The Paiute Trail began in Circleville, Utah, in the summer of 1988, when lifelong friends Clyde Lay, Forest Engineer for the Fishlake National Forest, and Linden Romine, a Piute County Commissioner, responded to the closure of Highway 53 to OHVs by improving an old horse trail up Wades Canyon for motorized vehicles and imagining a larger trail system linking public lands in the Fishlake National Forest with small rural communities in south central Utah. They mapped a 260-mile loop through four communities, relying largely on existing routes and requiring only limited new construction, then presented the concept to counties and communities. They chose the name Paiute from the area's Indian culture and adopted as the trail's symbol a Fremont character from a local pictograph estimated to be about 700 years old. In the summer of 1990, with a grant from Utah State Parks and help from a small group of supporters, they began marking the trail on the ground. Early advocates included Carma Thomas, Ron Bushman, Sherry Ashworth, Roger Foisy, Max Reid, Stan Adams, and Fred Christensen, along with many others who helped develop, market, and manage the system over the years. Their efforts transformed cow trails and old mining and logging roads into the Paiute Trail. Today it is a well-marked 238-mile loop crossing three mountain ranges, four rural Utah counties, and four small communities, with elevations from 5,200 feet to over 11,400 feet, plus 639 additional miles of connecting trails serving a total of 16 participating communities, and it draws more than 100,000 riders to central Utah each year.