Frequent users of the Bonneville Shoreline Trail were surprised when Kyle Burgess, an athlete with over 40,000 followers on Instagram, posted a video saying he was stopped by a wildlife management officer. He was told he had to have a permit.
“Guess I gotta buy a fishing permit to run the trails,” he said in the video.
Wildlife Management Areas in Davis, Salt Lake, Utah and Weber Counties have long been free for recreationists like Burgess. But now the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources requires everyone over 18 to purchase a hunting or fishing license to access several of these areas.
The law passed during the 2025 state legislative session and went into effect May 7.
A year-long fishing license costs $40 for Utah residents. Out-of-state residents who want to access WMAs will have to pay triple for a license.
Chelsea Duke is Wildlife Lands Coordinator for The Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. She said the money from license sales will directly benefit their efforts.
“It's a great way to support wildlife conservation, land acquisition, management, habitat restoration, all of those things, because those are really what WMAs are meant for,” she said.
DWR owns and manages 148 Wildlife Management Areas and Waterfowl Management Areas, both known as WMAs. Twenty-five of those are impacted by the new law.
The Bonneville Shoreline Trail that Burgess filmed from runs through the Timpanogos WMA, so DWR owns the surface rights and therefore the access to the trails, Duke explained.
But after public pushback, Duke said her agency worked with the Division of Outdoor Recreation to carve out exceptions for the Bonneville Shoreline Trail and the Great Western Trail.
“We wanted to make sure that folks were able to recreate and continue to do that, as they had historically used those trails, while also preserving the integrity of the Wildlife Management Area,” she said.
Duke added she doesn’t expect any other WMAs to get the same treatment.
It's only been a couple months since the change, so DWR is not citing people without a license yet.
“We just want to educate folks that maybe aren't aware of this new law,” Duke said. “We're also posting a lot of signage so that people are well aware of this new law.”
But folks who don’t go to these areas to hunt or fish are frustrated.
Duke said she understands, but that these lands are different from state or federal public lands.
“These properties in particular are meant to serve critical wildlife habitats, to provide places where you can go hunt, fish and enjoy wildlife in that way,” she said.
Perry Hall is Chair of Utah’s Chapter Chair for Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, a nonprofit advocacy group focused on habitat conservation and hunting and fishing access.
He supports the change.
“My hope is that more people end up buying a fishing license and then get curious about fishing and get curious about being in the outdoors in a way that's new and different to them,” he said.
Hall has hunted in Utah for more than a decade, but he’s also a trail runner and mountain biker.
“Putting the other hat on, I would gladly pay something even if I wasn't really kind of fully in the hunting space,” he said.
He called it “a pretty low investment” for funding and maintaining recreation areas.
“40 bucks seems like a pretty good deal to utilize some pretty cool state managed lands for recreating.”
