Most people used to think the Crestone Needle, a jagged peak in Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo range, was unclimbable. Until, that is, Albert Ellingwood and Eleanor Davis reached its summit in 1916. Looking down, they saw a basin whose pristine nature was marred only by their own camp. The Needle was the last of Colorado’s 14ers—peaks higher than 14,000 feet—to be climbed on record.
Today, Ellingwood and Davis would have company up there. In the South Colony Basin, the wilderness area below the Needle, thousands of hikers each year take in the alpine lakes and the jutting rockfaces above. More than 250,000 people try to summit one of the 50-plus Coloradan 14ers annually.
With those crowds come heavy foot traffic, fire rings, litter, and human waste. Leaving no trace can be a lofty goal in the face of such encroachments.
While wilderness experiences may seem, well, wild, they are often carefully curated by park and forest service rangers, recreation experts, and others who control access and build infrastructure like trails and install trash cans at trailheads. These professionals research and implement policy choices—large and small—that shape the topography of wildlands’ use. And those professionals have to figure out how best to balance coercive conservation policies with gentle nudges.
Historically, that balance has often involved limiting the number of visitors, through requiring reservations or permits, for instance, or charging fees.
Such impositions were once land agencies’ go-to methods of crowd control. But modern land managers generally like to think of visitor caps, which make the land of the free less free, as a last resort. After all, making the natural world accessible to more people can lead to more people caring about that world, and should—at least in theory—help conservation efforts. Instead, today’s recreation researchers said, they first focus on getting visitors to change their behavior to have less impact on the landscape. When behavioral shifts aren’t enough, though, they still have to figure out which crowd-control strategy serves the most visitors the most fairly, while minimizing their environmental consequences.
In recent years, crowd control has become more of a science than an art, as a new generation of researchers has nudged the field toward more evidence-based approaches. Through survey studies, structured interviews, and data from remote sensing technology like drones, a growing body of research is analyzing policy impacts on both ecosystems and visitors, digging into the effectiveness of less-restrictive rules, and revealing how to enact restrictions in the fairest way possible.
That work has an impact on the real world more quickly than a lot of other science. “You do a study, and within five or 10 years, you’re seeing that implemented on the ground, and seeing how the data is being used,” said Will Rice, an assistant professor in the department of society and conservation at the University of Montana. “And that’s always really exciting.”
Debates around how best to manage crowds while protecting, say, porcupines and alpine plants aren’t always simple or straightforward. Take the South Colony Basin, where to shrink visitation’s effects in 2007, the US Forest Service decided to move the trailhead 2.5 miles down, restrict backcountry camping locations, and ban campfires in certain areas—all examples of direct land management strategies that use compulsory rules to change people’s interactions with the wild.
After all that, though, the Forest Service still considered charging a fee for visitors. Public opposition to the fee helped cork the proposal.
Since then, the Forest Service has, instead, prioritized more indirect management methods, which encourage but don’t compel good behavior. They build trails through delicate, steep, and rocky parts of the alpine environment so that people will stay the preset course. Thoughtful trails might, for instance, veer hikers’ trajectory toward a good view, so that they don’t have to high-step off-trail to see it.
“A lot of times people say, ‘Well, I want to get from point A to point B, so I’m just going to take the easiest path to get there,’” said Otzma-Bie Paz, the assistant program director at the Rocky Mountain Field Institute, a nonprofit conservation group that does trail and restoration work on behalf of the Forest Service. “And that’s not always best, and we take a lot of time and resources into figuring out the most sustainable path so that it can last for as long as possible with the least amount of damage to the surrounding environment.”
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Environmental and natural resource lawyer Rebecca Sokol argued in favor of such indirect, behavioral strategies, in a provocative 2020 paper, and agrees with Paz’s assessment. “In my mind, a lot of it comes down to whether you can get people to stay on trail,” Sokol wrote in an email to Undark.
But that hasn’t always been the Forest Service’s modus operandi. Historically, the agency has relied on use limits to restrict the number of recreators. The idea lines up with its heritage in resource management: figuring out how many cows can graze a given plain, or how many trees can be felled in a forest, without upsetting the ecological balance.
People, though, aren’t cows or trees, and use limits create their own problems: If faced with an online permit-portal for a peak, people may instead choose to scale a mountain next door, displacing their damage. It could also lead to unsafe behavior: If someone waited a year to win a lottery for a permit, they might continue their trek in the face of, say, burgeoning thunderheads, or altitude sickness.
They also don’t have to learn to behave better outside.
That’s why Sokol’s paper, instead, suggested an approach called community-based social marketing, or CBSM, which is commonly used when analyzing the effectiveness of sustainability initiatives. CBSM was developed by an environmental psychologist in the 1990s and early 2000s, and it uses surveys and field observations to identify specific human behaviors that run counter to conservation efforts, and obstacles blocking behavioral change. After gathering data, researchers can identify strategies that could eliminate, or at least mitigate, the obstacles—resulting in more eco-friendly behavior that spreads throughout a community.
In the case of hiking, if people are cutting corners, researchers could go watch where they do so, interview them about why, and then plan to design and maintain trails that feel more efficient. Before committing to a certain action, the framework dictates, the researchers should pilot-test different strategies and measure their effectiveness. Ideally, more hikers will then see other hikers not taking shortcuts and will follow suit.
CBSM is a theoretical framework, and its effectiveness depends on the particular project for which it’s implemented; a 2020 paper in Social Marketing Quarterly called for more quantitative metrics for evaluating its utility on a given project and in general. CBSM’s shortfalls and challenges mirror those of other recreation research: The data, since it often involves people self-reporting, is a little less quantified and predictable than it would be in, say, a physical science.
While CBSM is widely used in sustainability initiatives, it hasn’t yet had much implementation in wilderness conservation. That’s perhaps because it’s a labor-intensive endeavor: Every behavior in every location has to be evaluated. What stops someone from slicing across a switchback in South Colony Basin is not the same thing that keeps them from packing their poop out of Petrified Forest.
Although Sokol wrote in full favor of behavior change and against use limits, today—now working for the federal government—she has a more nuanced view that considers practicality. “I think use limits can be important and integral in certain situations,” Sokol wrote in an emailed response. “Although I wish they were not necessary, I do think sometimes they are the only way to protect certain fragile resources.”
Early-career outdoor recreation researchers like Rice tend to agree that capacity caps should be the last resort. “We need to focus on behavior,” Rice said. “First and foremost, can we change people’s behavior to increase the amount of people we can have in a park?”
When that’s not enough, land managers shouldn’t just slap a use limit on a given area: They should consider which way to impose it—something Rice now studies. In the past, land managers have not thoroughly evaluated how each method is working in practice.
Stephen McCool, a scholar of outdoor recreation management and a professor emeritus at the University of Montana, wrote about the need for such rigor more than two decades ago. In a 2001 report for the Forest Service, he concluded that evaluations of policies’ effectiveness, efficacy, and efficiency “do not exist within the literature.”
Given that gap, McCool called for more research into the “conceptual soundness” of use limits—like investigating whether crowd-caps really protect a given resource—and into the ethics of land limits. “Who wins and who loses?” his paper asked.
“Because of the lack of research on these questions, the current state-of-knowledge about these effects is highly speculative,” the report concluded.
Calls for such research became louder in the 2000s. As visitation to national parks and forests increased, and climate change and human development put more pressure on public lands, the need for evidence-based approaches to human impacts became stark: Minimizing those would give nature breathing room to deal with the other pressures. In 2009, the director of the National Park Service hired its first official science adviser. In 2017, the Forest Service launched the Environmental Analysis and Decision Making effort, which uses the “best available science,” according to its website, to efficiently determine conservation and land-use choices.
Now, outdoor recreation researchers like Rice have been raised in that environment. And they are working to remove speculation and develop an understanding of how to fairly impose caps, how effective they are, and how people on all sides feel about them. “We’re just trying to make sure people can have fun outside,” said Rice.
Rice’s current home state, Montana, is home to a lot of agricultural workers. And so he thinks about how different methods of allocating campsites and backpacking permits might disadvantage those workers and their families. Reservation systems that, say, require a hiker to register way in advance don’t work when you tend to plants and animals. “You can’t predict six months in advance when you’ll be able to take your vacation,” he said. The same can apply to service workers who only get their shifts a week ahead of time.
To help land-management agencies choose which regulatory strategy might work best for the demographics they serve, Rice and colleagues published a guidebook last year, based on a review of scientific literature on everything from allocating city picnic tables to river-running permits. They also took interview data from fifty recreation managers, which the researchers coded and analyzed; their research formed the basis of two academic papers, one published earlier this year and one currently in peer review.
The compilation of the research provides practical insight: For instance, reservation systems can disfavor locals, those with lower incomes, and those from more rural areas. But managers can mitigate some of those effects by, say, opening some reservations half a year ahead, some two months ahead, and some the morning of, so the ranchers and bartenders can make a last-minute call but vacationers from states away can plan trips. Fees for permits are frowned upon all around. The idea is to give recreation managers enough analysis to make informed decisions.
“Our science tries to inform management of parks so that people can keep enjoying these places,” said Rice.
That’s also the goal in the work of Iree Wheeler, a postdoctoral scientist specializing in the environment’s interaction with society at the University of Wyoming, who recently studied how visitors perceived a timed-entry requirement at Arches National Park. Wheeler’s survey research found that, broadly, people pivoted to account for the annoyance—they came back when the park was less crowded, decided to go somewhere else, or enjoyed the experience for what it was rather than what they thought it would be—and were surprisingly satisfied with those cognitive and behavioral shifts. They also supported the entry system when they understood that it preserved both the park’s ecology and their own experience.
“They’re really pretty much okay with it,” she said. They just wanted the system, and its goals, to be communicated well. “Getting a ticket for a concert or something, you want to know ahead of time when the concert is going to be and you want to know what you need to do to get it,” she said. The strongest determinant of support, according to Wheeler’s survey work, was that the National Park Service makes all that clear.
When Wheeler does this research, she considers the whole system, parsing how an action by one land agency might affect another agency’s territory, visitors’ experience, or even the local town’s tourism income. For instance, she looked at whether the timed-entry system at Arches, part of the National Park system, would shunt people into lands managed by other agencies, like the state park system or the Bureau of Land Management, resulting in congestion and its negative impacts. (That didn’t happen.)
Noah Creany, a postdoctoral researcher at Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education, is concerned about another part beyond the human patchwork: the ecology itself. Sure, humans can adjust and arrive at the park gate at 2 p.m. and learn to be happy about it. “But the ecological systems are much more complex,” he said. “They’re much more intertwined and happen at many different spatial and temporal scales. So understanding that response can be more difficult and harder to measure.”
But gaining that understanding, before and after implementing a use limit or behavioral strategy, is environmentally important. “Humans, no matter where we go, we have some sort of footprint on things,” said Creany.
Creany’s research has found that the correlation between number of visitors and ecological disturbance, though, isn’t necessarily linear: “The initial use results in greater proportional disturbance than subsequent use,” he wrote in his dissertation. The construction of a sustainably designed trail disturbs the landscape more than how that trail is used. And the first person who veers from a trail perturbs the ecosystem more than those who follow.
Those findings were informed by a project in which he wanted to measure whether changes in trail management—for example, allowing only hikers or only bikers, or making a trail one-way—actually helped conserve the area. Did the restrictions have an effect on the trail width, depth, or erosion? To find out, Creany and collaborators used a drone (flying nearly 100 feet high “to mitigate disturbance to raptors and other sensitive avian taxa”) to take before and after images of the changed trails, and control trails, amassing nearly 3,000 measurements. They used spectral analysis and image classification to analyze that mass of data.
And they found, surprisingly, that there were no significant relationships between the restrictions and the amount of environmental degradation. They looked about the same as the control trails, which had no restrictions at all.
The design of the trail itself, he found, mattered more to a trail’s conditions, and processes like erosion, than how the trail is managed.
Creany and his colleagues don’t want to discourage human use or imply that recreation is simply a problem to be managed, or a stressor to slash. “The goal isn’t to be the buzzkill,” he said. But since flora, fauna, soil, rock, and water are also under the thrall of other variables, like climate change and increased urbanization, they are especially sensitive.
Figuring out how to make public lands accessible, though, is actually an important part of conservation: If the government walls off the wilderness, it will feel even more distant from people’s lives, Creany pointed out, and they may not care enough to protect it. “All of this rests on the idea that public lands are the benefit and trust of the American people,” he said. “And if it’s irrelevant to them, then it’s not going to endure.”
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Creany wishes more people knew that researchers like him exist specifically to make sure public lands do endure, for everyone. Even in the face of partisan cuts to public-land agencies, and the quashing of research on climate change and inclusion—both of which are central to land management—he and his colleagues are gathering data to give outdoor enthusiasts the best experience possible, whether they’re standing next to a grill at a paved campground or atop the Crestone Needle.
Many people, even extreme outdoor enthusiasts, don’t know that. Recently, Creany was working on trail maintenance in a remote part of Nevada. He and the trail team hadn’t seen anyone in a few days. Then, he said, as they were summiting a plateau, they ran into a guy in a ghillie suit—a full-body camouflage covering. “It really startled us. We weren’t expecting to see anyone.”
The man, a hunter, was surprised to see them too, for different reasons. “I didn’t know people worked on trails,” Creany recalled him saying.
Despite being an avid backcountry user himself, he’d never considered that someone managed it—that thought went into it, and into his experience of the great outdoors.
This article was originally published on Undark. Read the original article.
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