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Celebrating Seven Years of RPL |
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This Earth Day, we celebrate seven years of Runners For Public Lands!
RPL officially formed on Earth Day in 2019 as a group of passionate Ventura, California-based runners with the audacious goal of empowering runners to protect public lands and expand access to nature for all. The organization quickly spread locally, regionally, and nationally. This growth confirmed what we suspected from the beginning: runners were hungry to give back and help protect the places they run. In recent years, we’ve built out our immensely successful Trail Work Series, convened Indigenous and other thought leaders to redefine the term public lands, organized hundreds of race directors to speak up for outdoor recreation management federal funding and roadless area protections, and helped underrepresented runners participate in races as part of our Everyone Runs Fund. And we recently set up a new advocacy platform on our website to make it even easier for runners everywhere to send messages to lawmakers and agency officials about important issues affecting public lands.
We are so excited to continue our work and make the next seven years even better. Thank you to our volunteers, members, partners, and supporters whose belief in this work makes it possible.
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Spotlight: Join Us This June at Camp & Run in Leadville, CO |
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RPL’s annual Camp & Run will bring runners together to connect to nature and community through an immersive educational, stewardship, and running experience on June 5 – 7, 2026 in Leadville, Colorado. This will include discussions with local experts and public lands advocates, hands-on community projects and advocacy actions, and time to connect with new friends.
We are thrilled to partner with the Cloud City Conservation Center, Friends of Lake County, the Lake County Tourism District, and the U.S. Forest Service, and we invite you to join us to experience this iconic running destination alongside these incredible leaders and educators.
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Help Urge Congress to Fund Outdoor Recreation Management |
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Congress is currently working on the next fiscal year’s budget for agencies like the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, which collectively oversee nearly 440 million acres of public lands across the country. National forests, many national monuments, and vast swaths of other federal lands are home to thousands of miles of trails that we as runners rely on. The agencies that manage these trails and landscapes have been chronically underfunded for recreation management despite record high visitation rates. As the House of Representatives and Senate work through the appropriations process, take a moment to reach out to your members of Congress to ask that they ensure that the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are properly funded.
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Public Land Policy Updates |
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What the U.S. Forest Service Restructuring Means for Runners |
The USDA has finalized a plan to dramatically restructure the U.S. Forest Service, a move that will prioritize extraction while diminishing recreation management and environmental protection. For runners, that could mean more degraded trails, more industrial disturbance, and fewer chances to influence decisions. For race directors and gateway communities, it could mean coordination challenges, slower permits, and less economic certainty for small businesses. Our policy advisor, Jason Keith, wrote a news post that discusses more in depth what this will mean for the running community.
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Protecting the Roadless Rule |
The U.S. Forest Service is moving toward the next phase of its efforts to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which currently regulates permanent road construction and extraction on nearly 45 million acres of National Forest System lands. This matters for runners and race directors because roadless areas offer quiet, backcountry character, trail continuity, and undeveloped settings that define many race courses, including iconic events like Western States, Wasatch Front 100, Waldo 100k, and Bighorn Trail Run. We'll share more when the next public comment opportunity opens, but we wanted to flag this now because it is an issue RPL is following closely and one that could have real implications for races on national forest lands.
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Advocating for Proper Recreation Management Funding |
We recently signed on to a letter led by our friends at the Outdoor Alliance, which urged Congress to provide more adequate funding for recreation management on lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management. Our Director of Advocacy and Education, Bryant Baker, was quoted in the Outdoor Alliance’s news post about the issue:
“Federal lands managed by the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management represent some of the most beloved destinations for runners—the largest outdoor recreation group in the country. Runners rely on these agencies for trail maintenance, race event permitting, and more, which is why it's so important for Congress to fully fund their recreation budgets.”
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What Does It Mean to Be an RPL Ambassador? |
RPL’s Ambassador Program cultivates local leaders and provides support and training to establish inclusive, local communities of runners dedicated to promoting access to nature and environmental stewardship through organizing runs, stewardship events, and advocacy actions. These volunteers lead all of RPL’s trail work events, host community runs, help execute programs, initiatives, and campaigns, and contribute to inspiring grassroots storytelling efforts. Please join us in celebrating RPL’s current ambassador team doing the ground work in communities across the country!
San Diego-based ambassador Caryn Sandoval wrote a news post about what being an ambassador for RPL has meant to her. In the post Caryn shares, “No matter the effort, an ambassador is crucial to ensuring members of trail communities are aware of dangers to our public lands, as well as opportunities to protect them. It’s important to create opportunities for trail users to feel empowered to come up with an idea or take action.”
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This Year's Trail Work Series Going Strong |
We launched our first Trail Work Series on the East Coast! This event brought together 94 volunteers to remove trash, debris, and invasives from the Monocacy Creek Watershed. We are so excited to continue this work in the Tri-State Area with three other events this year!
The Trail Work Series continues to grow, bringing more volunteers together to maintain trails through hands-on service. In 2026, RPL has planned a total of 34 events. To date, we’ve completed 11 work days, mobilized approximately 220 runners who have volunteered 933 hours of service in 5 different communities. Later this spring RPL will kick off its 2026 Trail Work Series in Flagstaff, Denver, and Indiana Dunes.
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Find RPL at This Year's Cocodona 250! |
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We’re so excited to be a nonprofit partner at this year’s Cocodona in Arizona. Our board, staff, and ambassadors will be featured on the week-long race’s livestream, and we’re also hosting a public lands trivia night at Babbitt’s Backcountry Outfitters in Flagstaff on Friday, May 8 from 5 - 7 PM. This will be a fun event led by our resident trivia nerd, Bryant Baker, and will include free beer from Dark Sky Brewing and Uptown Pubhouse as well as some great prizes. We’re also stoked that our ambassador, Allison Powell, will be running the race under a charity bib for RPL. Good luck, Allison!
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Thoughts from the Trail by RPL's Founder |
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Running urban, rural, and remote landscapes, and getting a chance to experience, understand, and savor the natural world as it is, I’ve been fixated on what I call the 3 ’Fs: forces, frames, and flows. The forces of nature, especially the self-renewing capacities of life, so obvious in spring. The frames of mountains and valleys, hills and corridors, river and stream channels, and climate and trail systems. And the flows of the winds, clouds, and waters; and the seasonal migrations, seed dispersals, and nutrient cycles. Sometimes I think about RPL in a similar way. The forces of ambassador, staff, and board passion and stoke. The frames of ambassador-led events; staff-led operations and programming, and board-led governance. And the flows of the RPL community and wider public through our organization. At the seven-year anniversary mark, nurturing and upholding these forces, frames, and flows across our ecological and institutional realities is our work.
Welcome to everyone new in our community—members, Ambassadors, staff, and board—happy to have you, thanks for joining us.
Vic Thasiah Founder and President Runners for Public Lands |
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Runners for Public Lands
1680 Santa Ynez St
Ventura, CA 93001
United States
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