ATV and Off-Roading Around Fredericton: A Rider’s Guide to Trails, Permits and Rules

The managed trail network and who runs it

New Brunswick punches well above its weight for ATV riding, and Fredericton sits close to the middle of it all. The province is threaded with more than 10,000 km of managed trail, all of it looked after by the New Brunswick All-Terrain Vehicle Federation, which now brands itself as Quad NB. It is a volunteer-run federation of more than 50 member clubs spread across eight regions, representing tens of thousands of riders. Those clubs are the ones who cut brush, replace bridges, sign the trails and negotiate with landowners, which is the unglamorous work that makes the whole system exist.

The reason the network is so large has as much to do with land agreements as it does with volunteer sweat. A big share of the managed kilometres run across private woodlands, and Quad NB has spent years signing access deals to keep them open. In 2019 the federation reached a landmark agreement with J.D. Irving for more than 800 km of trail on Irving woodlands, and it holds similar arrangements with other private owners and with the provincial government on Crown land. When you see the standard trail marker, a white ATV inside a green circle on a blue post, that sign is shorthand for a legal agreement that lets you be there.

If you also snowmobile, the two worlds overlap but are not the same. Some corridors are shared in winter, and a handful of clubs manage both, but the permits, the grooming and the season are separate. We keep the sled side of things in its own write-up, so for winter riding see our companion Fredericton snowmobiling guide. This article stays on wheels: quads, and increasingly, side-by-sides.

Permits, registration and insurance: the paperwork

Riding the managed trails legally means clearing three separate hurdles, and people mix them up constantly, so here they are in plain order. First is the Quad NB trail permit, which is your right to be on club-managed trail. For the 2026 and 2027 seasons the full groomed permit runs about $145 including tax, with a cheaper non-groomed permit around $75 for riders who stick to unmaintained, snow-free trail. There is a youth permit near $30 for ages 6 to 15, plus short-term options: roughly $20 for a day and $30 for a week if you are just visiting. The non-groomed permit does not get you onto groomed trails, so if you ride year-round the groomed permit is the one to buy.

Second is registration, which is a separate government requirement, not a Quad NB one. Every ATV and side-by-side must be registered through Service New Brunswick, and that runs $41 a year. Third is insurance: New Brunswick law requires motor vehicle liability coverage of no less than $200,000, and you have to carry proof while you ride. None of these substitute for the others. A registered, insured quad with no trail permit is still not welcome on club trail, and a permit does nothing for the registration and insurance the province demands.

The good news is that buying is easy. Trail permits are sold online and at counters through Service New Brunswick, at club meetings, and through a long list of area powersports dealers. The Rusagonis club, for instance, lists retailers including Riverview Honda and Jim Gilbert’s, along with several equipment and motorsports shops around the capital region. Buy your permit before you ride, not from the tailgate of your truck at the trailhead, and put the decal where wardens expect to find it.

Age rules, safety training and helmets

New Brunswick takes ATV age rules seriously, largely because the trauma numbers gave it little choice. Helmets are mandatory for every operator and every passenger, full stop, on trail or off. Beyond that, age dictates a lot. Riders 16 and older with a valid driver’s licence have the broadest access. Youth aged 14 and 15 may operate on managed trails with a Class 9 licence, a safety training certificate and adult supervision. Children as young as 6 to 13 can only ride on designated managed trails, and only after completing an approved safety training course.

The safety course is not optional box-ticking for young riders. Anyone under 16, and anyone supervising youth operators, is required to complete the training. It covers machine control, terrain, hand signals and the judgment that keeps a kid off a trail that is beyond them. Quad NB and its clubs point riders toward the certified courses, and it is worth doing even for adults who grew up riding farm quads and never learned the formal signals or the etiquette of a two-way trail.

A few other rules catch people out. You cannot operate an off-road vehicle with a suspended driver’s licence, and riding impaired carries the same weight it does behind the wheel of a car. Machines are meant to travel in the marked direction of trail traffic, obey posted speed limits, and carry a mirror. These are the sorts of details that feel fussy until you meet an enforcement officer or another rider coming the other way around a blind corner.

Side-by-sides and UTVs on the trail

The fastest-growing machines on New Brunswick trails are side-by-sides, the sit-in, roll-cage vehicles also called UTVs or SxS. They have taken over a big share of the trailhead parking lots for good reasons: seat belts, a roof, room for a passenger or two, and a cargo bed that swallows a cooler and a chainsaw. For families and older riders they are often the more comfortable, more forgiving way to spend a day in the woods, and the managed network was widened and bridged over the years partly to accommodate them.

For permits and rules, a side-by-side is treated as an off-road vehicle just like a quad. It needs the same Quad NB trail permit, the same Service New Brunswick registration, and the same minimum liability insurance. Helmets are still required for operators and passengers, and if the machine came equipped with seat belts, everyone aboard has to wear them. The mirror requirement applies too. In short, the paperwork does not change when you swap handlebars for a steering wheel.

The one thing to check is width and trail suitability. Not every older, narrow single-track corridor was built with a wide machine in mind, and a few tight sections favour quads. Most of the main managed routes around Fredericton handle full-size side-by-sides fine, but if you are running a wide machine into unfamiliar country, ask the local club before you commit to a corridor you cannot easily turn around on.

Local clubs and where they ride

Two clubs do most of the heavy lifting around Fredericton, and joining or at least knowing them is the single best move a new rider can make. The Nashwaak Valley ATV Club (Club 47, Region 7) covers the ground most Frederictonians think of as home turf, with membership and permit points across Fredericton, Burton, Stanley, Durham Bridge, Penniac and Lincoln. Its trails follow the Nashwaak Valley and the hills north and east of the city. The club runs an active Facebook group and posts trail conditions there, which is often fresher than any printed map.

South and west of the river, the Rusagonis ATV Club (Club 45, Region 6) carries the load. Its territory reaches through Rusagonis, Oromocto, Charters Settlement, and the Harvey and Beaver Dam areas, and it coordinates with neighbouring clubs to keep the corridors connected. This is the club whose trails link into the old railbed running toward Fredericton Junction, a flat, fast, family-friendly spine that a lot of local riders use to get out of town and connect with wider country.

Clubs also serve the Stanley and Cross Creek country to the north, where the terrain gets rougher and the trails feel more remote. The exact club boundaries shift as volunteers come and go, so rather than memorize them, use the club finder on the Quad NB website to see who manages the ground you want to ride and to grab current contact details. Your membership dollars and permit fees flow back to these clubs, and a club that hears from its riders is a club that keeps trails open.

Where to ride: staging, connectors, gas and food

The appeal of the Fredericton network is that it connects, so you can start close to town and ride to lunch. The former rail corridor, part of the province-wide trail system, gives riders a long, graded route out of the Fredericton area toward Fredericton Junction and beyond, and it ties into the wider managed web from there. From that spine, club trails branch into the Nashwaak Valley, up toward Stanley, and across the woodlands south of the Oromocto River. Trailhead staging areas tend to be informal: a gravel pull-off, a club lot, or a business that tolerates trailer parking, so scout your launch point ahead of time rather than assuming.

Trip planning around fuel and food is half the fun and half the necessity. Side-by-sides and quads do not have huge tanks, and there are long stretches of the network with nothing but trees, so plan gas stops in the villages the trails touch and carry a spare jerry can on longer days. Quad NB’s mapping flags services like fuel, food, shelters and cell coverage precisely because riders have run dry in the wrong spot. A number of rural diners and general stores along the corridors have quietly become rider favourites simply because they let you park a trailer and buy a burger.

One local caveat worth knowing: not all nearby trail is open trail. CBC reported that Base Gagetown, the large military training area southeast of Oromocto, closed its trails to public ATV use over safety and security concerns, so do not assume old routes across the base are still fair game. When a corridor is closed, it is closed for a reason, and riding it anyway is exactly the kind of thing that costs everyone access. Stick to the signed managed network and you will not go wrong.

Seasons, maps and apps

The honest answer on season is that most of the good riding runs spring through fall, with winter as a separate, snow-covered chapter. Many managed trails open around mid-April and stay ridable into December, and the old railbed section, which crosses Crown park land under a seasonal lease, is specifically permitted from roughly April 16 to December 14. Spring brings its own hazard: mud season. When the frost comes out of the ground the trails go soft, and riding a soupy trail chews it into ruts that the club then has to repair. Clubs sometimes ask riders to hold off until things firm up, and it is worth listening.

For maps, start and end with Quad NB. The federation publishes the official managed-trail mapping, complete with service icons for fuel, food and shelters, and it is the only source that reflects current agreements and closures. Third-party apps like Trailforks and Wikiloc have user-submitted New Brunswick tracks that are useful for a sense of terrain, but they are not authoritative about what is legal or open, and plenty of the tracks on them are not managed trail at all.

A word on rentals and guided tours: they are thin on the ground right here. Fredericton has excellent powersports dealers for buying, servicing and gearing up, but a walk-up ATV rental or guided quad tour of the kind you find in some tourist regions is not really a Fredericton offering. If that is what you want, you are more likely to find it through operators elsewhere in the province, so plan accordingly rather than turning up expecting to rent a machine for the afternoon.

Ride responsibly and keep the trails open

Every metre of managed trail exists because a landowner said yes, and every closed trail is usually the story of that yes being withdrawn. That is the tension that sits under this whole sport in New Brunswick. Much of the network runs across private woodlots and working forest, and the goodwill that keeps it open is fragile. Staying on marked trail is not just a rule, it is the entire deal. As the local clubs like to put it, not every ATV tire track is an ATV trail, and cutting your own line across someone’s back forty is how corridors get lost for everyone.

The specifics matter more than the slogans. Keep out of wetlands and off soft ground, where a single machine can cause erosion that takes years to heal. Do not block driveways, turnarounds or gates when you stage, and pack out what you pack in, because a trailhead full of garbage is a trailhead a landowner shuts down. Ease off the throttle near homes: noise is the complaint that most often turns a neutral neighbour into an opponent. If you meet horses, hikers or cyclists on a shared corridor, slow right down and give them room.