Patrick McKay

Patrick is a former lawyer working as a software developer for a legal tech company, who lives in Highlands Ranch, Colorado. He is a Colorado native who has always had a deep love for exploring the outdoors and a fascination with maps. Though he enjoyed hiking and exploring backroads before that, he really got into off-roading in 2018 when he bought his first Jeep. He now enjoys a combination of moderate rock crawling and exploring obscure backcountry routes, mostly in central Colorado and southern Utah. Because of his legal background, he quickly got involved in off-road land use advocacy and serves on the boards of Colorado Offroad Enterprise (CORE) and Colorado Offroad Trail Defenders working to defend motorized access to public lands. He has written hundreds of pages of comments on agency travel plans and is part of a lawsuit challenging the travel management plan for the Pike San Isabel National Forest. He is also heavily involved in multiple ongoing BLM travel management processes in Utah. His trail advocacy work showed him that primary reason trails are closed is usually not because of abuse or overuse but obscurity and underuse. Hundreds of roads are closed in every new travel management plan because they are rarely used and the land management agencies claim they are "naturally reclaiming" or have low recreational value. One of the best ways to prevent trail closures is to ensure that people know about them and can find them on maps. This led Patrick to begin regularly contributing to OpenStreetMap (which is like Wikipedia for maps and powers most popular outdoor mapping apps), and to TrailsOffroad. In addition to off-roading, Patrick enjoys camping, hiking, skiing, snowshoeing, and flying drones.