Recreation

I’ve always found some of the recreation discourse to be complex

Sometimes, folks will use “outdoor recreation economic benefit” numbers to argue for Wilderness, and yet the economic benefit numbers include RVs and OHV’s (and possibly soccer balls, sometimes it’s hard to tell.) That’s always been a bit puzzling to me.

Then there is the general feeling that federal lands provide recreation that communities make money from, so federal taxpayers should pay for it.  Let’s look at this news story, for example. This is a Colorado Sun story about how the locals are and have been stepping up in Colorado. The story is from June 4 and incorporates concerns about the GMUG’s toilet cleaning contract and DOGE.  Although Chris French said they were working on those contracts.

Anyone who remembers locked toilets at trailheads and boat ramps during the early months of the pandemic in 2020 knows that does not stop people from pooping. That could lead to widespread closures of those public lands as the government grapples with serious health and safety concerns.

(Local U.S. Forest Service officials have been ordered not to speak with the media and direct all inquiries to regional and national offices that do not respond beyond saying they have received the request for comment.)

I haven’t tried separately from reporter Blevins, so we don’t know.

I’d only add, there were not “widespread closures” of FS land then and are unlikely to be now. And the pre-Trump loss of this years’ seasonals seems to be elided with Trump Admin buyouts or layoffs(and I thought those laid off were rehired?). Indeed it is hard to keep up.

It’s interesting that different counties have different views (or at least individual Commissioners do).

Could local support set a dangerous funding precedent? 

There’s also some concern that if local communities contribute financial support to federal management of public lands, budget-slashing bureaucrats may pinch future funds.

Hmm “budget-slashing bureaucrats”.. are those the same as federal elected officials- or federal employees?

What if they say ‘See, you don’t need us. You can take care of this,’” Gunnison County Commissioner Laura Puckett Daniels said. The county actually declined to pitch in for the backcountry Forest Service workers, not because of a lack of appreciation for public lands but to save funding for health and human services that could be slashed as the federal government shrinks.

For those of you not familiar with Colorado counties, the other counties mentioned are more wealthy than Gunnison County based on per capita income, according to Wikipedia.

Local budgets — even in communities where second homeowners pay big property tax bills — feel the strain of funding public land management, Daniels said.

I went down a bit of a side trail here. How did second homeowners get into the mix? Don’t primary homeowners also pay big property tax bills? Then I cam across this interesting NWCCOG (Northwest Colorado Council of Governments) report from 2024

. Quality of life perception is dramatically different between some respondent cohorts. Full-time, year-round residents who own or rent their residence feel dramatically more negative about the impacts of the tourism economy and QoL than their Second Homeowner counterparts that either do or do not rent their home as an STR. These residency-based
differences are the most pronounced in the study.

The whole report is very interesting. When we think about FS recreation, we tend to think about everyone, local and others. But the communities clearly have a “tourism economy” which can result in overcrowding and lessening the quality of the experience for residents. So perhaps it makes sense to think about “tourism industry-based recreation.”

Anyway, back to the original story.

“I don’t want to create the case for the federal government to divest,” she said. “We just don’t have the income the federal government does to absorb the magnitude of this work for very long at all even with the help of our partners. We can do this as a Band-Aid but we don’t have the funding streams to do it for the long term.”

Pitkin County is supporting two backcountry rangers through the county’s sheriff’s office, giving the rangers the ability to enforce rules around fires and reservations in heavily-trafficked zones.

I hadn’t heard of this approach before to ramp up LEO presence.

Pitkin County Commissioner Patti Clapper is not too troubled by setting a precedent for local-over-federal funding of public lands because the county – like Eagle, Gunnison and Summit counties – has been supporting seasonal Forest Service workers for several years.

“We see this more of a continuation of efforts we have done in the past to maintain our focus on public safety and forest safety,” Clapper said.

Eagle County and its towns launched its Front Country Ranger program in 2018 as “a way to enhance support for the Forest Service,” said Marcia Gilles, Eagle County’s first director of open space and natural resources, who spent more than two decades working for the Forest Service and Park Service.

“The Front Country Rangers was about enhancing a seasonal program we considered underfunded and now we are the sole support system,” Gilles said. “If it was not for this program, we would not have anyone out in a forest that sees 18 million to 20 million visitors a year.”

While Eagle, Gunnison, Pitkin and Summit counties are well-positioned to weather the loss of staff in public lands, the counties’ seasonal programs “are not sustainable,” Gilles said.

“It’s a stewardship responsibility of the federal government to support the Forest Service management,” she said. “We do have a recognition that there is a community-level need for support as well. This is about stewardship and partnership.”

Still, Daniels worries that local funding could lead a newly overhauled federal government to scale back support for public lands. That would create a patchwork of management policy that may hinder access and injure wildlife and habitat.

“If this becomes a state and county or regional management system, we could see a huge breakdown in what public lands mean,” Daniels said.

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So if we grant that communities and the feds have responsibilities, what should those be? Should it vary by the wealth of the communities, or by the amount that Forest-based recreation contributes to the local economy? Does advertising for more visitation bring with it responsibility to address the impacts?

With all that’s going on at the Forest Service, we’ve been remiss at rounding up recreation news, so here goes. Please add your own in the comments.

1. Lake Tahoe Basin Wide Trails Analysis Project

I couldn’t find much detailed news coverage of this decision, but I think it’s pretty interesting what the Lake Tahoe folks can do. Note what they did with adding trails. Here’s what the decision is doing (from the Draft Decision Notice September 2024).

Designate existing non-motorized trails as open to e-bikes (112.6 miles)
 Change existing motorcycle trail designation as open to e-bikes only (1.1 mile)
 Designate existing non-motorized trail as open to motorcycles (3.8 miles)
 Decommission Trails (2.5 miles)
 Construct new trails open to e-bikes (27.5 miles)
 Construct new non-motorized trail (14.7 miles)
 Construct new motorcycle trails (4.2 miles)
 Designate existing closed road as open to e-bikes (2 miles)
 Designate existing unmanaged trail as non-motorized (1.7 miles)
 Construct three new trailheads (Pine Drop, Brockway Summit, Elks Point). Trailheads would include a paved
parking lot and visitor information signage. Restroom facilities may be included.
 Upgrade stream crossings
 Upgrade trails for Best Management Practices
 Install wayfinding and interpretive signage
 Update the LTBMU Motor Vehicle Use Map (MVUM)

Here’s the need for change:

There is a need to provide a sustainable trail system meeting National Forest Trail Management Standard, including low-maintenance design principles, diversity of experience and challenge opportunity, and appropriate trail use guidance.
 There is a need to update the wheeled vehicle designation of the National Forest System trails and roads to reflect the use of e-bikes and update the Motor Vehicle Use Map to reflect these changes.
 There is a need to provide trail system connectivity to logical access points, such as trailheads, public transit routes, community centers and neighborhoods, and underutilized areas.
 There is a need to manage and upgrade some existing unmanaged trails.
 There is a need to provide a trail system that incorporates “stacked loop” design – trail experiences of different length, type and challenge exist from common access points.
 There is a need to provide Aquatic Organism Passage at trail crossings.
 There is a need to provide additional capacity on popular recreation trails.
 There is a need to limit potential impacts related to use conflict, or overuse of popular trail sections and areas.

Seems like many of these would apply in many places; perhaps other forests don’t have the capacity to take this on.

2.  The Continuing Steamboat Mountain Bike Trail Controversy

There’s plenty of coverage of this one. Here’s a story from 2019.  From last month:Forest Service changes to Rabbit Ears Pass mountain bike project have advocates hopping mad

That seems like six years, almost as long as fuel treatment project time frames.  It makes you wonder why people can agree in the Lake Tahoe Basin, but not in Steamboat?

3. Trail Stewardship Act Funding

Here’s another recreation story about folks helping out with FS work this year, this time rafting.

Aherin, of Lewiston and Salmon, Idaho, owns Idaho River Adventures and is president of the Middle Fork Outfitters Association. During the chaos that followed the Trump administration’s decision to dismiss probationary federal employees, his organization worked with the Idaho congressional delegation to lay the groundwork for a solution.

The Middle Fork Outfitters Association has been using the Trail Stewardship Act to help the Forest Service maintain the roads that provide access to Boundary Creek. The 2016 law allows holders of special use permits to use the money they are required to pay the Forest Service (3% of their gross profits) for trail maintenance and to care for other recreational infrastructure.

Before the act, outfitters would write a check to the federal government. Now they can write checks to contractors who perform maintenance work and then use the receipts to offset what they owe the feds.

This summer, Aherin and other outfitters will divert the money they owe the Forest Service to the Selway Bitterroot Frank Church Foundation. In turn, the group will hire four people to work as checkers at put-ins and two to work on Forest Service river patrol crews.

“It is really in line with our mission, it’s just not something we have done before,” said Ryan Ghelfi, executive director of the foundation.

The group typically hires trail crews and wilderness rangers to help the agency care for the Selway-Bitterroot and Frank Church-River of No Return wilderness areas that overlay much of central Idaho’s backcountry. Working on the river is new and so far a temporary part of the group’s work.

Ghelfi said the people the foundation hires will work under the direction of the Forest Service and at least for now, it is just for this summer to help the agency deal with unexpected circumstances.

“The way things are right now, it’s something our organization needed to be able to say yes to and we did.

4. Moth Plan for Shoshone

Very interesting and comprehensive story from Wyofile on managing moth/grizzly tourism. Who knew there was moth/grizzly tourism? I try to avoid grizzlies, myself.

The Shoshone National Forest has been assessing its moth sites in consideration of management changes since 2015, when it completed its Forest Plan. Before that, around 15 years ago, Yellowstone region managers prioritizing grizzly bear issues identified the moth sites as a top-three issue in the ecosystem, U.S. Forest Service biologist Dan Tyers told the room in Cody.

5. FS and BLM Recreation in Wyoming Compared: BLM Not Having Problems

This is coverage of the Wyoming Outdoor Roundtable

The panel was part of the Wyoming Outdoor Recreation Summit, which gathered businesses, agencies and recreationists in Laramie to talk about issues like access and economic opportunities. Though Ashcroft and his fellow panelists discussed longstanding challenges, participants were keen to hear about recent DOGE impacts on Interior Department agencies like the U.S. Forest Service, Park Service and Bureau of Land Management.

“Is there going to be a hair-on-fire moment when the bathrooms aren’t getting cleaned and maybe the campgrounds are getting closed?” asked Wyoming Office of Outdoor Recreation Manager Mark Tesoro, who moderated the panel.

“One forest may have lost their entire special uses program, which impacts guiding and outfitters, where another forest may be whole in that region,” Ashcroft said. “So it truly is varying by district to district, forest to forest, that you’re going to see impacts.”

Regardless, he said, “the agency’s priority is to keep sites open, and so we are going to prioritize that to the extent possible.” Sites may, however, not be open at the same level of service that users have enjoyed in the past.

“There could be sites that historically had running water, that may not have running water,” he said. “There could be sites that had trash collection that may not have trash collection this year.”

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Trail maintenance will be a big challenge, Ashcroft added, so users could encounter more debris or downed trees.

Agency leadership wants to keep decision-making as local as possible, Ashcroft said, and has identified safety, fire, timber and recreation as priorities. “I see us trying to focus what we have on those priorities, recreation being one of those priorities.”

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Jennifer Fleuret McConchie, Wyoming BLM deputy state director and the third panelist, doesn’t think the federal challenges will prevent the BLM from getting its work done this season, she told the crowd.

Wyoming BLM staff, key to Trump’s “energy dominance” strategy, have been largely spared by DOGE. 

“I don’t think any of the challenges coming to face us this year are going to stretch our ability to meet those challenges and work with our partners to get the work done where it needs to be done,” Fleuret McConchie said.

Knowing what we know, I wonder why the FS would have more problems than the BLM.  Possibly because of the last Admin’s getting rid of temps for  this year, plus the FS having 5K or so probationary hires?  Or is it a budget thing? Certainly DOGE could tell a BLM minerals employee from a recreation employee. I’m guessing it might be more complicated than just “they have minerals there.”

Anyway, this might be a year to recreate on BLM sites preferentially.

We have seen that there are many openings at the Great Basin Institute and elsewhere for various kinds of folks who have been let go or departed voluntarily from the Forest Service.
A recreation person reached out to me, who had 7 years of seasonal work and 1 year of permanent status.

This individual asked two questions:

Have you or others, written about the possibilities for my areas: Recreation, Wilderness, Trails?

During prior contractions in federal job, what options lead to new jobs in public lands?

Hopefully someone out there has experience and knowledge that you can share. If you don’t feel comfortable commenting in public here, please email me at Sharon at forestpolicypub.com and I can share with this individual.

For those of us who aren’t familiar with the way work is done at the Forest Service, and the tasks of different levels, Jason has a good description of how the Supervisor’s Office Recreation folks support the Districts.   I thought that this would be useful to highlight the utility of work at the Supervisor’s Office, and share Jason’s appreciation for folks doing this kind of work.

In our SO, engineering provides recreation support with complex bridge design and construction and major repairs to water, sewer, and electrical systems and to buildings. Work involves design, contract prep contract oversight and zones hands on repairs. There is a Forest rec program manager and developed recreation/trails specialist stationed at the SO to support Districts with Rec budgeting, project level budgeting, providing input to IDT, landscape architect support (rec site design, visuals), master site planning, information kiosk design & construction, sign planning, rec site and trail condition surveys, trail layout and design, partnership management, partnership outreach/development, drafting and oversight of agreements with multiple partners, service contract preparation, drafting volunteer agreements, development of operations and maintenance plans, procurement contract prep, design and layout of minor trail bridges, managing the Forest website to update recreation/trails information to ensure they are accurate, coordinating and putting on training such as hazard tree assessments and minor bridge inspections. They also go out, get their hands dirty as well, and assist Districts with project level implementation such as trail construction or construction of an information board kiosk. Wear many different hats.

Mike’s comment about the shared Volunteer Coordinator on the Rio Grande reminded me of part of my essay in the 193 Million Acres book, edited by Steve Wilent.  My ideas were partially inspired by talking to folks about the Volunteer Coordinator position. I may have posted this part of my essay previously, but it is still relevant, plus there are many new readers out there. I put my updated thoughts  in italics. I focused on dispersed recreation, but the ideas are relevant to all recreation.

One Giant Step Forward: Every Forest Needs Friends

Everyone needs good friends, and when it comes to recreation, friends are perhaps the Forest Service’s greatest need. The agency already has lots of friends. At the national scale, the National Forest Foundation was chartered by Congress in 1993 to “bring people together to restore and enhance our National Forests and Grasslands.”

Numerous local groups focus on their specific national forest or ranger district. In Colorado, the Friends of Dillon Ranger District (fdrd.org) are one example: “Friends of the Dillon Ranger District (FDRD) leverages the power of volunteers to make sure that your national forest lands, that are enjoyed by millions of people each year, are not negatively impacted by their popularity. By volunteering with FDRD, or supporting us by becoming a member or making a financial contribution, you benefit your national forest that makes Summit County a world-class destination.”

In California, the mission of the Stewards of the Sierra National Forest (sotsnf.org) is “to unite the many people who enjoy the diverse recreation activities available in the Sierra National Forest, promoting responsible recreation and use of forest resources, through conservation and education, and ensuring public access to the forest in the present and for future generations.” In Illinois, the Friends of the Shawnee National Forest (shawneefriends.org) is a “nonprofit organization that supports the Shawnee National Forest by promoting land stewardship,  nvironmental education, and responsible outdoor recreation.”

Friends groups can accept donations for supporting a forest or district— donations the agency cannot accept. I am going hiking tomorrow on a national forest. After I use about $30 worth of gas to get to a trailhead, I think it’s fair to donate $10 to the district Friends group. I’d like to do so via a collection box at the trailhead or perhaps online. But with no Friends, the
$10 sits in my pocket despite my best intentions.

What would it take to organize grassroots groups for every national forest, or even every forest district? If recreation were the “One Big Thing” for the 21st century Forest Service, a “Friends for Every Forest” campaign would be a major step toward getting there. And establishing a friends group could be among the duties of a jointly established and funded volunteer coordinator for each national forest. If the full cost were $70,000 per annum for such a position, and it was split between the Forest Service and its partners, then for roughly $5.5 million per year the outdoor industrycould make a difference on a moonshot scale. One corporation with stores nationwide, Recreational Equipment Inc. (REI) gives $1 million to the NFF via its REI Co-op MasterCard (www.rei.com/h/shared-values). REI and outdoor gear retailer Patagonia support Volunteers for Outdoor Colorado, as do numerous other companies, foundations, and groups (voc.org/sponsors-partners). Patagonia gives 1 percent of its sales to a variety of grassroots groups via its “1% for the Planet” program (patagonia.com); since 1995 it has donated $89 million in cash and in-kind donations to a variety of not for profits.

It is not too difficult to imagine that without undue economic pain, corporations that profit from the ready supply of free outdoor recreation on the national forests could give back in game-changing ways by focusing some proportion of their donations directly on national forests, BLM, and other lands where so many people recreate.

If the CEO of a major outdoor recreation corporation were to ask me “What’s the one thing our industry could do to help that would have the biggest impact?”  my answer would be to sponsor a volunteer coordinator and a friends group on every forest, all 154 of them. Many in the recreation industry have incredible assets and are now in the right place at exactly the right time. They have a network of local businesses, technological knowhow, marketing and media skills, and unfettered creativity compared to agency employees (that’s in terms of fetters, not creativity). Just being able to collect donations at trailheads and funneling the money back to the local unit through a not-for-profit would be a powerful step forward.

What if the outdoor industry put its financial, human, and technical resources behind building nonprofit capacity to support Forest Service and BLM programs? They would be choosing a leadership role of uniting, not dividing, something our country greatly needs. What would this look like?

Here’s one possibility. The outdoor industry could set aside some percentage of their profits to give back to public lands, but at least an amount equivalent to the $5.5 million for the volunteer coordinators. The first step would be to support the development of nonprofit, nonpolitical (how counterculturalis that?) friends groups for each forest or unit of the BLM. In fact, the
San Juan Mountains Interpretive Association (sjma.org) does that for an area that is a mix of Forest Service and BLM. What that does is remove the soul-draining bureaucratic distinctions and focuses attention and work on what needs to be done.

Some forests may already work with a variety of collaborative groups, Friends groups, and statewide interagency access councils or committees, such as the Montana Interagency Access Council. Many forests, though, lack some or all of this kind of external horsepower. The hardest part is probably just getting them started, and that’s where a major effort by the
recreation industry and the Forest Service could pay off, with support for generations to come. Nevertheless, the public’s role remains foundational.

As members of the public, we need to step forward and participate. To paraphrase President Kennedy, we should be asking not what our national forests can do for us, but what we can do for our national forests.

That One Big Thing

If having high-quality, diverse dispersed recreation was the Forest Service’s “One Big Thing,” what would be most important for the agency to address?
Here are a few suggestions:
• Focus forest and volunteer resources on an “every Forest has a Friend” program. Conduct a national conversation with existing Friends groups to see what they need in terms of support. Develop volunteer or paid mentoring cadres that travel to forests to help start new Friends groups and offer support to the groups. Support Friends groups and volunteer programs that are the equivalent of The Nature Conservancy’s Fire Learning Network, which “engages dozens of multi-agency, community-based projects to accelerate the restoration of landscapes that depend on fire to sustain native plant and animal communities,” Actively involve retirees and retiree groups in these efforts.

• Work with partners to fund a volunteer coordinator for each forest who will be the contact person for incipient friends efforts.

• Reorganize such that partnerships and volunteers are crucial parts of the organization and get serious about increasing volunteer and partner involvement—say, set a goal of 10-fold in 10 years. Think about striving for the equivalent of a moonshot for NASA.

• Work with BLM to benchmark other agencies that have been successful, and look for areas where working together with Interior agencies would increase efficiency and effectiveness. Because having a variety of dispersed recreation opportunities is the focus, choose partners that match the “wild and free” character of the Forest Service, with a bucolic, not “mall”-ic, atmosphere.

• Establish, with the Interior Department, a FACA group to review current agency practices and make recommendations for appropriately collecting fees, including possible changes to FLREA. This should include reviewing successes and failures across the country, developing best practices, and explicitly considering the idea of “pricing people out of their public lands.”

• Initiate an effort (with the BLM and states in appropriate locations), or piggyback on existing efforts, to improve mapping and feedback systems on the websites and phone apps for visitors.
These would make it easy to find locations across ownerships that both include opportunities visitors want as well as exclude those they want to avoid. The website and apps would also include information about the location and a place to give feedback and donate to local friend’s groups.

We now have some fairly excellent apps, but no links to give feedback to agencies nor to donate.

• Begin a program to phase out concessionaires from developed sites within 5 years, and replace them with paid agency staffers and trained volunteers.

I still believe agency presence and visibility is important, but given the cutbacks this year that don’t affect concessionaires, plus  their performance where I recreate, which is good, I’m not so certain about this.

• Encourage volunteers and retirees to work with the Forest Service to ensure access by providing support to land management staffs and increasing the agency’s capacity to litigate to open or preserve access to recreation sites. Montana’s Public Lands and Waters Access Association serves as an example of working with the federal and state agency budgets and donors to acquire or litigate access.

For example, some of us retirees are no longer at the “clearing trails” level of physical ability, but might be at the “writing documents under the supervision of a knowledgeable person” level for volunteering.

My vision for the national forests is that my great grandchildren will still find places where they can get away to camp, ride, hunt, fish, pick berries, and collect mushrooms and firewood. These are activities that our ancestors engaged in and that rural people today and tomorrow will continue to engage in. As US citizens, these experiences are our birthright. They should only yield to more restricted access for specific reasons, in specific places, when all enforcement efforts have failed, and with the local involvement and support of the communities.

The Forest Service has struggled with budgets that cannot keep up with needs and with organizations who think the easiest way to reduce costs is to keep people out and leave the land alone. I suggest that this is not what the majority of citizens want, even if they aren’t frequent users of the national forests, or even if they never use them. The Forest Service must take advantage
of the nascent groundswell of help and support and work to increase and expand it. The agency is not alone in this; it can and should build on the good work of friends groups and other volunteers. With their help, providing for a variety of dispersed recreation can become the agency’s new primary objective as stewards of America’s best experiences, and these precious
public lands can continue being wild and free.

Here’s a link to an article on the Shred Act. It’s comprehensive and has much historic perspective. 

It’s a bipartisan bill, and seems (perhaps unsurprisingly) to be supported by Congressfolk with ski areas in their district or State.

My question is: why would ski areas be special.. shouldn’t all recreation permit dollars, logically, go back to the Forest, or does it vary by kind of permit? Looks like NPS fees under FLREA are 80/20 local vs. other Parks and doesn’t go to the Treasury at all.  But maybe the other recreation permit fees are so minimal it wouldn’t matter? I found this page and got lost.  Then there’s the concessionaires, which according to our friends at the Western Slope No-Fee Coalition, is 10-15% of their gross revenue but paid in offsets, which effectively keeps the funding hyper-locally.

Of course, I guess that opens a broader question of “why not grazing fees or timber sale receipts?”  Maybe they already are going back to local units.  I think a table of different revenue sources and the proportion that stays local, goes to other similar programs, or goes back to the Treasury might be helpful in putting this bill in context. Maybe administering how the funds would go back to the unit is more work than it’s worth for smaller-dollar permits?

Colorado congressmen are taking another shot at keeping revenue from ski area fees in the local communities where resorts operate.

U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat, reintroduced the Ski Hill Resources for Economic Development, or SHRED Act, for the third time. Bennet was joined by co-sponsor Sen. John Barrasso, a Wyoming Republican, and several other lawmakers in bringing it to the U.S. Senate. Colorado Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse and Rep. Blake Moore, a Utah Republican, introduced the act in the U.S. House of Representatives.

“The SHRED Act ensures revenue generated by Colorado’s world-renowned ski areas stays in these rural and mountain communities,” Neguse wrote in an email, adding that the act would “keep ski fees local, reinvest in our national forests, and support the outdoor recreation economy and critical locally led initiatives.”

Currently, ski resorts that operate on U.S. Forest Service land have to pay a permit fee that goes directly to the U.S. Treasury. The fees from the 124 U.S. ski resorts operating on Forest Service land total over $40 million annually.

However, there is no guarantee that these funds go back to the national forests bearing the brunt of the recreational activity, which is what the SHRED Act aims to change.

As drafted, SHRED would establish a framework for local national forests to keep a portion of these fees to offset increased recreational use by supporting local ski permit and program administration.

It would enable 80% of the fees to be used for needs in the forests where they’re generated, leaving 20% for other national forests with winter or broad recreation needs.

Within each national forest, 75% of the funds would support the ski area program and permitting needs, to process proposals for ski area improvement projects, visitor information and wildfire preparedness. The remaining 25% would be set aside for year-round local recreation management and community needs. This includes special-use permit administration, visitor services, trailhead improvements, facility maintenance, search and rescue activities, avalanche information and education, habitat restoration at recreation sites and workforce housing.

If passed, the act could bring in up to $27 million for national forests in Colorado, according to estimates from the Forest Service and information from Bennet’s office.

The majority, around $20 million, would come from the White River National Forest where Vail Mountain, Beaver Creek Resort, Breckenridge Ski Resort, Keystone Resort, Arapahoe Basin Ski Area, Copper Mountain Resort, Aspen Mountain, Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk, Snowmass and Sunlight Mountain Resort all operate.

This story from June in the L. A. Times hits some of our favorite topics..poop and funding.  Interesting that this story is located in the “Climate California” section.. Another story in the same section is the takeover of black widow terrain by brown widows. The first specimens were collected in Torrance in 2003. Anyway, back to ..elimination.

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Joanie Kasten remembers peering out the kitchen window of her 108-year-old cabin in the Angeles National Forest and seeing a woman “going potty” near a large rock.

“Poor thing,” the 74-year-old thought. “She doesn’t know I’m right here.”

That was before the fierce Bobcat fire tore through Big Santa Anita Canyon in 2020, closing it to the public. Much of the canyon — which includes the popular Chantry Flat recreation area — is slated to reopen Oct. 1, and some who live there in historic cabins are worried that it’s going to open a floodgate of feces and urine.

That’s because seven toilets in and around the highly trafficked canyon in the San Gabriel Mountains vanished over the last six years — about half the facilities in the area, according to information provided by the U.S. Forest Service. Some were removed to comply with federal water safety regulations; others because they exceeded their lifespan. The fire claimed two. The loss climbs to nine if you factor in another two that were replaced but are currently unusable.

That leaves seven (and one urinal) in operation, including two composting toilets at a hike-in campground. Five of the area’s seven toilets are clustered at the Chantry Flats Picnic Area, a nexus for the most popular trails. Officials plan to install two portable toilets before the reopening.

It’s not just the canyon that’s lost restrooms in recent years. The Environmental Protection Agency ordered the Forest Service to close more than 60 campground pit toilets across seven of California’s national forests in 2018 to adhere to the Safe Drinking Water Act. Other toilets of the same type — known unflatteringly as large-capacity cesspools — were removed proactively in the Angeles National Forest, officials said. Many cesspools were replaced with other types of toilets, but not all.

Forest Service officials say it isn’t practical or feasible to install facilities in some difficult-to-access places — pointing to accessibility regulations and technological challenges. Besides, officials said, it’s not unusual for restrooms to be located in centralized areas on public lands, and it’s incumbent on the public to “leave no trace.”

“If you go hiking, there’s not a lot of bathrooms along trail systems,” said Forest Service District Ranger Ray Kidd, who manages the canyon. “They’re at typically trailheads, parking lots, places where we can get a pump truck or sewage truck to service those facilities.”

Cabin owners argue that visitors have and will continue to poop and pee in the woods without following best practices. If the agency doesn’t step up, they say, they’ll be left to literally clean up the mess — and fear contamination of waterways that snake through the area.

Justin McInteer, 51, said that before the area closed, he would “just go along and pick up s—.”

“It’s disgusting,” said McInteer, an artist who bought a cabin with his partner in the Winter Creek area about five years ago. “I don’t want to make that my habit by any means.”

“If they’re just saying, ‘No, we can’t do it,’ then who does?” he said. “It means that we probably will.”

Before the closure, the picturesque canyon, recently teeming with wildflowers, drew droves of hikers, mountain bikers, campers and picnickers.

Sturtevant Falls is one of the most popular destinations in the canyon. Cabin owners are concerned that the area no longer has sufficient bathrooms for large numbers of visitors.
One of the main draws is Sturtevant Falls, a 50-foot cascade less than two miles from a trailhead near the Chantry Flat parking lot. “By far, the most challenging thing you encounter on this hike is finding parking,” according to californiathroughmylens.com.

One of the casualties of the EPA order were toilets considered large-capacity cesspools at Hoegee’s Trail Camp, a hike-in campground and popular picnic spot just over two miles from Chantry Flat.

Large-capacity cesspools — which serve 20 or more people per day — release untreated sewage, which can contaminate underground sources of drinking water with pathogens, according to the EPA.

McInteer is just downstream from the Hoegee’s campground and said cabin dwellers in the area currently pull water from the nearby creek to filter and drink. But if people are defecating right next to the creek, he worries diseases could spread.

“It’s just a nightmare,” he said. “In my opinion, it’s unacceptable to open it as a campground without some kind of facilities.”

However, that’s the plan.

Forest Service officials said the three toilets at the campground were not replaced partly because of people throwing trash in them. Trash reduces the capacity and makes it difficult to pump sewage, Kidd said, and it’s costly to hire someone to remove the contaminated trash off the site.

Most campgrounds across the forest have restrooms, as well as road access to allow servicing, said Angeles National Forest spokesperson Dana Dierkes.

Pamela Zoolalian, a cabin owner who lives just downstream from McInteer, said she didn’t think the removal order was fully thought out.

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Leave No Trace

Dispose of waste properly

Deposit poop in catholes dug 6 to 8 inches deep at least 200 feet from water, campsites and trails. Cover and disguise the cathole when finished. (Some areas, like Mt. Whitney, require solid waste to be packed out.)

Pack out toilet paper and hygiene products.

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Zoolalian, an outdoor educator and self-described llama wrangler, said too few people are familiar with “leave no trace” — seven principles intended to reduce humanity’s impact on the outdoors. One is to dispose of waste properly.

“So you’re going to start seeing, I think, a lot of waste in the area from people that want to go and backpack but don’t know how to do it, and are making common first-time mistakes,” Zoolalian said. “And I think the area is going to end up having a bigger environmental impact because of it, versus just something that … seeps down.”

The EPA banned large-capacity cesspools under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act in 2005, but the U.S. Forest Service continued to operate them after the closure deadline, according to the EPA.

Forest Service Pacific Southwest Region leaders agreed to close dozens identified by the EPA by the end of 2020.

Closing the facilities across California’s national forests “is necessary for the health and safety of the forest ecosystem and surrounding environment, employees and forest visitors,” Forest Service Chief Randy Moore said in a statement when the agreement was announced in 2018.

By the deadline, forest officials closed 62 cesspools in the Angeles, Eldorado, Inyo, Los Padres, Plumas, Sierra and Tahoe national forests; it cost approximately $1.4 million to remove the facilities and install replacements, according to a news release.

The EPA, through spokesperson Michael Brogan, advised those with environmental concerns to report them to the agency through an online form.

“Reports from the public have led to state and federal enforcement cases and ultimately served environmental protection well,” Brogan said in a statement.

Chris Kasten hikes along the Gabrielino Trail, from Chantry Flat toward Sturtevant Falls. It’s one of the most popular trails in the area, and crowds are expected to return when it reopens in October.
On the trek to Sturtevant Falls, gushing vigorously in May, there used to be at least two bathrooms.

One, at a junction called Roberts Camp, was removed because it was similar to the toilets targeted by the EPA. Though it was replaced by a facility called a Sweet Smelling Toilet — a type of vault toilet with a plastic liner — fierce storms in the winter of 2022-23 washed away the road that allowed it to be serviced by a pump truck. It was put in after the Bobcat fire forced the closure of the area so it’s never been used.

Kidd, who leads the Forest Service’s Los Angeles Gateway District, said officials are looking into a long-term solution, such as reestablishing the road or moving the bathroom to the other side of the creek. That won’t happen by the time the area reopens, and the agency plans to temporarily put out portable toilets.

A bathroom around the corner from the falls was wiped out by the fire, and another one above the falls — at Cascade Picnic Area — was removed. They weren’t replaced.

(Forest Service officials said the picnic area was decommissioned and there’s no record that the bathroom near the falls was constructed by the agency.)

Chris Kasten, Joanie Kasten’s husband, said his family bought a cabin in 1984, but his history in the area started 10 years before that.

He said he has spent a good portion of his 62 years hiking, serving as camp manager for Sturtevant Camp, volunteering for the Forest Service and even working at the pack station when he was in high school. Every few feet on a recent hike, he’d remark on the beauty of a tree — such as a particularly charming white alder — or recount a chapter of forest history.

Chris Kasten called the Cascade facilities “one of the nicest outhouses ever up here” while he and his wife hiked with a Times reporter through the canyon on a perfect spring day. “Like, if you could say that an outhouse is nice.”

It was in good repair, he said, and didn’t smell.

When Joanie Kasten pointed out the rock she had seen the woman go to the bathroom near, Chris Kasten suggested education might not be sufficient to prevent something like that from happening once the crowds return.

“People want to do the right thing,” he said. “They just need the right place to do it.”

According to Shawn Troeger, a more than 30-year veteran of the Forest Service — who started at Chantry Flat in the early 1970s — asking people to employ “leave no trace” principles might work in the remote wilderness, like far-flung areas of the Sierra Nevada, but may not be practical in the canyon.

“When you’re talking about the kind of amounts of people we’re talking about, I’m not sure how you can keep a healthy environment without having sanitation facilities,” said Troeger, who retired in 2009.

But Forest Service ranks have diminished over the years. Underfunding is a consistent problem. Some areas where toilets were installed may have been along road systems that have since been absorbed by the hills.

Decisions to add facilities are based on staffing, location, maintenance needs, budget and accessibility, forest officials said. Replacing a vault toilet, the standard type in the forest, can cost $50,000 to $100,000. When a bathroom burns or is removed, money to replace it is not already in the operating budget, officials said.

It’s not a perfectly even story of loss. New restrooms have been added in other popular areas of Angeles National Forest, Kidd said, pointing to an additional toilet installed at Oak Flat Campground and another two added at Frenchman’s Flat.

Kidd said the agency is developing a plan in which additional staff will be on hand at times at the canyon to provide information to visitors. The Forest Service has also filled 17 recreation positions that will augment staff in both Kidd’s district and the nearby San Gabriel Mountains National Monument District. The agency maintains it’s difficult to hire for lower-paid positions because of the high cost of living and daunting commutes in the L.A. area.

The monument was expanded this year and some of the newly protected land now falls in Kidd’s district. However, he said the designation does not affect the canyon repair work.

There’s recognition that none of this may be enough to safeguard land so close to a megalopolis. Mirroring a national trend, the forest saw an explosion in visits during the pandemic, and numbers remain elevated.

So the agency is now in the early stages of exploring capacity limits for popular destinations. Studies looking at the issue are underway for Mt. Baldy and the north and east forks of the San Gabriel River.

“What we learn from those studies, we can apply it across the forest,” Kidd said.

For non-Coloradans, the White River National Forest is just to the west of the Arapaho-Roosevelt. While it is further from population concentrations on the Front Range, it is also the Forest with many famous ski resorts, including Vail and Aspen.  It’s kind of a Gucci Gulch of Colorado.  Anyway, it would be interesting to hear more from others than Wilderness Workshop in this Colorado Sun story.  Again the difference with motorized seems to be (so far) no new trails, rather than remove existing ones.  Is it a matter of time?

It’s been eight years since Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper announced his “Colorado The Beautiful” plan to connect 16 gaps in trails across the state, championing development of the highest profile trails, many of which had been in the works for many years.

Only one trail on the list of 16 rural and urban pathways is completely finished: the Palisade Plunge in the Grand Valley. Some appear permanently stuck, like the multi-use trail proposed between Eldorado Canyon and Walker Ranch in Boulder County. Most are winding through complex approvals involving multiple local governments and state and federal land agencies.

The slow, steady trail building is happening as land managers and local governments begin adding extra layers of scrutiny to recreation and its impacts. For many years, recreation was heralded as the easy choice when replacing things like mining, drilling and logging on public lands. That is changing as adventuring skiers, cyclists, paddlers and hikers push deeper into remote areas.

“Land managers like the Forest Service are increasingly recognizing the importance of reducing the ecological impacts of recreation. It’s not an easy task,” said Will Roush, the director of the Carbondale-based Wilderness Workshop. “However, our land management agencies still have a long way to go regarding crafting policy and implementing management decisions and practices to ensure our decreasing wildlife populations are protected from ever-increasing recreational use and development of public lands.”

The recent approval of a small section of the proposed 83-mile Carbondale to Crested Butte Trail — one of Hickenlooper’s 16 priority trails — illustrates the growing wariness of adding new recreational access in wild areas.

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In 2023, the Wilderness Workshop commissioned a study to analyze the ecological impacts of recreation in western Colorado’s wild places as participation in outdoor activities exploded. The study detailed how trails can disturb soil and vegetation in wildlife habitat and suggested new trails should be built only after “thorough consideration of the ecological consequences” and a better management strategy would be to concentrate use on existing trails.”

The impacts of recreation are becoming more evident in the 2.3 million-acre White River National Forest, where an estimated 17 million annual visitors inject $1.6 billion into rural Western Slope communities, making it the busiest, most economically vibrant national forest in the country. Roush and the Wilderness Workshop have spent years pushing the Forest Service to consider quality over quantity when it comes to recreation on public land, with additional protections for undeveloped areas. And limited new trail development.

Roush said the underway update to the 2002 White River National Forest Management Plan is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” for wild lands and wildlife advocates to work with the Forest Service “to ensure our public lands are not loved to death.”

“The science is clear: The most important piece of that is increasing protections for large, unfragmented landscapes,” Roush said.

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Seems to me that there are many scientific disciplines to consider. Anyway, the decision for the federal chunk took five years.

The White River National Forest started a National Environmental Policy Act review of five miles of the Redstone to McClure Pass segment on federally managed land in 2019 and issued a final decision in July. The White River’s acting forest supervisor Heather Noel approved a 5-mile, natural-surface trail following an historic wagon trail and the old McClure Pass Road to the top of the pass. Her decision required seasonal closures for construction and maintenance of the trail to reduce impacts for nesting birds, calving elk and lynx. The Forest Service also committed to a comprehensive analysis of the entire trail for future segments planned between Carbondale and Redstone.

Roush and the Wilderness Workshop cheered the promise of a landscape-scale review of the trail after working with the Pitkin County and Forest Service to protect wildlife habitat along the Crystal River.

“I’m very glad the Forest Service recognized the need to shift from a piecemeal to a comprehensive approach when considering recreational impacts,” Roush said. “It was also heartening to see Pitkin County amend their trail plan to remove the option for a trail through the ecologically valuable lands near Avalanche Creek. The animals and landscape win as a result. Going forward it will be even more critical for land managers and proponents of recreational development to take this holistic and ecologically centered approach from the start.”

The Center for Western Priorities, in their newsletter today,  pointed me to the below story, but they also added this.

Increasing amounts of campers on public lands is a phenomenon that is not unique to Colorado. From 2014 to 2020, there was a nearly 40 percent increase in reservable campsite occupancy in the Lower 48, with a particularly significant increase in weekday camping. Recent reports demonstrate that these trends show no signs of slowing down—over the last four years, the share of campers who report having trouble finding an open campsite has skyrocketed.

From the Denver Post:

The AR has some interesting ideas; there should probably also be a story on dispersed camping and its future on various forests. Also the idea that if camping spot supply is less than demand, should people who pay federal taxes to support them have an advantage? Is that a philosophical question or a practical one?

Making summer camping plans in parks and forests along the Front Range has become increasingly exasperating in recent years due to surging demand and unforgiving reservation policies. But take heart, campers, a modicum of relief may be in the offing.

Planners at the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests are studying ways to add campsites. They’re also considering ways to make selecting and reserving them a little less onerous.

The Arapaho and Roosevelt forests, which are jointly administered, stretch along the Continental Divide from just south of Interstate 70 to the Wyoming border. They include Clear Creek, Gilpin, Grand, Boulder and Larimer counties. They have 59 total campgrounds with 1,400 campsites.

“I don’t think we’re ever going to meet all the demand for people who want to camp on the Front Range,” conceded forest spokesman Reid Armstrong. “We have a limited amount of land, and we want to protect it. We want to preserve it for future generations.”

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This is the first I’ve seen of the concern about non-motorized recreation; however, instead of talking about closing campgrounds, they are talking about not adding more.  Of course, they wouldn’t be adding them in Wilderness nor Roadless, which are conceivably already preserved.  Of course, in a sense all recreation that requires vehicles to get there or tow trailers is motorized in some sense.

Still, public officials feel your pain, and some are exploring creative solutions.

“We have more than five million people along the Front Range, many of whom live in Colorado because they love the outdoors and the access to camping opportunities,” Armstrong said. “In addition, this is a destination for a lot of people. A lot of our camping opportunities are serving people who come from across the country, and even internationally, to visit Rocky Mountain National Park and other well-known sites in Colorado.”

Addressing the supply side of the problem can be difficult because of budgetary and environmental constraints. There are no plans to build new campgrounds in Rocky Mountain National Park, for instance, which attracts more than four million visitors annually, in part because it has a deferred maintenance backlog in excess of $200 million, said park spokeswoman Kyle Patterson.

Nor are there plans to add campgrounds in the White River National Forest, which stretches across the central Colorado high country from Summit County to Glenwood Springs and beyond. White River is the busiest national forest in the nation.

But over the past three years, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has added 181 campsites statewide, bringing its inventory to 4,403. This year, about 40 new sites will open soon at Boyd Lake State Park near Loveland. CPW spokeswoman Bridget O’Rourke said revenue from Keep Colorado Wild passes, which are sold through motor vehicle registration renewals, will help cover the cost.

Arapaho and Roosevelt officials also are thinking about more equitable ways to roll out reservations. Under the current system, campground reservations become available six months in advance, meaning people begin grabbing them for the summer in January and February. But many people don’t get vacation approval from their employers that early in the year, and by the time they’re ready to book reservations, popular campgrounds are fully booked.

“We recognize that many people are booking up all the campgrounds in January, and they don’t necessarily know when they’re going to go, so maybe they’re canceling at the last minute — or they’re eating the (no-show) cost,” Armstrong said. “We want to make the opportunities more equitable for people who work in careers where they don’t necessarily know they’re going to have that particular week off until they get closer to it, and they want to be able to make reservations more last-minute. We’re looking at how we can design more of a rolling reservation system that maybe issues some opportunities in January, and then more as we get closer to the actual date.”

Forest officials are also brainstorming with other public land agencies in the Front Range including Rocky Mountain National Park, CPW and county land managers, through their partnership in a coalition called NoCo Places, to find ways of making the process less confusing. NoCo Places was created specifically to address the impact of Front Range population growth on public lands and the visitor experience.

Under the current system, camping reservations for Rocky Mountain National Park and national forests are made through recreation.gov. Colorado Parks and Wildlife has its own site for camping reservations. Each agency has web pages and maps for locating their offerings with thumbnail descriptions.

“When people look for campgrounds, they know they want to go camping along the Front Range but they don’t necessarily understand all the different agencies and the different camping opportunities,” Armstrong said. “Right now they have to search up camping on state lands on one site and reservations for the forest service on another site. Counties may have opportunities on a different site entirely. So, something we’re talking about is, is there a way for us to create one portal across all public lands where people can find camping opportunities in the northern Front Range of Colorado?”

NoCo Places already has an interactive map that highlights selected public lands attractions in northern Colorado with information about those areas and links to the official information pages of the agencies that manage them.

Arapaho and Roosevelt will add a handful of sites to its camping options in the next two years or so. The Jack’s Gulch campground in the high country west of Fort Collins was heavily damaged in the Cameron Peak of 2020. It is being redesigned for a rebuild, and forest officials are hopeful they can reopen it in 2026. It would have 90 campsites.

West of Empire near Berthoud Falls, the small Mizpah Campground has been closed for more than a decade because of damage to an access road. Forest officials are hopeful Mizpah can reopen in 2026, but it would only add 10 sites.

One creative solution forest officials are considering is converting “under-utilized” picnic areas into campgrounds.

“They already have a lot of the stuff we need,” Armstrong said. “They have the picnic (table), they have the grill. What would it take to convert these places to new campsites? In some cases that might require a little bit of environmental assessment. I don’t have numbers for how many that will add, but there are some great opportunities across the forests to convert some of those sites.”

Armstrong said none of the solutions under consideration are likely to be implemented next summer. They could take from two to five years.

“We do want to create that diverse opportunity and try to have the most balanced approach we can to help people book reservations and get access to these places,” Armstrong said. “We also hope people will look elsewhere to discover camping in other parts of the state that maybe aren’t as well known.