Recreation

Almost all of my Forest Service contacts said there was a great deal more recreation occurring on the National Forests due to Covid. But they didn’t have counts. Some public affairs sources said they would have to wait for their turn with NVUM (which is not every year for every Forest).

Note: this is just the information I received and/or pieced together from various contacts. Some contacts did not return emails. If this isn’t true, please speak up and comment or email me.

I think Headwaters Economics had a good point that in arguing for recreation budgets, we need to know the numbers. So they developed this report.

https://vimeo.com/headecon

I haven’t read it in its entirety, but would like to know what others think.

1. Is counting recreationists important to managers and others?

2, Is NVUM enough? Can it be fixed to be enough?

3. What do you think of Headwaters’ ideas?

4. What are your own ideas (about counting recreationists?)

5. Does it make sense for BLM and the FS to use the same approach since they are all mixed together spatially in parts of the country?

What’s all the fuss?
For every “supporting theme,” there’s an opposing theme. Speed, damage to trails and conflicts on trails were among top concerns drawn from that local survey.

At a meeting about e-bikes in the Springs last fall, one equestrian, Eleanore Blacketer, worried about “the ability for a bike to have higher speeds than what we might normally see.” The horse could perceive a threat, she said, and the consequences could be “catastrophic.”

While the promise of profit is there, Crandall at Old Town Bike Shop said he’s been “cautious” about growing e-bike inventory. The anecdotes he hears about are of “some people riding e-bikes that don’t know the etiquette, don’t have the knowledge of history and don’t have the skills to be going the speed they’re going on trails,” he said.

Crandall added: “There’s going to have to be some creative legislation, and maybe some money for enforcement to keep it from becoming a crazy world.”

He envisioned e-bikers traveling farther afield than they should, “having a lot more power than they do skill,” and requiring search and rescue crews. That was a shared fear in the survey.

Those are exaggerations, proponents say.

Kent Drummond, a longtime hiker in the region who has racked up 3,350 miles on his e-bike, said fellow enthusiasts weren’t as interested in the backcountry as opponents popularly believed. E-bike-riding El Paso County Sheriff Bill Elder agreed: “I think for the most part, people who are avid e-bike riders stay mostly to the urban (commuter) trails.”

But Medicine Wheel Trail Advocates, the local mountain bike advocacy group, has brought attention to the technology still developing, the capabilities still expanding along with the type of people wanting to ride.

In a statement, Medicine Wheel advised e-bikes “be regulated separately from human powered bikes” and warned “they bring the potential to significantly change the trail experience.”

A reality check was needed, Drummond said. “If there’s more traffic on trails, it’s not e-bikes. It’s bicycles in general. … E-bikes aren’t ruining anything.”

He and other e-cyclists report taking harsh, vocal scorn from other riders they pass.

“Some riders feel that riding a bicycle with pedal assist is cheating,” Wiens said. “But not everyone wants their experience to be a feat of endurance and fitness. They may just want to have some fun.”

Are they faster than standard mountain bikes?
The popular answer: Depends on who is riding.

“Typically, eMTBs are slower going downhill than traditional mountain bikes,” said Wiens, whose international organization supports e-bikes as long as access for other bikes is unaffected. “The majority of eMTB riders aren’t riding any faster than traditional mountain bikers, but of course there are always exceptions.”

Granting caveats, analyses by Jefferson and Boulder counties determined traditional mountain bikers traveled slightly faster on average.

But research is still early, and the answer to the question might vary across locales. A Portland State University study, combining data from Boulder, Tennessee and Sweden, determined “e-bikes are indeed faster on average than conventional bicycles.”

Chinese researchers published a study last year that showed human correlations with the machine. One conclusion: “As e-bike riding skill increases, the riding speed continuously increases and is constantly expanding.”
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Are they damaging to trails?

Concluded a 2015 study in Oregon: “soil displacement and tread disturbance from Class 1 eMTBs and traditional mountain bikes were not significantly different.”

Again, Jefferson and Boulder counties found no increased harm in their assessments.

And again, because of the lack of it, research cannot be called conclusive. Some contend the weight of e-bikes, commonly 20 pounds more than traditional mountain bikes, pose greater risks to erosion, along with the motorized churning of a wheel.

I’ve found it really hard to get out of today’s thought channels, as the folks who have power in the different channels don’t particularly want to be flooded with new ideas and partnerships and thereby lose their power. I don’t think this is conscious, but they are in a channel, like a fishbowl, where that’s the way the world looks. To my mind, we’re all trying to do good, with different ideas of what that looks like.

So thanks to Dana for submitting another story on “overrecreating” in Southern Colorado, written by the Durango Herald. I think it’s a problem in other places (based on an RVCC Zoom call), including people tromping about on private land (!) in the west, but I haven’t been able to find many news stories about it. I was on a Society for Environmental Journalists Zoom call, and only a few of those folks were interested. Others were more interested in potential violence cropping up in the Interior West due to the policies of the Biden Admin and what we might call potential Bundification (these journalists were not residents of the interior west). I continue to be fascinated by what (some) non-residents think is noteworthy about us and what concerns them.
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What’s Going On: More Poop

All those hikers and campers take a significant toll on the alpine tundra, an already fragile landscape.

For one, hikers have been constantly going off trail, causing erosion and damage to sensitive vegetation. Campers, too, have been seen frequently having fires above tree line. And both have been known to leave behind trash.

The big issue, said Brent Schoradt, executive director of the San Juan Mountains Association, which works in partnership with the Forest Service, is people failing to pack out human waste and toilet paper.

The Ice Lakes Trail is headed toward a permit system after unprecedented high use in recent years has caused damage to the landscape.
Courtesy of MK Gunn
Over Labor Day weekend, SJMA tallied nearly 2,000 hikers and 215 overnight backpackers, and while people are encouraged to carry out their waste, it’s anyone’s guess who actually followed the rules, Schoradt said.

“In a huge use area like that, even burying your waste is not advised,” he said. “People think hiking is the lowest impact way to be out on the landscape, but with those sheer numbers, you’re still having an impact.”

Role of Social Media:

The Ice Lakes Trail has always been a popular spot for day hikers and backcountry campers, but in recent years, the power of social media has caused visitation to blow up.

Can Volunteers Help?
Shout out to the San Juan Mountains Association!

The effort was replicated again this year, albeit under a tent rather than a tiny home, and has had success in mitigating some of the impacts of having so many visitors in one area.

“We want to kill them with kindness and enhance everyone’s experience,” Schoradt said. “The last thing you want to do is give a sense that it’s a free-for-all.”

But, while the volunteers’ efforts have gone a long way to help curb some of the impacts at the Ice Lakes Trail, Forest Service officials say it’s time to increase management measures, namely, through a permit system.

There was an interesting comment about to the story..

I suggest giving priority to residents in the area and not to out of state or even out of town visitors farther than 100 miles away. Some of us moved here from out of state in order to be close to these areas and it is very unfair not to consider our requests first as property and sales tax payers who support the economy on an ongoing basis

This is definitely an out-of-the-traditional channels topic. Generally, it seems like we think “NFs belong to all Americans so everyone should have an equal chance.” But if it were a Rich Person Owned Resort with thousands of acres around a community, we might expect that the concept of “being a good neighbor” would also be involved. For example, we remember the story about Weyco in SW Oregon, in which individuals in the community were concerned that Weyco was charging for access. Is it basically some kind of property rights question?

There are also concerns regarding social equity- should poor local people get preference over better-off tourists? (Conceivably people from outside Colorado must have some money to get here and spend time). OTOH, dispersed camping costs less and may be more affordable to people coming from out of state? Or we might want to give permits preferentially to those communities who have traditionally not recreated on federal lands. What do you think?

We’ve seen some of this around the west through time (think Moab), but there’s a unique GYE (Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem) twist. Here’s a link to the NY Times article; you can search on the title and find it elsewhere if you have a paywall. The story’s mostly focused on Bozeman but touches on West Yellowstone.

The phenomenon of gridlock in a natural paradise has been seen across the West for years. But in Montana it has accelerated markedly this year, fueled by urbanites fleeing the pandemic. Now, many residents are concerned that the state that calls itself the Last Best Place has bragged a little too loudly and too often.
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Housing prices have soared, especially this year, driven by COVID refugees who sometimes buy a home without seeing it. In one month this summer, the median home price jumped by $88,000 to $584,000 — in a city where the average annual wage is about $48,000. Home prices jumped another $35,000 just last month. Even as the Tyvek and two-by-fours of new construction have become ubiquitous, many local residents say they are getting priced out of the market.

But the cramping of recreational pursuits is just one dimension. The Greater Yellowstone ecosystem, which takes in more than 34,000 square miles of wildland around Yellowstone National Park and includes the cities of Bozeman and Jackson, Wyoming, is considered the largest nearly intact temperate ecosystem in the world.

It is one of the few places in the continental United States where landscape-level ecological processes can play out, including wolf packs hunting elk and deer, long-distance wildlife migrations and wildfires that can be left to burn in order to rejuvenate the natural landscape.

But the mounting human population, exacerbated by the pandemic but increasing over a period of years, has threatened all of those natural processes. “We are going to lose the greatest wildlife-rich ecosystem remaining unless we chart an alternative path,” said Todd Wilkinson, editor of Mountain Journal, an online magazine that has warned of poorly managed growth and the arrival of “Rivergeddon.”

“Other places like this no longer have wildlife because the landscape has been so fragmented,” Mr. Wilkinson said.

Snowmobiles and backcountry skiing are encroaching into the denning areas of wolverines. A recent study in British Columbia found that the presence of people in wildlife habitat, especially those on mountain bikes and off-road vehicles, can force animals to flee important feeding areas.

It almost sounds as if wildlife are happier on…large privately-held cattle ranches who can restrict recreation access. As has been talked about in other articles, if you want open space in the grassy parts of the west, you tend to have.. ranching.
This also raises another question. If, as we see, some deer, elk, mountain lions and coyotes seem to be acclimated to people in terms of living successfully around communities, can such wildlife also become acclimated to recreationists?

Mr. Glick, the advocate for sustainable planning, said that tourism and the growth of real estate, tech and service industries have been promoted as better alternatives to the damaging effects of mining and logging, Montana’s former mainstays. But they need to be studied and carefully managed, which is not now the case, he said.

“Conservationists touted recreation as the benign alternative to resource extractions,” he said. “It’s a tough pill to swallow that the alternative they have been promoting has become a significant environmental issue.”

Ms. Andrus, the Bozeman mayor, said it “may be time to dial down the tourism promotion” and reallocate some of the money to compensate for the impacts of a large number of visitors. But shutting the door is not the solution, she said.

“Closing the state down to visitors is not practical; even if it was, I don’t believe it is a good idea,” she said. “You cannot put that genie back in the bottle.”

Does anyone have examples of communities who have dealt successfully with these issues?

There’s an interagency effort to deal with increased recreation in northern Colorado called NoCoPlaces 2050. Here’s a link. They have a research page that looks interesting, including behavioral science.

This is from an article from the Vail Daily News.

Consultant Steve Coffin said virtually every place within a six-hour drive of the Denver area is seeing increased pressure on public lands.

Coffin is one of the coordinators of a group called NoCo 2050 places. That group has brought together public land managers, local government representatives and others to look into possible strategies to address the growth in public land use.

Most of that pressure is coming from the Front Range. Coffin said that 94% of the state’s population growth in the past decade has been concentrated on the Front Range. That’s why the mountains on the east side of the Continental Divide have seen so much pressure on public lands.

The idea behind NoCo 2050 Places is, in part, to encourage greater cooperation between agencies and take a broader view of how to manage the pressure on the state’s special places.

Langmaid attended — virtually, of course — a meeting of civic leaders, an offshoot of the NoCo 2050 Places project.

Langmaid said the ideas discussed by that group include both a broad vision and talk about the future.

“What I told the group is that this is not in the future, it’s right now, and were behind the curve,” Langmaid said.

Part of the problem is that public land agency budgets continue to dwindle, especially as more of those agencies’ funds end up committed to fighting wildfires.

What that means is that towns depending on tourism will have to spend more of their money on public private partnerships with government agencies.

In addition to increased pressure on local government budgets, Langmaid said there are other potential problems.

“If you start restricting access, do you create inequities?” Langmaid asked. Those inequities could include blocking access to those who don’t have the access or skills to make on-line reservations. If fees are charged, is that a barrier to lower-income users?

“These are big questions,” Langmaid said.

No silver bullets
No one has yet come up with solid answers to these and other questions.

In addition, Langmaid said it’s time to rethink destination marketing.

“We need to be looking at destination management with as much fervor as destination marketing,” she said. Successful marketing doesn’t mean communities — or public lands — are ready for the impact visitors bring.

Vail has already funded cooperative projects with the Forest Service including the Front Country Ranger program. The town is also working with the Forest Service and Colorado Parks and Wildlife on a “landscape level” project to improve wildlife habitat and lower fire danger on more than 4,000 acres on the north side of Interstate 70 starting at the town shops and East Vail.

“We’re the ones creating the problem; we have a responsibility to (help address it),” Langmaid said.

While any system to restrict trails into public lands will take time, Stockmar said perhaps the town could take some action on its own.

“We do have authority over (trail) access points,” Stockmar said. “We have the very thin potential leverage that (users) are on town land.”

Whatever solutions come to pass, Langmaid said it’s important for the town and users to maintain “a very high quality experience with wilderness values” on those well-used trails.

Themes in the Vail Daily story that we’ve mentioned before:
* Education not necessarily working without enforcement.
* Reducing numbers and/or improving behavior.
* Adjacent communities possibly restricting public access.