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The wilderness challenge
Forty years after the Wilderness Act, managers struggle to keep wild areas pristine.

By Rebecca Huntington

With sun dappling whortleberry bushes and pine needles, Linda Merigliano's spry step gives away her enthusiasm for escaping Forest Service office work for field duty in the Gros Ventre Wilderness.

On this sunny September morning, she has brought few tools for this day's assignment: a shovel, a digital camera and a binder filled with photographs.

Except for the camera, Merigliano is following the spirit of the wilderness designation, leaving mechanization behind. She carries no cell phone. The shovel is for extinguishing abandoned campfires; the binder and camera are part of a larger effort to track the health of the wilderness.

"Let's see if we can find this one," Merigliano says pointing to a photograph of a campsite closed because it was too close to the shores of Goodwin Lake. Campers repeatedly built fires at the base of a large boulder, leaving black scars, visible in the photo.

In 1994, Merigliano brought the Bridger-Teton National Forest's entire Jackson Ranger District office staff to Goodwin Lake to spend a day rehabilitating and closing campsites. Camping is prohibited within 200 feet of the shore.

The district's wilderness manager, Merigliano is charged with taking care of the forest's three wilderness areas ­ Bridger, Teton and Gros Ventre ­ which make up 38 percent of the forest.

That's an unenviable task given the amount of land, 1.27 million acres, in need of oversight and the lack of funding. In fiscal year 2000, the latest estimate available, the Bridger-Teton spent about 35 cents per acre on wilderness management.

Debate over how well federal land management agencies are meeting the objectives of the Wilderness Act, signed Sept. 3, 1964, which created the world's only National Wilderness Preservation System, has percolated for years. Independent panels and peer-reviewed reports have documented public support for wilderness values and failures in protecting those values. Agency leaders, in response, have launched initiatives to try to shore up programs.

But on the 40th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, the question remains: Will these lands, as the act intended, remain forever wild and "untrammeled by man?"

A study of American attitudes toward wilderness, published in the International Journal of Wilderness in August 2003, indicates a growing concern for wilderness stewardship. The report surveyed more than 5,000 randomly selected individuals and compared their attitudes to a similar survey done in 1994.

The report documented a sharp rise in wilderness values. For example, 93 percent of respondents said wilderness areas were "very or extremely important" for protecting water quality. That percentage rose notably from 79 percent in 1994. Likewise, respondents also found wilderness important for the protection of air quality and wildlife and for future generations.

Americans are cherishing wilderness more for "nonuse" values, such as water and air quality, the report states. This indicates "a shift toward greater concern for stewardship," state the authors, who include Ken Cordell, project leader for a Forest Service working group, which tracks trends.

"It seems more and more that ecological and existence values are central to Americans' viewpoint on wilderness," the study states.

In fact, only 65 percent of respondents valued wilderness as "very or extremely important" for recreation opportunities ­ well below the 75 percent who valued "just knowing it exists." Both those numbers rose sharply compared to 1994 results of 49 percent and 56 percent, respectively.

"It is increasingly clear that protection of the lands within the [wilderness system] from development and exploitation is what most Americans want," the study states. But the study concludes that rarely does that viewpoint find "a seat at the table" in discussions about how to manage federal lands.

Ironically, while Americans were more aware of the wilderness system and valued it more, support dropped for creating more.

In 2000, 52 percent of Americans supported adding more wilderness, down from 56 percent in 1994. Support for adding more wilderness is greater among urban, easterners compared to rural westerners. Younger generations and whites also were more willing to support additions, the study found.

The study suggests Americans are more concerned with safeguarding areas already designated wilderness than protecting new lands. The wilderness system has grown from 10 million acres, designated 40 years ago, to 106 million acres today.

Wilderness 'essential'

George Nickas, executive director of the nonprofit Wilderness Watch, worries that the popularity of wilderness areas is beginning to chip away at their core values. Federal land managers are compromising wilderness characteristics ­ building bridges and putting up signs ­ to try to accommodate ever-increasing crowds while protecting only the physical resources. But what's lost is the solitude and unfettered adventure in a place free of modern conveniences and technology, he says.

"If we don't respect what that idea was when the Wilderness Act was debated," Nickas says. "we'll lose wilderness as we know it today."

Howard Zahniser, the primary author of the Wilderness Act, conveyed the wilderness idea this way: "I believe we have a profound, fundamental need for areas of wilderness ­ a need that is not only recreational and spiritual, but also educational and scientific, and essential to our understanding of ourselves, our culture, our own natures, and our place in nature."

Merigliano further explains the idea of wilderness as an area where Mother Nature reigns. Where natural cycles, such as forest fires, are allowed to take place without human interference.

Untrammeled, which means unconfined, unrestrained, does not necessarily translate into untrampled, however.

"When you've got human use in a wilderness you're going to have some change," Merigliano says. "The question becomes how much change is acceptable?"

In the Gros Ventre Wilderness, for example, Goodwin Lake, an easy 3-mile hike, attracts about 80 percent of the activity, Merigliano says. Although Goodwin Lake falls short of some wilderness ideals with scattered fire rings, trampled tree roots, crowds on weekends and multiple signs, it still remains more primitive than other nonwilderness sites where restrooms are installed and trails highly engineered.

Managers need restraint

Moreover, the Gros Ventre still has lots of "untrammeled" and "untrampled" country to explore, Merigliano says.

"I think the thing that impresses me about the Gros Ventre, is it's still really wild," she says. Merigliano acknowledges that a lack of lakes, which are popular destinations, and difficult backcountry access have probably kept crowds at bay across most of the Gros Ventre Wilderness.

But Nickas fears that a visitor to Goodwin Lake will let that experience define wilderness, essentially lowering the bar for all wilderness.

"There's a tremendous temptation to make exceptions because of challenges we face today," Nickas says. "But the reality is those challenges will get more difficult over time."

The answer, according to Nickas, is restraint. Land managers must restrain themselves from continually trying to accommodate more use, which degrades wilderness character. And wilderness users must restrain themselves from demanding unlimited access and from the urge to carry all their modern technologies into the woods, he says.

But those wilderness ideals are constantly butting against other values, including human safety, worker efficiency and resource protection, making it difficult for land managers to decide where to draw the line.

The debate is not limited to the Forest Service or Department of Agriculture, which oversees national forests. The National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Bureau of Land Management, which fall under the Interior Department, also are in charge of managing wilderness.

For example, more than 2 million acres, about 91 percent, of Yellowstone National Park has been recommended for wilderness designation since 1972. But Congress has never acted on that recommendation, leaving the lands in legal limbo.

Although there is no place more appropriate for a wilderness designation, the Yellowstone recommendation has never moved forward because of a feeling within the Park Service and among the public that the land is already protected, according to Bob Seibert, Yellowstone's West District ranger.

"It was more important to focus on wilderness designations in areas that have a less secure future," Seibert says.

But that's changing, and the Park Service's understanding of wilderness management is evolving, says Seibert, a former member of the Park Service's national wilderness steering committee. Rocky Mountain National Park, in Colorado, for example, recently secured its wilderness designation.

While lands are in contention for wilderness designation they must be managed in a way that does not impair the resources and preclude future wilderness designation.

Much of Yellowstone Lake is recommended wilderness. Even so, the Park Service allows motorized boats to traverse most of the lake.

Seibert says that meets the spirit of the law because it is a "transient intrusion" that does not cause permanent damage, which would preclude a wilderness designation. Floating docks, installed to accommodate boats and protect the shoreline from damage, could be easily removed, he says.

"That's not to say that we should be allowing motors there," Seibert says, "but that decision was made by our management staff long ago."

Should Congress grant Yellowstone its wilderness designation, motor boats would be banned. That could create a dilemma, however, for the Park Service, which relies on a commercial fishing boat to set gillnets to catch lake trout.

Lake trout are among the many nonnative species threatening to decimate native species. The Park Service estimates lake trout consume roughly half a million native Yellowstone cutthroat trout per year.

"All of the experts tell us that this can easily spell doom to the cutthroats," Seibert says.

Gillnetting with a commercial fishing boat helps protect the native cutthroat. But says Seibert: "You wouldn't be able to use that if you religiously followed the Wilderness Act."

The Park Service is looking for ways to cut down on the use of motors in the wilderness where possible. While crews still use chainsaws to clear backcountry trails in spring, when thousands of trees cover paths, workers are switching to hand tools in summer and fall.

It's an incremental change. The workforce is too small to make the switch year-round, he says. Leaving trails uncleared in the spring would encourage hikers to create new trails, causing resource damage, he says.

Management plan lacking

In the past five years, Yellowstone officials have more stringently applied what is called the minimum tools evaluation, Seibert says. That evaluation requires managers to fill out a form to determine the minimum tool necessary to get the job done. Park managers are thinking twice before ordering a helicopter instead of a string of pack horses, for example.

In the past, Seibert says: "Sometimes we allowed efficiency to blunt the edge of wilderness management."

Nickas acknowledges there are dedicated workers in the field trying to protect wilderness values. But he says there is a lack of commitment among agency leaders to spend money or political capital on wilderness programs. In fact, many agencies depend on volunteers to do wilderness work.

"Being a wilderness ranger ... is as hard as any job anybody in the Forest Service does," he says. "They don't send volunteer geologists out to do their oil and gas stuff. But they have no trouble sending volunteers out to do their wilderness work."

Moreover, Yellowstone does not have a wilderness management plan, only an outdated draft backcountry plan, and the park lacks a full-time wilderness coordinator with oversight across all divisions from maintenance to resource management to ranger operations.

Grand Teton National Park also lacks a wilderness management plan. But Superintendent Mary Gibson Scott has committed to writing a new general management plan, which could address wilderness, said park spokeswoman Joan Anzelmo. Over half of Grand Teton has wilderness character and is managed as wilderness.

But that's a challenge in a park that saw about 350,000 day hikers in wilderness areas in 2003. A particularly popular destination, Hidden Falls, which requires a short hike around Jenny Lake or a boat ride across it, does not exactly meet the wilderness standard for solitude. In 2003, as many as 575 people per hour passed on the trail below the falls.

According to Nickas such high-traffic locations give people the wrong impression of wilderness and degrade the character of the overall system.

But Anzelmo disagrees, saying accessibility is key to building support for wilderness.

"You don't want to have lands that are so difficult to reach, that are so locked up that people can never get to them," she says. "Giving people a window into what a wild place is like is a really great thing to do."

Teaching people about wilderness values in Grand Teton is particularly appropriate since it's home to the Murie Ranch, established by brothers Olaus and Adolph Murie and their wives, Mardy and Louise. Conservationists all, Mardy and Olaus Murie helped craft the 1964 Wilderness Act and Mardy Murie was influential in the 1984 Wyoming Wilderness Act. The ranch is now the site of the Murie Center, which carries on teaching about wilderness and conservation.

Grand Teton's rugged peaks and easy access are a draw for rock climbers and other adventurers, who sometimes get into trouble and require a helicopter rescue. Human safety trumps wilderness values, which prohibit motors, when it comes to rescue missions, Anzelmo says.

Climbers and other visitors heading off the beaten path also have created 130 miles of trails in addition to the 220 miles of trail the Park Service maintains in Grand Teton.

For example, the trail to the CMC Route, a popular climb on Mount Moran, was insignificant when monitored in 1986, according to the Park Service. In 2000, it was well established and the number of campsites with bare ground increased from six to 13. The corridor had to be downgraded from pristine to semi-pristine. Across the park, Grand Teton staff have documented an increase in campsites from 420 in 1982 to 556 in 2002.

Some parts of the park, however, remain pristine. Park officials have designated a portion of the park between Leigh and Webb canyons as "a protected natural area" where the terrain and experience are more in keeping with wilderness ideals.

Monitoring the key

Back at Goodwin Lake, Merigliano describes the Sisyphean task of trying to meet the spirit of the act by allowing "unconfined" recreation while at the same time controlling human impacts.

For Merigliano, monitoring is key. Likewise, Grand Teton officials concluded that better monitoring could have caught impacts along the CMC trail sooner and limited damage.

On the Bridger-Teton, Merigliano has made a concerted effort to document precisely what changes are occurring at sites such as Goodwin Lake. In 1995, for example, she went back to Goodwin Lake to see how well the staff's rehabilitation efforts had held.

To her dismay, she found that campers were still using it and still building fires next to the boulder. This time, she ordered a large stone placed in front of the boulder to cover the fire pit and eliminate the temptation to build new ones there.

Nearly a decade later, Merigliano can hardly contain her glee that the rock remains in place with no fire rings visible and the fire scar retreating, now less than a third its original size.

"The thing that is so gratifying to me is that it's held," she says. "People have not been camping on this site."

But the victories are small. Trampled whortleberry bushes have yet to regrow. And just up the trail at another closed campsite, where feet and erosion have exposed mineral soil, there is no improvement from a decade ago.

Again, Merigliano is preparing to redouble efforts.

The Bridger-Teton National Forest has won a $40,000 grant from the National Forest Foundation, which offered the grants to celebrate the 40th birthday of the Wilderness Act. The Forest Service needs to secure a $40,000 community match to keep the grant. The Forest Legacy Center, a nonprofit, held a 40th birthday party Saturday atop Snow King Mountain to begin raising that match.

The grants are designed to help forests meet a new 10-year wilderness stewardship challenge, issued by Forest Service Chief Dale Bosworth and announced Sept. 3.

The Forest Service has set standards to measure the effectiveness of wilderness management. A recent study showed only 8 percent of national forests met the baseline.

"It's a fairly new thing to try to define what is a success in wilderness management," Merigliano says.

Bosworth responded to the poor showing on stewardship standards with a challenge to get all forests up to the baseline within 10 years. The baseline is meeting six of 10 criteria, which range from collecting air quality data to effective weed management.

What may be hardest to measure, however, is what has not been done ­ measures taken to restrain human influence and allowing nature to run her own course. As one independent report on wilderness management put it: "It goes against the grain of our species to not do."

.....

Study: Wilderness boosts economies

Designated wilderness areas are on par with commercial airports when it comes to predicting prosperity in rural western economies, according to a new study.

The Sonoran Institute analyzed the federal economic statistics from 400 western counties and found that new businesses, investments and residents tend to locate near public lands.

Moreover, the better protected those lands are, whether designated wilderness or national park, the more they contribute to the economic well-being of local families and businesses, concludes the report, "Prosperity in the 21st Century West."

"We set out to study the impact of wilderness and parks," said Ray Rasker, director of the institute's socioeconomics program and coauthor of the study, released this summer. "But it really ended up being a study of rural development."

The report identifies three distinct Wests, he said. One is the urban West, encompassing cities and nearby bedroom communities. The other two are the rural West. One is connected to larger economic markets via reliable air service. The other rural West covers remote communities, "really way out in the middle of nowhere," he said.

The Sonoran report describes rural communities with good airports as "rural but connected."

"In the places that are 'rural but connected,' wilderness is a huge economic asset," Rasker said. "It creates the setting that surrounds the communities. That's what attracts people to want to live there."

Jackson Hole is a poster child for that finding with a vibrant economy built, in part, on benefits created by surrounding wilderness, Rasker said.

Jackson economist Jonathan Schechter agreed with the report's findings that protected public lands and good air service are driving economic growth.

In Teton County, tourism has remained flat for the past decade but the county's economy has more than doubled anyway. Schechter attributes the boom to a growing permanent population choosing to live in Teton County and spending money on homes, recreation and other goods and services.

"The Sonoran study is the most geographically inclusive study to date of some of these major elements of change in the West," Schechter said.

But the report overlooked additional factors, such as "community character," that draw people to rural communities, he said.

Rasker agrees that wilderness alone will not generate economic growth.

In rural remote areas that do not have air service, for example, the study found that wilderness did not spur economic development.

"It's never damaging to create wilderness, but it's not enough," Rasker said. "Unless it also has an educated workforce, and unless it's also connected to larger markets, it's not going to make much of a difference."

Such findings suggest wilderness proponents ought to consider pairing rural economic development projects, such as airports or schools, with future proposals for wilderness designation, he said. "Economic development and conservation do go hand in hand."

­ Rebecca Huntington

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