Leave No Trace's Seven Principles, Explained by the Organization That Wrote Them

By Travelog Editorial Team ยท Updated August 9, 2026

The Leave No Trace Seven Principles -- Plan Ahead and Prepare, Travel and Camp on Durable Surfaces, Dispose of Waste Properly, Leave What You Find, Minimize Campfire Impacts, Respect Wildlife, and Be Considerate of Other Visitors -- were organized and copyrighted in 1999 by the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics, a nonprofit formed in 1994. NPS and other land agencies teach and endorse these principles widely, but the Center is the actual organization that wrote and trademarked them.

Nearly every hiking guide on the internet lists "the seven principles," and almost none of them say who actually wrote them. That attribution gap isn't trivial -- it's the difference between a genuine, documented outdoor-ethics framework and a vague cultural consensus nobody can point back to.

Who Actually Wrote These, and When

The history traces back further and more specifically than most summaries suggest. The US Forest Service began looking for ways to address recreation-related land damage in the 1960s, and a "no-trace" program for wilderness and backcountry travel took shape by 1987. The pivotal moment happened in the summer of 1985: Jim Ratz, then executive director of the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), invited a small group of Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management staff, researchers, and academics on a three-day backpacking trip into Wyoming's Popo Agie Wilderness -- the collaboration that grew directly out of that trip formalized into a written Forest Service-NOLS Leave No Trace curriculum partnership in 1990.

The framework expanded from there through documented agency partnerships: the Bureau of Land Management formally joined in 1993, followed by the National Park Service and US Fish & Wildlife Service in 1994. That same year, following a 1993 Outdoor Recreation Summit in Washington, DC, that brought together land management agencies, nonprofits, and outdoor-industry representatives, Leave No Trace, Inc. was incorporated as its own independent organization -- the entity now known as the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics. The seven-principle framework itself was copyrighted by the Center in 1999. NPS, the US Fish & Wildlife Service, the Forest Service, and countless outdoor organizations teach and endorse these principles constantly today, which is exactly why the actual authorship gets lost -- endorsement gets mistaken for origination. NPS's own Leave No Trace page is a direct example: it teaches the principles accurately but doesn't claim to have written them, a distinction worth preserving rather than collapsing.

The Seven Principles, One by One

Plan Ahead and Prepare. This is the foundation the other six build on: know the regulations and specific concerns for the area being visited, prepare for extreme weather and genuine hazards, schedule the trip to avoid peak-use periods where possible, and travel in smaller groups when the situation allows. This principle exists because most Leave No Trace failures trace back to inadequate preparation, not malice.

Travel and Camp on Durable Surfaces. Durable surfaces are specific categories -- established trails and campsites, rock, gravel, dry grasses, or snow -- chosen because they can withstand foot traffic without lasting damage, unlike fragile vegetation or wet soil that takes years to recover once compacted.

Dispose of Waste Properly. This means packing out all trash, leftover food, and litter, full stop -- not a partial cleanup of visible mess, but a genuine commitment to leaving nothing behind that wasn't already there.

Leave What You Find. The instruction here is specific: examine cultural or historic structures and artifacts, but don't touch or remove them. This principle exists to preserve the past for the next visitor, not just the natural environment for the next hiker.

Minimize Campfire Impacts. The practical guidance is to use a lightweight stove for cooking and a candle lantern for light rather than defaulting to an open fire, since fire impact on a landscape -- scarring, resource consumption, wildfire risk -- is disproportionate to its actual necessity in most backcountry situations.

Respect Wildlife. Observe animals from a genuine distance and never feed them -- a rule that exists because human food alters wild animal behavior in ways that are often irreversible and frequently dangerous for both the animal and future visitors.

Be Considerate of Other Visitors. The final principle is about shared space: keeping the outdoors peaceful and natural for everyone who visits, not just the current group on the trail.

"Leave What You Find" Has Federal Law Behind It, Not Just Etiquette

This is worth knowing precisely, because it changes "Leave What You Find" from a soft suggestion into something with genuine legal weight on federal land. The Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 makes excavating, removing, or trafficking archaeological resources on federal land a federal crime, prosecutable as a felony -- covering activities like unauthorized metal detecting, digging up artifacts, defacing rock art, and looting. Genuine penalties attach to this: up to 2 years in prison and a $20,000 fine for excavation or trafficking, rising to as much as 10 years and a $250,000 fine for more serious violations causing damage to US property, with equipment used in the offense subject to confiscation. This isn't a hypothetical deterrent -- it's the actual legal backing behind a principle that often gets treated as optional etiquette rather than the enforced law it actually is on federal land.

Why "Principles," Not "Rules," Is the Deliberate Word Choice

This distinction is worth taking seriously rather than treating as a rhetorical footnote. The Leave No Trace Center itself frames these as principles specifically because they're meant to be applied flexibly across genuinely different conditions -- a desert environment, an alpine one, and a wetland each require different specific practices to achieve the same underlying goal. Rather than issuing exhaustive, situation-specific rules for every possible landscape, the framework teaches the seven underlying principles and trusts recreationists to apply genuine judgment to their specific conditions.

What This Means for Applying Them on an Actual Trip

Knowing who wrote these principles, and why they're framed as adaptable guidance rather than rigid rules, changes how they're actually useful in practice. A hiker facing an unfamiliar landscape -- a desert wash instead of a forest trail, for instance -- can apply "travel on durable surfaces" correctly even without a location-specific rule, because the principle itself, not a memorized checklist, is what's being taught. That's the intended function of the framework, and it's also why citing it correctly to the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics, rather than a generic "park rules" attribution, matters: the organization behind it is still actively developing and teaching this material, not a historical artifact of unclear origin.