Ride like you live next door.

Why the tracks stay open

Every track you love exists because somebody — a farmer, a forester, a council, a community — tolerates motorcycles on it. Tolerance is the right word. They don't owe you the track. It costs them maintenance, noise, the occasional rude rider, and they get nothing back except the hope that the people passing through are decent.

You can ride your bike well, plan flawlessly, hit perfect lines, and still be the reason a track gets gated next year. That's the part most riders don't think about until it's too late.

The good news: the etiquette is small, simple, and almost free. The whole thing fits in three ideas — respect the track, respect the people, respect the place — and the rest is detail.

Respect the track

Stay on the line. Don't cut switchbacks because the inside looks easier. Don't ride parallel to a rutted section to make a new line — that's how a track turns into three tracks and then a scar visible from satellite. If a section is too gnarly to ride, walk it or turn around. The path that exists is the path you ride.

Wet trails are fragile trails. Soft, soaked dirt under a knobby tyre carves ruts that take a winter to heal — sometimes longer. Some places it never heals. If the ground is squelching under your boot, that's the day to take the road or pick a different track. Erosion you cause stays around long after you've gone home.

Leave gates as you found them. Open gate? Leave it open. Closed gate? Close it behind you. Stock animals are someone's livelihood, and a gate left open at the wrong moment can cost a farmer their afternoon — or their year.

Respect the people

You're a guest, not a customer. Walkers, cyclists and horse riders have priority. On a narrow trail you stop, kill the engine, and wait for them to pass. Horses spook at the sound of a single-cylinder thumper at twenty metres — back off, idle, give space. A nod and a wave costs nothing and changes how someone tells the story afterwards.

Throttle discretion. Most people don't notice a quiet bike riding past. Everyone notices the one revving up a hill. Aftermarket exhausts that sound great in a car park sound aggressive on a forest track at 7am. The fewer people you wake up, the more places stay open.

Small groups. Six bikes is a lot. Ten is too many. A column of motorcycles is intimidating to anyone walking the same track and creates problems where one rider would have created none. If you're riding in a bigger group, split into pairs of three or four and stagger the start.

Through villages: slow, quiet, money. Locals see your dust. They hear your exhaust at lunchtime. The deal — if there is one — is that you stop for fuel, eat at the café, sleep at the guesthouse. Rural communities along these tracks are often the only reason the tracks still get used. Spend money there. It buys goodwill the next rider through will benefit from.

Respect the place

This is the part most rider codes barely cover, and it's the one that bites the deepest.

Wildlife stays wild. Don't rev at deer, don't chase, don't honk to scare. You're loud enough that animals already know you're there — the rest is up to them. Riding through a wood at the wrong time of year disturbs more than you can see. If a track passes through a nesting area or a calving meadow, take the alternative.

Pack it out — all of it. A torn snack wrapper. Cigarette butts. A broken bar end you swap out at lunch. A dead inner tube. The rule is simple: whatever came in on your bike leaves on your bike. Litter on a remote track stops being litter and becomes the reason the track gets closed. One discarded oil bottle in a pristine valley undoes a hundred riders' good behaviour.

Fuel and oil discipline. Refuel away from streams and standing water — a small spill from a clumsy filler nozzle into a creek is not small for the things living in the creek. Carry a rag for drips. Oil changes belong at a workshop or on paved ground where any spill can be wiped up and the used oil ends up in a proper waste container. Don't do it trailside, on grass, or next to a river. A litre of motor oil contaminates a thousand litres of water; that's not an opinion, it's chemistry. The same goes for coolant and brake fluid.

Fires depend on where you are. Some regions allow them in marked spots, others ban them entirely in fire season — check local rules before you light anything. What's universal: hot exhaust into dry summer grass is how landscapes burn. Park bikes on bare ground or rock when stopping in fire season, never in stubble or standing grass.

The summary that actually fits in your head

You can forget every paragraph above and still ride well by holding to one rule: leave nothing behind that proves you were there. Not noise. Not ruts. Not litter. Not oil. Not a stranger's bad afternoon.

Adventure motorcycling exists in the margins of what's tolerated. The riders who keep tracks open ride like they're going to be back next year. Everyone else burns goodwill they didn't earn — and the rest of us pay for it with the next gate, the next sign, the next legislation.

It's a small ask. Make it a habit and you stop having to think about it.