Who Closed
Your Trails.

In the fall of 2025, the BlueRibbon Coalition — the organization that has defended motorized recreation access on American public lands since 1987 — published three detailed investigative pieces on its website tracing the history behind the largest OHV closure in American history. The WEMO closures. 2,200 miles. A federal court order. A judge in San Francisco. A legal framework built over two decades by a specific set of organizations with a specific goal.

BRC named the mechanism. They called it wilderness laundering — temporary closures that get stuck in regulatory limbo, routes that disappear from maps, permanent designations that make losses irreversible. They noted that every time a court sets a timeline for BLM compliance, the process takes years longer than ordered, and more terrain is locked in as wilderness while it waits. They acknowledged plainly that they are "fighting to change the rules that make cooperating in the current system a losing endeavor."

That sentence deserves to sit with you for a moment. An organization that has been fighting for public land access for nearly forty years is telling you that the current system is designed to produce losses for the people fighting inside it. That is not a critique of BRC's effort. It is a description of the architecture they are fighting against.

This memo is about that architecture. Not to litigate it. Not to assign malice where none may exist. But because the access community deserves to know what it is actually up against — and because knowing changes what the right response looks like.

The Free Market of Ideas Requires an Honest Market

There is a genuine debate to be had about how American public land should be managed. Conservation advocates make real arguments. Access advocates make real arguments. Both sets of arguments have merit. Both deserve to be heard. The American tradition of public land — born in the 19th century, unique in the world — was always intended to hold that tension in productive balance: land held in trust for all Americans, managed for multiple uses, accessible to the public whose tax dollars purchased it.

That debate is healthy. That debate is necessary. That debate is — or should be — the free market of ideas applied to the question of how we steward the land we share.

But a free market of ideas requires something the access community has not had for a very long time: a level field. And what the research behind this memo reveals is that the field has not been level for decades — not because one set of arguments is stronger, but because one side of the debate has resources the other side cannot match, routed through institutional structures the other side cannot navigate, funded from a source most people in the access community have never heard of.

The Architecture, Named

Johann Georg "Hansjörg" Wyss is a Swiss billionaire, born in Bern in 1935, who came to the United States as a student in 1958 and fell in love with the American West while working a summer surveying job with the Colorado Highway Department. He built a medical device company called Synthes into the world's largest maker of bone fracture treatment devices, sold it to Johnson & Johnson in 2012 for $19.7 billion, and used the proceeds to fund what has become one of the most influential conservation philanthropy operations in the world.

In 2014, when asked directly, Wyss said he carried only a Swiss passport and did not have a US green card. As of 2021, he had not disclosed publicly whether he holds citizenship or permanent residency in the United States. Court documents from a civil proceeding identify him as residing in the US on an E-2 investor visa — a treaty investor classification that grants the right to live and work here based on a business investment, but confers no voting rights and no right to participate in the American political process.

The Federal Election Commission found in 2022 that Wyss made $119,000 in unlawful political contributions to American candidates between 1990 and 2006. The FEC declined to take action because the statute of limitations had passed.

In 2018, Wyss pledged $1 billion — later increased to $1.5 billion — to what he calls the Wyss Campaign for Nature: a decade-long effort to protect 30% of the planet's land and ocean surface by 2030. In the United States, the ground-level execution of that campaign has included funding the organizations that brought the WEMO litigation and the SR9 dispersed camping closure outside Zion National Park. He sits on the boards of The Wilderness Society and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance — two of the primary institutional players in the access restriction fights this community has been absorbing for decades.

None of this is secret. All of it is documented in public filings, foundation grant records, congressional testimony, and Wyss's own published statements. What is missing is not the information. What is missing is the connection — the understanding of how these pieces fit together into a single coherent architecture pointed at a single strategic objective.

The Questions Worth Asking

We are not here to assign motives. Wyss has stated plainly — in his own words, published under his own name — that he loves the American West and believes its public lands should be held in trust for future generations. We take that at face value. The question is not whether his intentions are sincere. The question is whether his method is consistent with the democratic principles he says he is trying to protect.

The Role of Man in the Wilderness

Underneath the legal and funding architecture, there is a philosophical argument that deserves to be named directly — because it is the argument that ultimately determines what the terrain looks like in 2030 if the 30x30 agenda succeeds.

The implicit premise of the wilderness designation framework — the one that drives the minimization criteria, the route closures, the dispersed camping elimination — is that human presence in wild land is inherently damaging. That the best conservation outcome is the one where humans are absent, or present only in managed, concentrated, fee-based environments. That the trail closed to OHV use is a trail that has been protected.

We reject that premise — not because we are indifferent to conservation, but because we believe it gets the relationship between human beings and wild terrain exactly backwards.

The people who use public land are the people who fight to keep it public. The OHV rider who has run the same wash in the Mojave for twenty years knows that terrain — its ecology, its fragility, its resilience, its seasons — better than any foundation-funded researcher reading satellite data from a Washington DC office. The family that has camped free outside Zion for a generation on SR9 is not the threat to that land. They are its constituency. They are the political force that stands between that land and the interests — development, energy, privatization — that would actually destroy it.

Remove the user from the land and you do not get better conservation. You get land that belongs to everyone in theory and no one in practice — land without a constituency, without advocates, without the lived human relationship that gives public land its political meaning. Land in that condition is not protected. It is simply waiting for the next administration, the next policy cycle, the next pressure that finds it undefended.

What the Access Community Deserves

BlueRibbon Coalition has fought for this community's access to public land for nearly forty years with integrity and without compromise. They have won real victories — a Supreme Court case, the Roadless Rule rescission, trail openings that would not exist without their legal intervention. They deserve every dollar of support this community can give them. The Fund the Cause allocation in your Member Dashboard exists precisely because that fight is real and it is ongoing.

But BRC has now told us something important: the current system is designed to produce losses. Not because BRC isn't fighting hard enough. Because the architecture they are fighting against was built over decades by organizations with resources they cannot match — funded from a source that most people in this community have never thought about. The fight is real. The field is not level. And knowing that is the first step toward changing it.

The access community has never had its own institutional counterweight. No foundation with the resources to fund the legal pipeline that defends access the way the Wyss network funds the pipeline that restricts it. No scholars program producing the next generation of access-defense attorneys. No endowment that ensures the fight continues regardless of what OEM grants come through this quarter.

That is not a criticism. It is an observation about what is missing — and what the next chapter of this fight requires. The terrain is worth defending. The people who use it are worth representing. The democratic principle that public land belongs to the public — not to the vision of any billionaire, foreign or domestic — is worth fighting for at the scale the fight actually demands.

The more you know, the clearer the path forward becomes.