6
Volcanoes and Crowds
Vehicles are a real problem for us. . . . 97 percent of [Mount Rainier National] Park is wilderness. Yet within the next ten-fifteen years, we will be surrounded by suburbs. And the pressure of people to come and use the Park twelve months a year. It’s that pressure, pressure, pressure.
—National Park Service ranger John Madden, Rainier: The Mountain
The Wilderness Act (Section 2[c]), under “Definitions,” calls for “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation” in wilderness areas. USFS and NPS management philosophy enforces “Leave No Trace” tenets, whether on glaciers or rocks, or in alpine parks or drainages below. Yet traces in many shapes and sizes get left, regularly. “Leave No Trace” includes guidelines familiar to anyone entering big-W areas in the past two generations, and compliance is assumed. The polite phrasing on park signs assigns responsibility to visitors. But the colorful plastic wrappers of varying shapes or wads of soggy white toilet paper represent the outer, unintentional residues of wilderness consumerism: casual trail discards of time expended within big-W boundaries. The felt experience of the vast majority of Northwest volcano visitors or climbers does not include “being unnoticed” even if they use blue, double plastic bags. Quite the contrary, particularly on standard routes. Managing “wilderness experience” on the volcanoes in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries places unreasonable if not untenable demands upon USFS or NPS agency personnel. Voluntary compliance with “Leave No Trace” tenets depends upon an informed and cooperative public, and the public is neither at all times and places.
There’s a problem here. “Wilderness experience” since 1964 has solidified into an entity, something sought after and measured, a finite resource not unlike stream quality or particular wildlife censuses or migrations. Agency folks are supposed to monitor and protect this resource—the sign of access and use. This “resource” arguably comprises the fundamental management issue of the twenty-first century. Wilderness experience is both historical and contemporary, ineffable mountain glory and a set of measurable criteria, private subjective experience and legal mandate and management protocol. As a precious resource it is overdetermined, ideal more than real, and as Hamlet admits in another context, “Aye, there’s the rub.” Wilderness experience remains problematic, given the friction between these contrary tendencies.
Certainly the contemporary moment exists at odds with any historical view. The volcanoes have been taboo landscapes for eons, magnets for the past 150 years, and wilderness areas for the past fifty (or less). Now crowds come to the volcanoes and leave sundry imprints below and on the snow. Above timberline and the alpine parks, of course, those traces don’t decompose so the signs of our passing linger indefinitely.
On the easiest climbing routes it’s not hard to find discarded, frayed climbing slings or other trash. At the high camps along these routes, which imitate a bustling apartment complex in high season, it’s hard to believe that camp spots or runoff aren’t being degraded. Over three decades ago, one historian painted an indelible portrait of mass mountaineering’s legacy: “Mountain slopes are often marred by paraphernalia left behind by exhausted climbers retreating from a summit conquest or from storms. . . . Abandoned polypropylene rope, aluminum cans . . . plastic wrappers, and nylon fabric become an almost permanent kind of defacement.”1 A bad habit in descents is evidenced by this kind of defacement as though a climb is psychologically diminished or neglected in its second half. The baleful legacy has not improved given the far greater numbers. Northwest volcanoes bear signs of this discard signature: a higher-elevation version of careless picnickers or walkers in the forests and meadows below.
Rainier hires crews of climbing rangers, of course, though climbers far exceed the number of such rangers; typically, few or no USFS personnel patrol on the other volcanoes. Climbing parties usually self-register, thereby pledging to observe local rules and Leave No Trace camping. That most elusive resource, wilderness experience, is a fiction unless one tackles obscure routes: the west-side routes above Sandy Glacier, for instance, on Mount Hood. Even routes famous for their technical challenges such as Rainier’s Liberty Ridge, sharp on its northwest side, receive more than occasional parties due to increasing publicity. The numbers problem deeply erodes the letter and spirit of wilderness experience, and agency personnel face an impossible dilemma.
The Mount Baker–Snoqualmie National Forest website, like most national forest websites, deems “wilderness education” “the most important tool” in management. The site states the goal of preserving wilderness experience conditionally: “If people are aware of what is required of them in a . . . wilderness trip, there is a chance that they will behave appropriately. The hope is that people, by their own actions, will preserve the aesthetic experience. Management can be anticipatory rather than reactive, and a traditional freedom of choice will be maintained in wild land recreation” (emphasis added).2 “There is a chance” sounds, at best, skeptical. Most hikers and climbers fulfill this best-case scenario, though day hikers litter more than backpackers. Published surveys from MRNP and MHNF within the past generation reveal a preponderance of increasingly short visits, and as the number of quick visitors rises, so inevitably does the fraction of “noncompliant users.”3 Trip brevity reinforces a carelessness typical of many in their regular, built environments, as though wilderness as other does not change behavior in the space of a few hours. The quick daytrip, or wilderness lite, prompts sloppy behavior by some who leave new versions of tin-can trash. This despite the fact that by the late twentieth century it became easier to pack it out.
Best-case scenarios presume a tendency to fall short, and an increasing minority remains blissfully ignorant of best practices on and below the volcanoes. In the old tradeoff between access and preservation, preservation plays second fiddle. Checks upon access are challenged and, at best, grudgingly tolerated—or ignored. Given the realities of mass mountaineering, the goal of agency management grows ever more elusive. Instead, personnel often practice damage control in the face of crowds: closure is not an option given likely public backlash. As one critic commented a generation ago, “insulation” increasingly trumps “intensity”: “intensiveness of impact” pushes aside “intensiveness of experience.”4 In this sad tradeoff, the human boot print easily does damage.
In the past generation that thickening boot print at the volcanoes is accompanied by technology creep, but technology creep began decades before GPS systems, transponders, and smartphones. The ink was barely dry on President Johnson’s signature on the 1964 Wilderness Bill before management challenges were manifest: the gap between the promise of solitude and on-the-ground traffic already existed in popular locales. When John McPhee reached the Glacier Peak Wilderness Area’s Image Lake in August 1969, he encountered a suburban scene: “We walked past tents along the shore—blue tents, green tents, red tents, orange tents. The evening air was so still that we could hear voices all around the lake.”5
The suburban scene is now repeated at base camps or along standard routes at all of the volcanoes. Lower-altitude parking lots are filled to overflowing, and NPS campgrounds fill within minutes of preceding campers’ mid- or late-morning departures: first-come, first-serve, with slowly cruising carloads warily eyeing imminent departures. NPS founding Director Stephen Mather’s goal of nearly a century ago has been met with a vengeance.
Leave No Trace didn’t happen at Image Lake in the late 1960s. Arch-preservationist David Brower tried to soften the human impact, confidently claiming a longer view: “I’ve seen crowds in wilderness before. I know that they’ll go away, and when they go they haven’t really left anything.”6 That claim depends upon the definition of “really.” He was right and wrong, as the track record of the intervening four decades attests. Certainly the successive revolutions in the alpine gear and clothing industry have mitigated impacts to some extent. MSR (Mountain Safety Research) stoves and dehydrated foods, for example, have long replaced campfires, canned food, and #10 tins. Campsites below snowline are less depleted of wood. With some exceptions, gone are the days when saplings were hacked by dull hatchets.
The story has grown more complicated, though. Modern gear reinvents itself like those limitless brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice: an endlessly variable, alluring supply, continuous new models feeding an insatiable demand, the huge engine of environmental consumerism. Supply is the outer vesture of wilderness consumerism. Far more people bring far more gear—lighter weight and stronger alloys and synthetics—to the volcanoes and elsewhere, and while it lessens the impact of human trammels, the trammels still multiply. On standard routes, Leave No Trace competes against well-churned, braided trails and challenges climbers, for example, to find clean snow to melt for water.
Climbers wear plastic boots and tote transponders and portable communications devices including iPads for satellite feeds and instant access. They bring more pieces of the Web into the remote spaces of mountains as if more is better, rather than less. In the past two decades, “connectivity” increasingly means wired, dialed in at all times; the older, romantic meaning of mountain sublime, or even affinity with remote landscapes (or nearby outdoors), has receded. Wired expectations and behaviors diminish the fundamentally different experiences and values epitomized by the snowpeaks.
The Internet creep represents, of course, part of the larger, wired twenty-first century. More Americans do visit wilderness areas though the percentage of visitors has declined in the past generation for many reasons, including the lure of the virtual world for the aptly named Net Generation and aging boomers.
The crowd at Glacier Peak’s Image Lake or Mount Rainier’s Emmons Flats or South Sister’s standard route exacerbates the access vs. preservation dilemma endemic to the NWPS management, whatever the agency. Proposed rationing systems fly in the face of our democratic values governing public wildlands. But have we reached or passed “recreational carrying capacity,” the point where the need for traffic control is paramount? In 1999 the USFS considered adopting a permit system limiting the number of Mount Hood climbers to twenty-five per peak weekend day, weekends proving the usual, disproportionate load. That number that might guarantee “wilderness experience,” but the MHNF quickly backed off due to vociferous public protest. Journalist Jon Bell cautions, “It’s an idea that’s almost surely going to come back around. . . . As the Portland population continues to swell, the demands put upon the mountain increase, and an accident made worse by too many climbers on the South Side route morphs from potential to reality.”7
Safety has been as issue for generations. Mount Hood’s recent history includes a long series of disasters and deaths, and as more novices climb (on the southern route and elsewhere), the disasters grow in number. The longest chapter by far in Jack Grauer’s Mount Hood: A Complete History is “Tragedy, Search, and Rescue,” a recounting of climbing accidents on the volcano. Because Mount Hood represents the oldest example of mass mountaineering, it’s no surprise that disasters on Hood form common copy—a predictable result of open access.
Even as definitions of and demands for “use” increase, the “resource” is finite. Volcano wilderness areas, with their diversity of climates and ecosystems, dramatize the fragility of wilderness as a resource in a country of over three hundred million inhabitants. The Northwest has exceeded the upward demographic curve of the past three generations, and many old and new alpinists with sufficient income and mobility take to the mountains, especially the volcanoes. Admittedly, most backcountry remains nearly deserted but that’s not the case with the snowpeaks, particularly in those convergence zones where climbers have the best chance to summit.
That sharp population increase pits access against preservation as never before. In too many spots, the former harms the latter, with various resources degraded. Some locations in local national parks, like volcano trailheads, imitate malls with limited parking: that wilderness “threshold” is tough to get beyond. One contemporary criticism of the National Park System concerns its privileging of recreation over protection, with one cynic claiming “NPS stands not for National Park Service but for National Parking Service.”8 In MRNP it’s crowded at the top of the road, if not the crater, with Paradise employees working as traffic cops. That quip about the NPS exposes our enslavement by private vehicles and pursuit of the windshield wilderness.
The endemic tension between access and preservation in the agencies is, unsurprisingly, visible in the published agendas of more than one Northwest environmental organization. The Mazamas’ Conservation Committee sometimes partners with up to two-dozen conservation organizations (such as “Friends of Mount Hood,” founded more than two decades ago) to advance its preservationist agenda. In recent years it supported lobbying efforts that led to more than 127,000 additional acres in MHNF being designated wilderness (as part of the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act, March 2009). But its “Conservation Goal” defines a tough balancing act: “Mountain environments are protected and managed to balance their use for public enjoyment and their value as natural habitats.” The first of its five strategies—“Advocate for open and fair access to alpine areas” (www.mazamas.org)—restates the gospel but potentially troubles that balance because open access has resulted in habitat degradation, both above and below snowline.
Thousands hike or climb Mount Hood every year but tens of thousands ski it (or near it). Mount Hood’s skiing history explains its highest use (excepting Timberline as hotel), and accruing profits pit “wilderness experience” against the happy crowds of downhill (and, increasingly, cross-country) skiers and boarders. Occasionally, these contrary traditions exist side by side. The Mount Hood Meadows resort remains the biggest corporate player despite the history and fame of Timberline, and in its roughly forty-five year history it has frequently attempted to expand its special use permit through proposals submitted to MHNF—the old story of demand and corporate growth. Wilderness character was taking a back seat to this demand, and sundry environmental organizations opposed, by the 1980s, actions they deemed degrading to the vicinity of the Mount Hood Wilderness Area, for instance Timberline’s heavy use of salt to sustain summer skiing.9 A preservationist coalition (including Friends of Mount Hood) frequently opposed and litigated resort expansion plans both at Mount Hood Meadows and at Cooper Spur to the northeast.
In recent years “wilderness threshold” has proven a vexing concept around Mount Hood. The proposed Cooper Spur expansion would have given Hood a big ski resort on its northeast side, a counterpart to Timberline. The proposed resort plan demonstrates development pressures at the boundary of wilderness areas: pressures that reflect, in this case, a restricted and economically privileged definition of open access. This project would have allowed uses antithetical to de facto wilderness. Various nonprofits opposed expansion of the Cooper Spur Inn ski area into a four-season destination resort with golf course and new ski lifts and runs. The owners of Mount Hood Meadows, having acquired the Cooper Spur facility, wanted to complete a land exchange with Hood River County of over six hundred acres contiguous to the facility (156 acres already acquired) that contain old growth forests and pristine backcountry.
This proposal within the past generation proves that the early twentieth-century lure of volcano destination resorts does not fade, as the big business of Timberline Lodge and Mount Hood Meadows attests. Of course most people could not afford a fancy built environment abutting Mount Hood backcountry. The Mazamas’ opposition appealed to various stewardship identities including its own. As its website proclaims, “The land and surrounding public and private land is an important part of Mazamas’ history as well as an essential element of the natural heritage for the entire region and in particular the citizens of Hood River County, neighboring counties and the residents of Portland.”10 A high-density wilderness threshold was avoided through a negotiated settlement (2004), wherein the corporate entity gave up 770 acres northeast of Mount Hood for 120 acres in Government Camp primed for development.11
How can preservation survive open access near and on the volcanoes? Without a steady stream of visitors, the preservationist lobby—which fancies itself a prophet trying to convert those visitors to its doctrine of salvation in wilderness—would not grow and sway policy.12 The dilemma updates the philosophy of founding NPS Director Stephen Mather and longtime REI CEO Jim Whittaker, who both believed in getting the crowds into the parks and onto the peaks. The massive recruitment, while converting many to the gospel of mountain glory and stewardship commitments, would lead to increasing problems on the ground due to sheer numbers.
Northwest environmental organizations advocate preservation but tend to ignore the tradeoff between crowds and degradation. Discover Your Northwest, a nonprofit founded in 1974 in Seattle, defines itself as a “social enterprise” that “promotes the discovery of Northwest public lands, enriches the experience of visitors, and builds community stewardship of these special places today and for generations to come.” The group has fostered “community stewardship” through onsite “educational merchandise” such as MRNP trail maps. Those water-resistant trail maps, like the Mountaineers’ hiking book series a generation earlier, facilitate mass use. Noting decreasing visitation in some public lands in the Northwest, this organization, like so many others, strives to increase the number of visitors to the volcanoes, improve their experience above and below snowline, and increase their environmental commitment.13 The three-prong strategy of such a regional environmentalist organization, while laudable, does not address the access vs. preservation contradictions. Evidence such as overflowing parking lots and campgrounds around the volcanoes suggests that the first goal contradicts the second.
For virtually everyone, access means our cars, and we’re unwilling to sacrifice personal preference for alternatives. How many who want to climb Rainier or at least get on the mountain would ride that old Tacoma Eastern railroad were it revived? The slow time of that old approach would be inconceivable for most who want to briefly visit MRNP or bag the summit. Or what about those vacationers who’ve planned one day (or less) for MHNF and Mount Hood? Yet a generation ago one historian, citing the usual problems of auto congestion, made the case for mandatory public transportation being the only approach to balance access with preservation.14 The problem is succinctly stated but the proffered solution—tourist railroads—has not caught on, to put it mildly. Railroad infrastructure hardly exists for Northwest volcanoes, so it isn’t a viable option. Other forms of shuttle, similar to Glacier National Park’s 1930s-style open mini-busses, should be studied. Rocky Mountain National Park utilizes a moderately successful public transportation system that has been recently (2010) studied.15 But most volcano visitors want a quick in-and-out experience, and aren’t willing to sacrifice the personal convenience of driving themselves.
The issue of “recreational carrying capacity” sinks beneath the weight of diverse, subjective criteria including those variable definitions of “wilderness experience.” It is extremely difficult to establish benchmarks that guarantee consensus about capacity and preserve that most elusive resource. Given mountaineering’s popularity, the commitment to open access becomes harder to sustain as various systems of rationing or other controls are attempted.
Michael Frome, well-known environmental activist and author whose most famous book, Battle for the Wilderness (1974; 1997), is a late twentieth-century call to arms, reviewed some of the (use) permit systems in place in particular Washington and Oregon national forests. He concluded these systems lack size limits (i.e., number of people in one party), so do they have any teeth? Frome and like-minded writers want to advance the debate and force the agencies’ hands, claiming the time has come for backcountry rationing systems since heavily used wilderness is not wilderness. He would claim that in high season, the “use capacity” of some wilderness areas has been exceeded.16 That sentiment is commonplace—but the measurements are problematic. Exactly how does “use capacity” define wilderness experience as a finite resource in a given area? Presumably the former cannot be standardized from one volcano wilderness to another. Certainly standard routes sorely test the notion of use capacity and pose a textbook case for restricting access. A range of restricted-access definitions has existed (with appropriate boundary signs) for many years and for many reasons in wilderness areas. But favorite approaches to standard routes show myriad signs of overuse, including trash along those braided boot trails on glacial moraines.
In particular backcountry locations, a sense of crisis accompanies the lopsided contest between preservation, restoration, and increasing numbers of feet on and off the trails. What real choices do agencies have? In what specific ways should climbers or other wilderness users lower their wilderness expectations? Since the 1960s habitat restoration projects have stemmed or turned the tide of degradation. Certainly the alpine parks of MRNP’s Paradise or Mount Hood’s Timberline reflect the wear of mass tourism just as particular routes above them show chronic “traces.” Other voices sound warnings. The Mountaineers: A History concludes that the Northwest’s extraordinary natural landscapes are under grave threat and that the kind of “responsible access to the backcountry” on which such clubs depend may be a thing of the past.17 Though most backcountry—for example, North Cascades National Park—stays uncrowded, the volcanoes—Mount Baker, The Three Sisters—do not, for many reasons I’ve analyzed. While “responsible access” defines most climbers or other backcountry users, it doesn’t define everyone, nor could it. Broad-brush wilderness area restrictions seem politically untenable and difficult at best to enforce.
Given the era of mass mountaineering, “wilderness experience” seems not only a receding target but, for some segments, a disincentive—precisely the opposite of its intent. In recent decades a changed sentiment is intermittently evident at trailheads and sometimes, above them. Some prefer not being far off by themselves; they live in crowds and seek people in the mountains, perhaps believing safety exists in numbers. This mind-set, accustomed to stadiums or gyms or electronic extensions of them, brings crowd expectations to national parks or national forests as though visiting a volcano comprises a species of one-stop shopping: a visitor center and gift shop, a short paved trail, a climb. Crowds are okay because that’s what many people know and like. The presence of groups reassures them, and they won’t get lost.
The ever-growing series of regional hiking, backpacking, and climbing guides heavily influences the sensibility that we’re going the right way if we see other groups ahead or behind us. The flow validates our choice, rather than some “road less traveled” that offers wilderness experience. It’s a different attitude towards the presence of others, one inimical to the Wilderness Act. In this mind-set, popularity promises a higher status. That fact, along with the ease (or difficulty) of a route, helps explain why, for example, a line of hikers and climbers ascends Oregon’s South Sister’s standard (non-technical, southeast) route, whereas far fewer tackle North Sister, slighter lower, or Three-Fingered Jack farther north.
Volcanoes, crowd magnets and wilderness areas, invite wilderness experience if not personal transformation. How do we reconcile these contrary traditions? A USDA interagency General Technical Report, Keeping It Wild: An Interagency Strategy To Monitor Trends in Wilderness Character Across the NWPS System, defines “wilderness character”—the guarantor of “wilderness experience”—as “the combination of biophysical, experiential, and symbolic ideals that distinguishes wilderness from other lands.” These ideals—natural environments mostly free from human alteration; personal experiences in these environments apart from those characteristic of contemporary society; and symbolic interpretation of the concepts of humility, restraint, and interdependence in terms of our interactions with the natural world—don’t match up with crowds or the status game of peak bagging. Paraphrases of twentieth-century wilderness philosophy, the ideals depend upon four criteria (“Untrammeled,” “Natural,” “Undeveloped,” and “Solitude or Primitive and Unconfined Recreation”), each of which includes a set of “monitoring questions” and “indicators.”18
This set is highly relevant to the Northwest volcanoes, particularly the fourth criterion. One monitoring question asks, “What are the trends in outstanding opportunities for solitude or primitive and unconfined recreation inside wilderness?” (italics original). The “indicators” (e.g., “Remoteness from sights and sounds of people inside the wilderness,”) show that wilderness mandates don’t exist at many of the volcanoes’ base camps and standard routes, and that “wilderness character” is an ideal, not a reality.19 Keeping It Wild, a fairly recent document, suggests that policy, while an accurate descriptor of many Northwest wilderness areas, is seriously out of step with the legions on volcano glaciers and snowfields.
In addition to their erosion of open access, quota systems manifest practical problems because of uncontrollable variables. And when it comes to mountains, there’s a real resistance to them. One veteran Mountaineer, photographer Ira Spring—whose longtime collaboration with Harvey Manning in the Mountaineers’ ongoing series of Washington hiking books has arguably increased backcountry population more than any other single factor—has ruefully noted one sad prospect: the possibility of strict systems to steeply reduce weekend use in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area and the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, resulting in the necessity for securing permits far in advance of current weather and trail conditions.20 These proposals have not come to pass. Others have claimed a local bias in such systems, as urban Northwest climbers monitor local conditions more easily than those outside the region.
Quota systems have been commonplace on western whitewater rivers for decades, but mountaineers resist “their” volcanoes or peaks being treated like “Wild and Scenic” rivers, many subject to a rationed permit system. In extreme cases private parties wait many years to secure a floating permit. The volcanoes, taller and bigger than the Cascades they rise amidst, remain giant white flames drawing the most people. Some national parks like Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon use a trailhead quota system to “regulate the number of backpackers starting each trail, each day.” The quotas imitate those used on “Scenic and Wild” rivers (e.g., the Salmon River branches in Idaho, and the Colorado River through Grand Canyon). Such a system of “pulse releases” could be adopted at Northwest volcanoes, which see thousands of climbers per summer season. The Mount Adams Ranger Station, for example, issues at least 350 “Cascade Volcano Passes” on a summer weekend. Certainly quotas would lessen resource degradation and get lucky participants closer to “wilderness character.”
Not only have numbers increased, but also their attitudes have changed. Doubts have arisen about the contemporary climbing community’s interest in wilderness character. In the current scene some climbers act indifferent or even hostile to “wilderness experience” as a resource. One famous Northwest ski mountaineer, Lowell Skoog, has questioned “whether the younger climbers really care as much about the wilderness values as the older ones and what that might mean.”21 The history of modern mountaineering, regional and otherwise, reveals practices antithetical to the Wilderness Act and the recent Keeping It Wild report. Some younger climbers climb for the immediate route and little more: they ascend with blinders in place, like thoroughbreds on a track. To the extent that they narrow their vision and divorce “the technical climb” from wider “experience,” they enact a reduced, atrophied version of being in the mountains. They might claim, though, that in their single-mindedness they conform to the traditional sociability of climbing wherein solitude plays little to no role. It’s all about being noticed, not going unnoticed.
That’s a fundamental shift from the historical reasons for climbing snowpeaks. In MRNP, for example, backpackers value the experience of solitude more than do climbers, as noted by park officials. On sections of the Wonderland Trail or side trails, there’s a higher chance of walking apart than on the most popular routes above. That distinction derives, in part, from the fact that most climbers are interdependent, not alone; the solo backpacker walks and camps independently. But on Rainier’s two standard routes, and in spots along the Wonderland Trail, it looks like use capacity has been exceeded.
At Rainier and Hood, wilderness experience abuts industrial-scale tourism, the concept of “recreational carrying capacity” a sliding measuring stick of conflicting agendas. On hard routes or on particular, less publicized volcanoes this isn’t an issue. In the later twentieth century, public wildlands are construed as a valid natural resource not only by agency personnel and professionals, but the general public. We expect wilderness as a public right at our most exceptional mountains and elsewhere. Furthermore, thanks in part to the Wilderness Act we prize “solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation” though our tolerance for that varies considerably.22 This kind of experience occurs infrequently on volcano standard routes.
At MRNP, nearly synonymous with official wilderness for a generation, users carry particular expectations about solitude and “primitive recreation” with their backpacks once they’re hours beyond parking lots or trailheads. A mid-1970s a backcountry reservation system was scrapped after one year due to flaws. This system favored long-distance backpackers (e.g., complete Wonderland Trail hikers) over more casual weekend backpackers.23 A modified, more nuanced system reintroduced about a decade ago balances reservations with traditional, first-come, first-serve permits, and requires the applicant to appear in person to claim the reservation. The system takes a shot at fair rationing, no matter the applicant’s location, even if it doesn’t guarantee “ideal isolation” in the backcountry.
In the past three decades, Rainier has proven a test case of curbing development and preserving or restoring resources while maintaining open access. By the early 2000s the balancing act had turned precarious, and the Nisqually–Paradise corridor still feels congested. In the early 1970s MRNP decided to halt any additional substantial infrastructure in the park, its 1972 master plan capping development at the current road system and fifteen extant locations, most categorized as Class II, general outdoor recreation areas: fee stations, developed campgrounds, and visitor centers, most dating from MRNP’s first forty years.24 Most visitors don’t step far beyond the 3 percent non-wilderness corridor, the Nisqually-Longmire-Paradise area (the oldest and most popular), with one- or two-stop shopping at the end: visitor center, souvenir shop, café.
By MRNP’s centennial in 1999 the corridor was often saturated in high season. Recreational carrying capacity was defined by parking lots: since the 1990s visitors have frequently discovered “Full” signs and must drive around a loop, their visit thwarted for the time being. Full lots describe the tipping point of adverse visitor experience. Parking stalls seem a reductive definition of recreational carrying capacity, an urban (or suburban) benchmark that supports “National Parking Service” criticism. This interpretation also seems a failure of vision in its dependency upon private vehicles for the definition of quality visitor experience, however short or long. We don’t think past our cars.
The full lots are an initial indicator of crowded conditions sometimes replicated just above them, along paved nature trails in the alpine parks that, however congested, try to contain the flow and reduce informal switchbacks and off-trail paths. Meadows restoration projects, conceptualized in the Paradise Meadows Plan of 1989 just beyond the Paradise Visitor Center and other buildings, blunt and minimize generations of damage caused by feet if not hatchets used in early twentieth-century camping. This detailed “Meadow Plan,” which included work by a range of disciplines, turned conditions around in the meadows in the face of increasing use.25 Despite ongoing restoration, though, Paradise still shows the impact of visitors. Keeping Muir’s lower Gardens of Eden pristine is difficult, as alpine plants and grasses do not always regrow fast enough as more feet step near or on them.
The Mount Rainier National Park Wilderness Act of 1988 encompassed the ever-popular Paradise–Camp Muir trail, a longtime day hike in its own right. Camp Muir symbolizes the dilemma at Mount Rainier: legal wilderness yet prevalent conditions antithetical to wilderness experience. How can this four-thousand-foot hike-climb, site of the long-ago Silver Skis Race and used by thousands every summer, be called or managed as wilderness? John Muir proved too successful as writer and publicist, and would be appalled at what he and other early proselytizers wrought. The area named after him looked battered by the twentieth century’s end. In high season Camp Muir, with two of its buildings dating from MRNP’s first generation, buzzes like a hive, encampments spread out across the Muir Snowfield (like the Emmons Flats overflow on Rainier’s northeast side).
The scene forces painful questions about different user groups and infrastructural problems (e.g., water, sewage). The thousands of hikers create the latter. The problems at Muir—like Mount Hood’s Palmer chairlift, which tops out at 8600 feet on Mount Hood’s south central side, and Silcox Hut, a rustic alpine lodge (1939; 1993) located just below the 7000-foot level on the Timberline ski hill—are exacerbated by the steady stream of day hikers: both unregulated and traditionally more careless about “Leave No Trace” impact. Maybe a more fleeting presence occasions a fleeting sense of attachment and stewardship. In addition to these two “villages” on Rainier, MRNP was monitoring (1991) eleven alpine areas that showed signs of wear in the camping spots.26 The cumulative human trammels include more than abandoned trash or discarded gear.
Shit happens. Our poop, in alpine environments especially, proves the most personal, embarrassing trace of our passage. By the late twentieth century, human waste was the glaring detritus of mass mountaineering, particularly on standard routes, both in the Northwest and in high ranges around the world. Feces, like bodies, do not decompose in extreme cold or snow conditions, and increasing traffic leaves increasing deposits for subsequent traffic to encounter. A Seattle Times story in 1998 proclaimed that, according to the best guess, five tons of poop had accumulated on Mount Rainier, almost all on the two standard routes. By the 1990s, climbing registration personnel and rangers issued blue bags so that “pack it out” carried literal and absolute reference. No snow latrines, no deposits below rock outcroppings. But we don’t all pack it out for many sorry reasons. In July 1994, MRNP initiated a “Mountain Cost Recovery Program”: a special use fee for summiteers that helps cover administration, high camp staffing, and human waste removal costs. Blue bags and climber education have lessened this noxious impact but haven’t eliminated it. The blue bag program begun at Rainier was subsequently employed at Mounts Baker, Adams, and Hood.27 All climbers need to use them—like best practice, Leave No Trace behavior in any wilderness area. But best presumes less than best.
A minority will never take responsibility for their own shit (literal and otherwise). But Mike Gauthier, former chief climbing ranger at MRNP, estimated that only 1 percent of Rainier climbers violate the policy. In his instructions to staff and climbers, his two main marching orders included 1) safety and 2) poop. In his judgment, the big problem concerns pit toilets, an unresolved issue at Camp Muir despite recent renovations. Gauthier escorted Washington Senator Maria Cantwell to Camp Muir in 2007, and she complained about the foul toilets. She has a lot of company. When masses collect at higher altitudes, human waste becomes a noxious problem that solar toilets—which don’t always work that well—only partially solve.
In MRNP, personnel work as high-altitude monitors and janitors but never eliminate all traces; the other volcanoes lack field crews, among others. And then there are sloppy climbers. Climbing rangers have policed Rainier’s two standard routes for many years. According to the Mount Rainier National Park, 2009 report, they maintained a constant presence at Camps Muir and Schurman in the summer season doing camp patrols; rangers spent about two hours an evening talking with climbers, reminding those in need of it about Leave No Trace requirements. They also spent over eighty hours cleaning the Camp Muir public shelter since day hikers’ food scraps attracted foxes. Food scraps resulted in animals becoming accustomed to the upper mountain, far above normal altitudes for foxes. Climbing rangers also spent nearly two hundred hours cleaning five solar dehydrating toilets at Camps Muir and Schurman, including emptying and rotating the toilet paper baskets.28 Budget restraints render this problem well outside the dictates of wilderness management.
The wear and tear along standard routes signifies a problem far beyond definitions of wilderness character or wilderness experience. These conditions imitate the maintenance or restoration challenges of city parks or greenbelts, or along roadways. Because of their position and fame, Rainier and Hood act as bellwethers broadcasting the crowd problems in volcano wilderness areas more conspicuously than the other peaks. At Rainier, the high camps focus the high-density-in-wilderness contradictions as nowhere else. After an extensive snowmelt in 2009, the Muir Snowfield revealed many problem areas due to networks of informal trails and non-regulated campsites, which ranger crews did their best to rehabilitate. The Snowfield stays busy year round.29 The Muir Snowfield, official wilderness, neither looks nor feels like one. Those long-ago large-group climbs proved an ironic foretaste of non-wilderness in wilderness.
Adverse human impacts also occurred on the Kautz Glacier route—for a generation in the mid-twentieth century, Rainier’s most popular climbing route. In 2009 climbing rangers monitored more non-regulated campsites and hauled abandoned gear down from the Kautz ice cliffs.30 Poop is not the only trace left behind. With the spike in climbers, the carelessness of a few carries a multiplier effect. In the early twenty-first century, almost five thousand climbers tackle Mount Adams, the Cascades’ third highest volcano, per year, almost all of them using the standard, South Climb route and over half of them summiting: same funnel, same non-wilderness.
The expectation of solitude or primitive recreation in wilderness depends, as much as any felt experience, upon quiet, and quiet is not the norm on standard routes. At Mount Rainier quiet is threatened from another source, one that both epitomizes and parodies wilderness consumerism. Flyovers provide a luxurious amenity for those with deep enough pockets, no matter their contemptuous disregard of most others’ expectations. Here is windshield wilderness from above as “visitors,” comfortably ensconced, gain the omniscient point of view. A 2010 Seattle Times story, “Mt. Rainier air tours are up for discussion,” reviewed the current debate about limiting commercial sightseeing flights in MRNP—a controversial subject in other national parks, like the Grand Canyon. Over 1.7 million visitors entered MRNP in 2009, and the vast majority wanted natural quiet—as do the mountain goats. Staff writer Lynda V. Mapes stated that five operators were licensed to run up to 113 MRNP “sightseeing air tours” a year.
Given public preference, it seems odd that any are allowed. The air tour approximates an aerial amusement park ride and it confuses domains, imposing “sky train” expectations at a volcano or other outstanding natural feature. The invasive spread, even ubiquity, of noise pollution is a stark antagonist of wilderness experience. Yet aircraft line urban and suburban skies, so according to a common mind-set, why not allow them equal access to wilderness airspace? In an era when connectivity means wired, increasing segments of the public ignore or reject “wilderness character.” Or it steadily loses relevance.
Is preservation at the snowpeaks a rearguard action in the early twenty-first century? Rainier air tours represent one risk accruing from the ongoing commitment to unchecked access. The inundation of people in MRNP occasions, according to its leading historian, a “cultural anxiety,” as park personnel must define preservation in the twenty-first century.31 The mandate is to manage all but 3 percent of MRNP as wilderness, not unlike other Northwest volcanoes, but the common corridors like Camp Muir sadly parody consensus benchmarks of wilderness character. They are problematic as wilderness thresholds. As Ranger John Madden stated, “It’s that pressure, pressure, pressure.”32 How will MRNP climbing rangers or personnel in the other volcano wilderness areas better persuade all users to Leave No Trace so that hikers and climbers will continue to find clean lines, fresh powder, and pure water? It remains to be seen how we will collectively reverse the manifest signs of heavily used wilderness.
In the past half century, a growing gap exists between “wilderness experience” as a resource and management mandate and mass mountaineering. Bagging the volcanoes, high-end trophies, conflates elements of wilderness consumerism and status tourism. Limiting climbing parties to twelve represents a shaky compromise between the big group climbs of old and Wilderness Act dictates. The limit of twelve confirms the sociability of mountaineering: sociability at odds with more than one cornerstone of “wilderness character” (e.g., Keeping It Wild). For many, twelve would comprise far too large a climbing or backpacking party, a size that precludes experiences of solitude.
Mount Hood’s image as supreme winter playground has solidified since the Wilderness Act. On the peak’s standard route, crowd climbing and skiing abut as nowhere else in the region, each uneasily accommodating the other. In the 1980s and 1990s, Mount Hood Meadows expanded to become the biggest ski area on the mountain. Greater Portland and MHNF have figuratively overlapped for a long time, and that creates an illusion of leisure without limits, though winter weather and mountain borders, in another sense, suggest finite limits.33 By the early twenty-first century the myopic refusal to accept greater Mount Hood, for example, as a finite system has produced clear stresses. This economy is driven by a regional sensibility wherein people expect to have it both ways: funky, sophisticated city and easy alpine (or coast) access. “Keep Portland Weird” (and “Beered”) and keep wilderness un-weird—and close.
A recreation economy starkly divides haves from have-nots, and plenty of studies demonstrate, for example, the proportionately low number of some minority populations within wilderness areas. That demographic tendency is of a piece with historical urban park design, which ignored racial and ethnic minority populations, for the most part, in advancing an upper- and middle-class, mostly white recreational agenda. Too, the tendency reflects the habits of wilderness consumerism, wherein those with discretionary income and leisure time use wilderness areas, and poorer city dwellers typically do not. The MHNF wilderness areas, which help make the scaffolding upon which metro Portland’s recreation economy rests, show signs of degradation. An “urban national forest” obviously implies urban problems including upkeep.
On Mount Hood, differing versions of the recreation economy exist cheek by jowl. These competing interests carry different assumptions and expectations, and often clash. The two main ski hills border the Mount Hood Wilderness Area and include a thin slice (Timberline) or wedge (Mount Hood Meadows) of the volcano. The slice and the wedge show higher numbers than anywhere else in the area, particularly between November and April.
Nothing is more urban than the monumental hotel, symbol of an early, twentieth-century rustic luxury, that rises at Hood’s southern base. More people visited Timberline Lodge than all of MRNP in 2009. The lodge, a famous cultural artifact, represents a supreme extant example of a Matherian destination resort. CCC crews (Company 928, from Zigzag, OR) and WPA crews, along with USFS personnel, created a monument of 1930s rustic architecture with its exposed beams, pegged oak floors, and huge hexagonal stone fireplace. These craftsmen recycled materials and built infrastructure: old, cut power poles were carved into stairwell newel posts, old railroad tracks were forged and hammered into andirons, and old CCC uniform scraps were woven into rugs.34 The CCC crews also built the road and water system. A massive, symmetric edifice, the Lodge signifies a manmade marvel to complement the peak above—an icon poised near the edge of wilderness like the Prince of Wales Hotel in Waterton Lakes National Park (Alberta).
Timberline Lodge has been a mecca since it first opened its doors. When the Roosevelts visited the Lodge for its dedication on September 28, 1937, FDR’s balcony speech was broadcast live. Hotel and ski hill were immediately national news. The lodge’s reputation explains, at least partially, the popularity of climbing Mount Hood, though that tradition long precedes the lodge. Forty-three years after Roosevelt’s national broadcast, film director Stanley Kubrick employed a crew to take exterior shots of the lodge for his horror film, The Shining (1980). As movie prop the lodge became famous again, but divorced from its volcano.
The fact that lodge, ski hill, and circumambulating trail share a name poses an irony. The Timberline Trail, which wends through the Mount Hood Wilderness Area, signifies uses antithetical to those symbolized by hotel and chairlift. Backpackers on the Timberline Trail or climbers on a route other than the south side or Cooper Spur routes have a chance to discover “wilderness experience”: an irrelevant concept at Timberline or Mount Hood Meadows, where fresh powder matters most. For most “Timberline” means lodge or ski hill, not a trail through a wilderness area that skirts above and below the upper edge of trees.
The recent history of Mount Hood’s south side route reveals similar management problems found on Mount Rainier’s Paradise–Camp Muir corridor, and ongoing adjustments by MHNF personnel: adjustments that again reveal the gap between wilderness experience management and high density use. As at Rainier, “wilderness threshold” remains a vexed concept since the clusters of climbers above Palmer chairlift within the wilderness area, while not as large as those below, step along a well-trodden path. Even the rule of twelve or less in a party appears arbitrary and bears unfortunate consequences. Groups who worked hardest on cleanup and trail restoration were excluded because of the size rule. In his years of study, Mount Hood’s most famous historian, Jack Grauer, has noted a pattern of small groups’ sloppy camping habits that features slashed branches and piles of cans and bottles in campfire rings.35 Nowadays small groups are much less likely to trash campsites, though some still do. These inconsistencies suggest that the size rule fails as a compromise, ignores the histories of mountain or environmental clubs, and does not promote the Leave No Trace ethic. The rule poses another example of a number that sometimes neglects social realities and works against preservation.
Mount Hood evidences the lag between changing scales of use, wilderness policies and subsequent implementation problems, and new bids for agency-public cooperation. Perhaps most climbers in the line prefer the line to something untrammeled or solitary, believing the more, the better and safer. Enforcing the group size rule—that effort to redistribute the crowds into smaller clumps—led to occasionally absurd outcomes, with rangers waiting like cops in a speed trap. In 1998 a ranger positioned near Crater Rock (more than halfway up the route) to issue citations for infractions assumed friends greeting friends (in different parties) meant too large a group.36 A common scenario in an urban district becomes an occasion for citation in mandated wilderness. Arguably, this rule alienated those very preservationist lobbies most dedicated to helping the agency manage wilderness experience as a resource.
Something is way off base in this scene, with enforcement tied to an overly rigid, anachronistic policy. Given the thousands opposing the 1999 quota system, this proposed rationing had no chance, but as elsewhere in the region, the problem of recreational carrying capacity being exceeded won’t go away. Further, safety in numbers is an illusion because numbers easily compound problems, as on any road.
Yet in the early twenty-first century the MHNF has reached out as never before to both occasional visitors and local environmental organizations, actively soliciting their cooperation and help. Rallying the forces potentially if not actually lessens seemingly endless litigation. Sustained outreach raises visibility and builds both the constituency and advocacy. An Oregonian editorial from December 11, 2000, “One Last Chance on Mount Hood,” complimented the USFS for its more active outreach even as it stressed shared responsibility with wilderness area users. The editorial’s title recognized, among other things, the sorry consequences of heavily used wilderness on and below the mountain. The only way to get it right entails ongoing public education, lobbying, and policing—peer pressure as a prod for compliance.
As an urban national forest MHNF seeks public buy-in and visible support in a number of ways like savvy PR recruiting campaigns. The executive summary of the MHNF Strategic Stewardship Plan (2006) stresses collaboration with various public stakeholders. The plan points out that in a five-year period alone (2000–2004), the Vancouver-Portland metro area’s population increased 5 percent. That demographic pressure underlines its five challenges, among them to “Work together with public, private, and civic interests for sustainable regional recreation, which is essential to our spirits and our economy.” In keeping with wilderness philosophy, the matrix of recreational and spiritual values exists above and before financial values. The question of ecological sustainability is crucial to the stability of the regional recreation economy. Sustainability suggests a new access-preservation matrix, one in which preservation is less compromised. Sustainability means, primarily, resource stability, yet the most elusive resource on popular routes above and below tree line is wilderness experience. Something has to give.
Fig. 10. Mount Hood, south climb (standard) route in late summer, with Crater Rock left of center and Steel Cliffs, center background. Wikimedia Commons.
A national forest needs its advocates, especially if hundreds of thousands live next door. The recent shift in definition and strategy points up its dependency on the contiguous metro area, where most of its visitors live. MHNF relies on Portlanders and vice versa—in some respects, a symbiosis.
On Mount Hood’s south side, recreational activities, especially climbing and skiing, are prioritized. Unsurprisingly, numbers run the game. Among the nine “On the climb” recommendations, in the current MHNF “Climbing Mt. Hood” regulations, the final one addresses historic and contemporary conflicting uses near Palmer chairlift: “Avoid climbing on the groomed ski runs of the Palmer Snowfield” and the “Snowboard terrain features” including parks and jumps.37 For a generation, Mount Hood has been a leader in the sport of snowboarding, hosting competitions and developing innovative terrain parks. The camp hosted by famed snowboarder Tim Windell recruits approximately 1400 snowboarders per summer and almost 5600 (including mountain bikers) the rest of the year.38 That’s about two thirds of the number of climbers tackling Hood every year.
Mount Hood’s current standard route (south climb) regulations reflect its iconic status as a mass climb, at least half of which falls within official wilderness. The regulations make no pretense of sustaining mandated wilderness experience, accepting the reality of traffic jam above Crater Rock, a formation just east of the route and not much more than a thousand feet below the summit.
MHNF asks climbers to strictly adhere to established climber paths or, in the absence of paths, disperse parties to reduce impact. The request sends mixed signals, as approach paths have a way of endlessly braiding and widening. Recognizing the common bottleneck higher up, from the Hogsback through the Pearly Gates, MHNF advises climbers to communicate with nearby parties if a traffic jam occurs, climb during weekdays, or climb early in order to descend to the Hogsback before the day’s main traffic. Common sense alternatives depend, of course, on schedule flexibility and the sacrosanct criterion of personal convenience.
On the problem of poop, MHNF reminds climbers of the blue bag policy—optional—and of a waste barrel in the Salmon River parking lot. Yet some don’t summit carrying their shit, as though their waste degrades their aspiration. The MHNF website notes that climbers sometimes leave a blue bag to pack out on the descent, whereupon ravens pick them apart. The website reminds climbers to secure poop bags in gear and pack all food scraps out because of animal habits, like those foxes at Camp Muir on Rainier.39 The association creates unwanted animal behaviors. Field mice, packrats, coyotes, bears, ravens, and “alpine” foxes follow people and their droppings. You must take it with you. But not everyone does.
How can shared stewardship, a form of peer pressure, prevent that noncompliant fraction from growing, let alone change the behavior of careless day hikers or climbers? Clearly a new matrix favoring greater preservation needs to be realized. In the Northwest, designating wilderness has proven enormously successful over the past half century: the fact that almost half (42%) of Washington’s Mount Baker–Snoqualmie National Forest is designated as wilderness areas marks the achievement of the preservationist lobbies and the greening of Washington’s population. Most of this mountainscape remains pretty empty. But sustaining “wilderness character” in popular spots has been harder. If a volcano wilderness area resembles a commons, more users equals more evidence of use. These arctic island corridors enact the contradiction noted by one mountain historian over three decades ago: “To make wilderness more available is, paradoxically, to make it less so.”40 More boot prints mean that wilderness experience keeps receding into the distance as though it were a vanishing condition.
Further, the volcanoes are not immune to satellite communications technologies, and while no cellphone towers exist on glaciers, many pack their networked expectations with them. Too often we carry our wired worlds in our rucksacks or heads as the virtual environment enters these arctic wildernesses. It’s a mixed blessing at best. Not all volcanoes require climber registration though website and print information makes it clear that registration facilitates search and rescue operations in the event of emergencies. Satellite communications greatly aid not only backcountry skiers and climbers but also search and rescue personnel. But the ubiquity of cell and smartphones and related electronic devices demonstrates an urban sensibility imported into high altitudes.
Like transistor radios at Glacier Peak’s Image Lake forty years ago, these communications technologies on mountains vitiate wilderness experience, sharply reminding listeners both what they have and do not have. For most, such devices increase noise pollution as nothing else does. Climbers mimic the general population. According to a recent (February 9, 2013) Chicago Tribune editorial, some don’t accept any difference between national park and theme park. As the writer argues, such folks don’t belong in a national park or on a volcano, as “they’re the very demographic the rest of us go to Yellowstone [or name your comparable park or wilderness] to escape. . . . The call of the wild doesn’t need a ring tone.” A theme park exists as antithetical space to a wilderness area, and to the extent that the former represents a pop cultural norm, many people unsurprisingly and inappropriately export theme park expectations into contrary domains. Wilderness areas confuse or scare folks accustomed to crowds. In the Cascades, many unhesitatingly bring their wired world with them.
Growing numbers of news stories in recent years chronicle climbers, some un- or under-prepared, making rescue calls and placing large (including financial) demands upon search and rescue personnel and equipment. The idea and practice of rescue is not in dispute; the fact that some, perhaps after a few weeks of practice on a climbing wall, end up on routes well beyond their ability suggests an overreliance upon professional help (as well as the yawning gap between fake and real rock). In some cases distressed climbers call loved ones far away, who in turn contact search and rescue groups closest to that volcano or peak for help. At Rainier and Hood the numbers include novices who assume that help, if needed, is on the way. Rescue costs have developed into a robust debate, with most believing that costs should be borne by the victims, not absorbed by local or regional rescue groups or taxpayers.
A fundamental contradiction exists between climbing and wilderness area mandates. The tableau atop peaks of summiteers with cellphones symbolizes the current condition of mass mountaineering as fundamentally non-wilderness. This spectacle updates the Mazamas’ inaugural scene. The contemporary version is a motley collection of transitory small groups, who presume and expect instant connectivity, as though craters are high-priced extensions of their regular settings. Management practices need to be modified to accommodate and control the urban realities of standard routes and approaches.
Maybe Leave No Trace needs to be amended for particular application to the volcanoes, which as wilderness areas pose a special case of fragility. Maybe the “wilderness character” criterion, “Solitude or Primitive and Unconfined Recreation,” should be abandoned so the appropriate agency may develop a flexible set of guidelines particular to one volcano: guidelines that reflect the ebb and flow of climbers and treat the route in urban terms. Most climbing routes whose difficulty exceeds the capacity of novice or occasional climbers illustrate Wilderness Act philosophy; standard routes, however, violate it. The numbers on Northwest volcanoes erode the intent of the Wilderness Act. Those numbers, which increase on our most exceptional mountains, require new education and new enforcement guidelines to minimize and offset adverse impacts.
Perhaps a Northwest volcano resembles a Congressionally-designated “Wild and Scenic River,” which affords a series of protections and restrictions. Should Mount Jefferson, Mount Washington, or Glacier Peak be managed like Idaho’s famous Middle Fork of the Salmon River—perhaps the premiere whitewater river in the Northwest? The permit system on the region’s (and the West’s) whitewater rivers is strict, with only a finite number of trips released per day, like pulses into the river canyon. Commercial operators acquire more permits than private parties. This difference—guided trips versus private parties—doesn’t occur on the volcanoes, nor do restrictions for private parties except in their size. But do we need to adopt a quota system of releases per day so that climbers enjoy some approximation of wilderness experience? Maybe the time has come to match the quota system governing many “Wild and Scenic” rivers. A permit system clarifies the reality of backcountry (or high altitude) consumerism, since a coveted permit signifies a consensus high price, like a moose hunting tag in Montana.
Meanwhile, the graphs documenting the increasing popularity of volcano standard routes show rising lines, a steady flow of climbers for whom the notion of finding your own pace and place rarely happens. The extreme example of crowds on a volcano, Japan’s Mount Fuji in high season (particularly Obon in mid-August), shows tens of thousands of climbers staying in huts and walking between cables on a clearly marked, zigzagging route. Small bobcats and bulldozers are deployed at various elevations to continually “upgrade” the track; a post office and noodle shops await the climber on top. There is a “passing lane” but one stays inside the cables: deviating off-route is not acceptable.
Northwest volcanoes will not develop comparable infrastructure, of course, but other signs and habits of mass tourism exist. Maybe we need a system wherein local environmental organization volunteers, working under the auspices of agency personnel, man summits and other key points to minimize impacts. This occurs on various Northeast peaks, for example Vermont’s Mount Mansfield, which hosts approximately fifty thousand visitors per year. Or the vast majority of Colorado’s fifty-three mountains that rise above fourteen thousand feet that because of their height draw hikers and climbers from afar, and are monitored by the Colorado Fourteeners Initiative.41 There are many forms of fragility, after all, and it’s past time for all interested parties to accept them in the greater interest of preserving—or restoring—pristine conditions on our snowpeaks.