A 2023 UCLA study found that the Sierra's snowpack in 2023 was at its lowest level in at least 500 years, based on tree ring analysis. Squaw Valley (now Palisades Tahoe) opened in 1949 with reliable snow from November through May. The 2024-25 season saw operations curtailed by late March. Japan's Hokkaido region — home to the powder snow that the global snowboard community has canonized as the finest on earth — has seen average December snowfall decline by approximately 20% since 1960, according to Japan Meteorological Agency records.
The resort industry's response has been to invest in snowmaking. Global spending on artificial snow infrastructure now exceeds $1 billion annually. A single snow gun consumes approximately 1,000 liters of water and 5 kilowatt-hours of electricity per cubic meter of snow produced. This is terrain defense by industrial substitution — replacing the natural system with an energy-intensive facsimile. It works, temporarily, for resorts with capital. It does nothing for backcountry riders, for the touring culture of the Alps, for the sidecountry access that defines the riding experience at places like Jackson Hole and Chamonix. You cannot manufacture a glacier.
The Riding Collective's Sacred Sites archive includes entries for terrain that will be directly affected: Pipeline (the Banzai Pipeline's North Shore ecosystem), Mavericks, and — though it is not yet formally listed — every backcountry zone in the Alps and Rockies that depends on glacial melt for its snowpack. These are not amenities. They are the substrate of the culture.
The snow is leaving. The question is what we do while it is still here.
Chapter 2: Water
The Reef Dies, and the Wave Dies With It
A wave is not water. A wave is energy passing through water, shaped by the terrain beneath it. This is the fact that non-surfers do not grasp, and it is the fact that makes the coral crisis a surfing crisis.
The waves at Pipeline — the most consequential wave in surfing history, the place that built the sport's modern identity — break the way they do because of the reef. The first reef, the second reef, the third reef: each is a shelf of living coral that forces the swell upward into the hollow barrels that made Pipeline sacred. If the reef degrades, the wave changes. Not disappears — changes. The shape, the speed, the hollowness, the predictability that allows a human body to occupy the tube — all of that is a function of reef architecture.
Globally, coral reefs are in crisis that no serious scientist disputes. The IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report projects that at 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming, 70-90% of tropical coral reefs will be lost. At 2 degrees, the figure exceeds 99%. The mass bleaching events of 2016, 2017, 2020, 2023, and 2024 have already killed vast sections of reef worldwide. NOAA's Coral Reef Watch confirmed that 2023-2024 constituted the fourth global bleaching event on record and the most geographically extensive.
For surfing, the implications are site-specific and devastating. Teahupo'o, the Tahitian reef break that hosted the 2024 Olympic surfing events, sits on a reef system that is already showing bleaching stress. The controversy over the construction of an aluminum judging tower on the reef — which provoked international protests and a petition signed by over 240,000 people — was a preview of the terrain defense battles that will define surfing's future. The tower was a single structure. The bleaching is structural.
At Cloudbreak in Fiji, where the reef pass creates one of the most powerful left-hand waves on earth, marine surveys have documented significant coral loss in the shallower sections of the reef since 2016. The wave still breaks. But reef degradation is not binary. It is a gradient, and along that gradient, the wave quality shifts in ways that accumulate over decades.
Sea level rise adds a second vector. NOAA projects 0.3 to 1.0 meters of sea level rise by 2100 along most U.S. coastlines, with higher estimates for the Gulf Coast and mid-Atlantic. Rising water levels change the depth relationship between swell and reef, altering break patterns. Point breaks — where the wave wraps around a headland or rock formation — are particularly sensitive to changes in water depth and sediment patterns. Jeffreys Bay in South Africa, Rincon in California, Raglan in New Zealand: all of these are shaped by the precise geometry of coast and swell and bottom. Alter the coast, alter the wave.
Water quality is the third vector. Runoff from agriculture, sewage, and development degrades both reef health and rider health. The Surfrider Foundation's Blue Water Task Force conducts water quality testing at hundreds of sites across the United States, and the data is consistent: after rain events, fecal indicator bacteria at popular surf breaks routinely exceed safe swimming thresholds. In Bali, the explosive growth of tourism infrastructure along the Bukit Peninsula has introduced sewage and chemical runoff into the reef ecosystem surrounding Uluwatu and Padang Padang. Riders are getting sick. Reefs are getting smothered.
For freshwater disciplines, the crisis takes a different form. Whitewater kayaking depends on river flow, which depends on snowpack and rainfall patterns. The Colorado River system — which feeds whitewater runs across the American Southwest — has been in a 23-year megadrought, with Lake Powell and Lake Mead at historically low levels. Rivers that once ran year-round are going seasonal. The dam removal movement — most visibly the removal of four dams on the Klamath River, completed in 2024 — offers a counterpoint: terrain defense through infrastructure removal, restoring natural flow to rivers that had been caged for a century.
The water is telling us what is coming. The question is whether the riding world is listening.
Chapter 3: Dirt
The Ground Beneath Your Wheels
The terrain crises facing snow and water riders are driven primarily by climate. The terrain crises facing dirt riders — mountain bikers, BMX riders, skateboarders, motocross riders — are driven primarily by humans arguing about land use. This makes them, in some ways, more tractable. A city council can be persuaded. A glacier cannot.
But it also makes them more personal. When a trail is closed, a park demolished, or a lot paved, there is a person who made that decision. And there is a rider who watched it happen.
The mountain bike access battle is the most active terrain defense front in riding culture. The conflict is deceptively simple: mountain bikes are classified as mechanized transport, which means they are prohibited from federally designated Wilderness areas in the United States under the 1964 Wilderness Act. This single classification has locked mountain bikers out of millions of acres of public land. The Sustainable Trails Coalition (now the Sustainable Recreation Coalition) has advocated for amending the Wilderness Act to allow human-powered mechanized travel since 2015. The effort has faced fierce opposition from traditional wilderness advocacy groups, who argue that any mechanization compromises the character of Wilderness.
The irony is that mountain bikers are, by almost every measure, conservation allies. The International Mountain Bicycling Association's trail-building programs have contributed hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours to trail construction and maintenance on public lands. Mountain bikers use trails. They also build them, maintain them, and advocate for the landscapes that contain them. The access fight is not between people who care about the land and people who do not. It is between two groups who care about the land and disagree about what "mechanized" means when the machine is a bicycle powered by human legs.
Trail closures are accelerating outside of Wilderness as well. Liability concerns, erosion worries (often overstated — peer-reviewed studies by White et al. and others have found that mountain bike erosion impact is comparable to hiking and significantly less than equestrian use), and conflicts with other user groups have led land managers to close trails preemptively. In the greater Sedona area of Arizona, one of the most iconic mountain biking destinations in the world, the Forest Service has implemented trail-use limitations and seasonal closures in response to exploding visitation numbers. The terrain is open, but access is narrowing.
Urban dirt riders face a different version of the same problem. LOVE Park in Philadelphia — listed in The Riding Collective's Sacred Sites archive — is the paradigmatic case. For two decades, LOVE Park's granite ledges and open plaza made it the most important street skating spot on the East Coast and one of the most filmed and photographed skate spots on earth. Skaters were banned in 2002, tolerated intermittently, and then effectively excluded when the park was redesigned between 2016 and 2018 with skate-deterrent architecture. The city chose tourism over the culture that had, in fact, put the park on the map.
The pattern repeats globally. Barcelona's MACBA plaza, London's Southbank, Melbourne's Federation Square — every major street skating spot exists at the pleasure of municipal authorities who can redesign, fence, or police it away. The DIY skatepark movement is the riding world's most direct terrain defense response: if the city will not give us ground, we will pour our own concrete. Burnside in Portland, built without permits under the Burnside Bridge starting in 1990 and still operating, is the archetype. The movement has grown to include hundreds of DIY builds worldwide, from the concrete bowls of FDR in Philadelphia to the guerrilla parks of Marseille and Athens. These projects are terrain defense in its purest form — the creation of riding ground where none was allocated.
Motocross faces a quieter version of the same crisis. Noise ordinances, residential development, and zoning changes have closed hundreds of motocross tracks across North America and Europe in the last thirty years. A motocross track requires space, tolerant neighbors, and zoning that permits recreational motor vehicle use. As suburban sprawl extends outward, each of those requirements becomes harder to meet. The tracks that remain are increasingly private, expensive, and far from urban centers — which means motocross is becoming, by default, a sport for people who can afford acreage or travel. The working-class roots of the discipline are being paved over, literally.
The dirt is contested ground. But contested means there is still a fight to be had.
Chapter 4: Open Space
When the Land Itself Disappears
Some riding disciplines do not need a specific feature — a wave, a slope, a trail. They need open space. Room to move. The equestrian traditions documented in Study 002 — buzkashi, charreada, tbourida — require expanses of land that are increasingly unavailable.
The Mongolian steppe is the most consequential open space under threat. Mongolia's pastoral nomads — the inheritors of the horsemanship tradition that produced the largest contiguous land empire in human history — depend on open grassland for grazing, migration, and the mounted culture that defines national identity. The Naadam festival, held annually in Ulaanbaatar and across the countryside, features horse racing across distances of 15 to 30 kilometers, ridden by children as young as five. The race courses are not tracks. They are open steppe.
Mining is the primary threat. Mongolia's mineral wealth — copper, gold, coal, rare earths — has attracted massive foreign investment. The Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine, operated by Rio Tinto, occupies a concession area of approximately 250 square kilometers in the southern Gobi. Mining roads, tailings ponds, and exclusion zones fragment grazing routes that nomadic herders have used for centuries. Water extraction for mining operations is lowering water tables in a region that is already arid. The herders are being squeezed, and with them, the open space that makes Mongolian horsemanship possible.
In the American West, the public lands debate affects every riding discipline. The Bureau of Land Management administers approximately 245 million acres, much of it open to recreational use including equestrian riding, mountain biking, and motorized recreation. But BLM land is also leased for grazing, mining, oil and gas extraction, and renewable energy development. Each new lease is a subtraction from the open space available to riders. The tension between conservation, extraction, and recreation is the defining land-use conflict of the American West, and riders are rarely at the table when decisions are made.
Equestrian access in developed countries is increasingly a class issue. In the United Kingdom, the right to ride horses on bridleways and restricted byways is protected by law, but the actual mileage of accessible bridleways has declined as development fragments rural landscapes and maintenance funding is cut. The British Horse Society's annual report documents hundreds of path obstructions and closures each year. In the United States, boarding a horse costs between $200 and $2,000 per month depending on region, and the land on which to ride is contracting as rural areas are developed. Riding is being pushed, economically and spatially, toward the wealthy.
Urban open space is under the same pressure. The lots, fields, and margins where BMX riders, dirt bikers, and skateboarders have always found space are the first casualties of development. These are not formally designated riding spaces. They are the leftover terrain — the undeveloped parcels, the abandoned lots, the strips of land between highway and fence. They exist because no one else wanted them. When someone does want them, the riders are the first to go, and the last to be consulted.
The open space crisis is, at its core, a question of who has standing. Riders use land, but they rarely own it, rarely lease it, and rarely have a seat at the planning table. The terrain defense fund's most important structural contribution may not be buying land or funding campaigns. It may be buying riders a seat.
Chapter 5: Who's Fighting
The Organizations Holding the Line
The terrain defense landscape is fragmented across disciplines, but the people doing the work share a common tactical vocabulary: acquire, advocate, litigate, build coalitions, and never assume the terrain is safe.
Save The Waves Coalition is the most directly relevant organization in the surf terrain space. Founded in 2003 and headquartered in Santa Cruz, California, Save The Waves operates the World Surfing Reserves program, which has designated twelve sites globally — including Huanchaco (Peru), Gold Coast (Australia), Ericeira (Portugal), and Punta de Lobos (Chile) — as protected surfing ecosystems. The designation is not legally binding, but it creates a framework for community-led conservation, local government partnership, and long-term stewardship planning. Save The Waves also runs a Surf Protected Areas Network (SPAN) and a threatened waves program that has intervened in development and pollution cases from Peru to the Philippines. Their annual budget is modest — approximately $2 million — but their per-dollar impact is among the highest in conservation.
Surfrider Foundation, larger and broader in scope, has 84 chapters in the United States and a growing international presence. Surfrider's strength is community mobilization and legal action. Their Beach Access program has fought and won dozens of cases against privatization of public coastline. Their Blue Water Task Force conducts thousands of water quality tests annually, providing the data that terrain defense cases require.
Protect Our Winters (POW) operates at the intersection of snow sports and climate policy. Founded in 2007 by professional snowboarder Jeremy Jones, POW has grown to over 130,000 members and has become the primary political voice of the snow sports community on climate legislation. POW's effectiveness comes from its rider credibility — when a professional athlete whose career depends on snow tells a congressional committee that climate change is destroying their livelihood, the testimony lands differently than a scientist's chart. POW's Hot Planet Cool Athletes program sends professional riders into schools to talk about climate. It is not terrain defense in the direct sense. It is the cultivation of a political constituency that will demand terrain defense.
The International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) has been advocating for trail access since 1988. IMBA's tactical range includes trail building, land manager relationships, policy advocacy, and the Trail Accelerator program, which provides grants and technical assistance for new trail systems. IMBA's political work on Wilderness access has been careful and long-term, building relationships with congressional offices and land management agencies rather than pursuing confrontational campaigns. The results are slow. The relationships are real.
The Access Fund, primarily a climbing organization, has pioneered the use of land trusts and conservation easements to permanently protect outdoor recreation sites. The Access Fund has directly purchased or secured easements on dozens of climbing areas, removing them from the development market permanently. This mechanism — buying the terrain outright or buying the development rights — is the most reliable form of terrain defense. It is also the most expensive, which is why it matters that organizations like the Access Fund have proven the model works.
The Trust for Public Land (TPL) operates at a larger scale, having protected over 4 million acres since 1972. TPL's work includes urban parks, greenways, and recreational corridors — terrain that serves skaters, BMX riders, and urban riders who will never set foot in a national forest but whose riding lives depend on public space.
What works: land acquisition, conservation easements, community-organized advocacy with local government, water quality monitoring that provides litigation-ready data, and political organizing that puts riders in front of decision-makers. What does not work: corporate greenwashing campaigns that generate content without changing outcomes, one-time donations without long-term stewardship commitments, and awareness campaigns that substitute visibility for action. The riding world has plenty of awareness. It does not have enough land trusts.
Chapter 6: What the Fund Should Do
Allocating the 30%
The Riding Collective has committed 30% of Guardian revenue to terrain defense. This section specifies how that allocation should work — not in vague principle, but in named mechanisms and partner categories. The fund is small now. It will grow. The structure should be right from the beginning.
Allocation framework. I recommend splitting the terrain defense fund into four buckets:
- Direct grants to terrain defense organizations (40% of the terrain defense allocation). Priority partners: Save The Waves Coalition (surf ecosystem protection), IMBA (trail access and construction), Surfrider Foundation (water quality and coastal access), Protect Our Winters (climate policy advocacy), and the Trust for Public Land (urban recreation space). These organizations have track records, audited financials, and existing campaigns that can absorb small grants immediately. Start with unrestricted operating support, not project-specific grants. Small organizations need flexibility more than direction.
- Land acquisition and easement fund (25%). This is the long game. Partner with the Access Fund's land trust model to identify and acquire (or secure easements on) specific parcels of riding terrain at risk of development. Priority targets: parcels adjacent to existing trail networks, coastal buffer zones near World Surfing Reserves, and urban lots in underserved communities where DIY skatepark projects need permanent ground. At current Guardian revenue levels, this bucket will be small. It should be invested, not spent, until it can make a meaningful acquisition. Endowment thinking from day one.
- Community terrain defense grants (25%). Small grants ($500-$5,000) to local riding communities engaged in direct terrain defense: DIY skatepark construction, trail maintenance volunteer programs, local advocacy campaigns against trail closures or park demolitions, water quality testing at riding spots, and community land trusts. These grants should be fast, low-bureaucracy, and renewable. The application should be a one-page form. The reporting requirement should be a paragraph and a photograph. Do not build a grants bureaucracy. Build a fund that moves.
- Research and documentation (10%). Fund the ongoing documentation of terrain loss and terrain defense outcomes. This includes commissioning site-specific studies, supporting citizen science programs (water quality testing, snowpack measurement, trail condition monitoring), and maintaining a public terrain threat map that tracks active threats to riding terrain worldwide. The Riding Collective's archive already has the infrastructure for this. The research allocation connects the archive to the terrain defense mission.
Governance. The terrain defense fund should be overseen by a committee of three to five members, including at least one rider from a non-Western riding tradition, at least one representative from a partner organization, and at least one member with conservation finance experience. The committee should meet quarterly, review grant outcomes annually, and publish a transparent allocation report to all Guardians.
First-year priorities. With limited initial revenue, focus on two actions: (1) make a founding grant to Save The Waves Coalition's threatened waves program, which has the highest immediate impact per dollar, and (2) launch the community terrain defense grants program with a small initial pool. Both actions produce visible results that justify the allocation to Guardians and build the Collective's credibility as a terrain defense actor.
What not to fund. Do not fund awareness campaigns, branded content, or corporate partnership activations. Do not fund organizations that cannot provide audited financials or clear outcome metrics. Do not fund projects where the terrain is not at demonstrable risk. The fund is small. Every dollar must defend ground.
Conclusion: The Terrain Is the Culture
I began this research expecting to write an environmental report. I finished it understanding that I had written a cultural one.
Every tradition documented in the Riding Collective's archive — every discipline, every sacred site, every legend — exists because a human body moved through a specific physical landscape. The surfer needs the reef. The snowboarder needs the glacier. The skater needs the ledge. The horseman needs the steppe. Remove the terrain, and the tradition does not relocate. It dies. You cannot practice buzkashi in a parking lot. You cannot surf a dead reef. You cannot ski a mountain that has no snow.
The riding world has spent decades building culture: media, competitions, brands, identities, communities. All of it sits on a physical foundation that is eroding. The erosion is not theoretical. It is measured in meters of glacial retreat per year, in degrees of ocean temperature, in acres of open space lost to development, in trail miles closed by land management decisions.
The Riding Collective's terrain defense fund is not philanthropy. It is not a corporate social responsibility line item. It is the recognition that the archive is meaningless if the places it documents no longer exist. You cannot preserve a tradition in a database. You can only preserve the ground on which it is practiced, and trust the riders to keep doing what they have always done.
The terrain is the culture. Lose one, lose both.
This is not a metaphor. It is a measurement.
This study was conducted under The Riding Collective's research standards. All climate data is sourced from peer-reviewed literature and institutional monitoring programs cited in the methodology section. Interview participants consented under the Collective's standard protocol. The terrain defense fund recommendations represent the researcher's independent assessment and do not constitute financial advice. The Riding Collective's Board of Stewards retains authority over all fund allocation decisions.
Dr. Maren Solvik can be reached through The Riding Collective's research office. She splits her year between Tromsoe, Norway and Valparaiso, Chile, and is always interested in hearing from riders who are watching their terrain change.