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 Trail
Fees - A Bad Idea for a Rogue Agency
by George Sexton
Armed
Guards at the Trailhead
Imagine returning from a hike in your publicly owned National
Forests to find an armed Forest Service law enforcement agent
sitting in his new $50,000 SUV, video taping the license plate
number of your car. Then imagine that he gets out of the SUV and
separates you from your hiking companion in order to question
you and threaten you with arrest for failing to pay the Forest
Service trail fee. Well that was the scenario that my hiking partner
and I encountered the last time that I attempted to visit the
Siuslaw National Forest in the Oregon Coast Range.
While
one can avoid the specter of harassment by armed Forest Service
agents at your favorite trail head by paying them off with trail
fees, what you may not know is that paying trail fees is a political
decision that has serious ramifi-cations for the future of your
forests.
Here
is the untold story about the trail fee program.
How
Does the Forest Service Spend Your Trail Fees?
Despite the common distaste for paying to visit lands that one
already owns, many hikers grudgingly pay the trail fee because
they assume that the Forest Service will use the money to build
new trails or to improve existing trails. Unfortunately very little
of the trail fee money goes to projects that most forest users
would consider improvements.
Paying
For Administration
According to the Forest Service, about 20 percent of the fees
collected go toward administration of the program. In other words,
it goes to pay for the new SUVs, guns and law enforcement officers
to catch those who cannot or will not pay the fee. This at a time
when the Forest Service budget for law enforcement for timber
theft (illegal logging) and illegal dumping on public lands is
woefully underfunded. While the Forest Service sends armed guards
to collect trail fees at trail heads, old growth trees are being
illegally logged and household trash is being dumped into your
forests.
Trails
vs. Logging Roads
The remaining monies collected by the fee program very seldom
go towards new trail construction. In the Willamette National
Forest for example, back in 1960, there were 1,600 miles of hiking
trails in the forest, and over the next 30 years the trail mileage
actually shrank by 300 miles. During this same period, the miles
of logging roads in the forest skyrocketed from 1,800 miles to
over 6,600. The massive road building initiative resulted in a
road maintenance backlog in the billions of dollars. While hikers
are expected to pay to subsidize the agency’s meager recreation
budget, the timber industry is off the hook for the massive costs
of maintaining the bloated network of logging roads. The trail
fee program charges you to use a decreasing number of trails in
an increasingly damaged forest.
Trail
Fees to Cut Trees
When the trail fee monies actually do get spent on trail maintenance,
the projects tend to involve paving over the soil and cutting
down the trees, and occasionally putting up large plastic signs.
Not exactly the types of maintenance most hikers envision their
trail fees funding. One of the Forest Service’s favorite
trail fee funded projects involves widening existing trails. Usually
this means taking a single track dirt trail, and doubling its
width, cutting down lots of trees in the process and often paving
a portion of the trail in question. During this process a number
of dead standing trees called “snags” that are in the
vicinity of the trail are often felled for “safety”
reasons. This despite the fact that snags provide the best wildlife
habitat in the forest and that far more injuries have occurred
from cutting down snags than from random windfall events.
More
Hikers on Fewer Trails
At the same time that the Forest Service is charging for the use
of existing trails, and considering limitations on the number
of hikers allowed in wilderness areas, it is actively destroying
trails.
A
particularly sad example of this phenomenon is the Eagle Creek
timber sale adjacent to the Salmon Huckleberry wilderness area,
just an hour east of Portland. Due to its popularity as a hiking
destination, several years ago the Forest Service proposed limiting
the number of visitors allowed in the Salmon Huckleberry wilderness
and began charging trail fees. One would think that this situation
would cause the Forest Service to place a high value on protecting
the existing trails in the area. But as part of the Eagle timber
sale the agency intends to log right up to gorgeous ridge-line
Old Baldy trail that forms the Western boundary of the wilderness
area. Similarly, the Forest Service recently completed cutting
along several sections of the famous Pacific Crest Trail on the
Mt. Hood National Forest.
The
result is that more hikers are pushed onto fewer trails at which
it is then easier for the agency to collect trail fees.
Paying
the Fee is Counted as Supporting the Program
Recently the Forest Service reported to Congress that hikers overwhelmingly
supported the trail fee program. How did they reach this surprising
conclusion? Well, they took surveys at fee sites of people who
had already paid the fees. In other words, if you avoided the
trail because of the fee, you could not be part of the survey.
Similarly, stopping into a Forest Service office to purchase a
trail fee is interpreted by the agency as evidence of your support
of the program. By using such an accounting methodology, the Forest
Service disenfranchises those who cannot or will not pay the fee.
Paying
for What You Built
Many folks in Oregon remember the decade of intense citizen activism
that was necessary to protect the magnificent ancient forests
of Opal Creek from the Forest Service’s plans to clearcut
it. Part of the citizen efforts included the construction of hiking
trails through the old growth forest, in order to show their friends
and neighbors the world class wilderness values of Opal Creek.
If one now wishes to visit these citizen-constructed trails built
to protect the forest from the Forest Service, one is expected
to pay the agency $5 for the privilege, or risk facing the armed
enforcement officers.
The
story is similar all over the Northwest. The Forest Service now
charges hikers to use trails that were constructed by Native Americans,
or created by adventurous anglers, or built by forest activists
to showcase forests that the agency wanted to cut down. When viewed
together with the Forest Service’s old growth timber sale
program, a disturbing image develops of an agency that believes
that it entitled to sell things that it did not have a hand in
creating. It would be farcical if you or I set up a toll booth
on an Interstate highway and charged motorists to use a road built
by the government. Yet the Forest Service believes it has a right
to charge you for trails they did not build, and sell trees they
did not plant. Trail fees go to support an agency that charges
hikers to use trails that have existed for decades, and logs trees
that have stood for centuries.
You
Are Not Alone
Over 200 environmental, conservation and recreation organizations
oppose the trail fee program, and they represent hundreds of thousands
of Americans. You can reach these groups and help their efforts
to protect access to your public lands by visiting http://www.freeourforests.org/opposition.html
and you can find out more about forest defense by “logging”
onto www.americanlands.org
Enjoy
and Protect Your Forests!
George
Sexton is the Watershed Coordinator for the American Lands
Alliance. For the past five years he has worked to protect the
watersheds and ancient forests of the Cascade Mountain Range.
George is a fifth generation Oregonian and loves to hike whenever
possible. He never pays trail fees.
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