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My first indication that things had changed in the rural West came a few years ago, shortly after the Sangre de Cristo Wilderness bill had been enacted.
Jim Little, the publisher of the Wet Mountain Tribune in Westcliffe at the eastern foot of the Sangres, was going on vacation. I was supposed to fill in during his absence, so I was reading through some recent editions to catch up on Custer County.
The passage of the Sangre Wilderness Bill was a
front-page story, along with local reaction. I expected the
usual hollering about locking up resources
and
consequent economic disaster if mining or logging were
forbidden in much of the Sangres.
After all, Westcliffe was pretty much a cow town, with plenty of mining residues and presumably hopes for more mining someday, and I held similar assumptions about logging.
But instead, a chamber of commerce official sounded almost ecstatic as he cited some study which predicted a three-fold increase in visits to the Sangres with formal wilderness designation, as opposed to informal Forest Service roadless-area management.
More Sangre visitors meant more people stopping to spend money in Westcliffe, so the chamber liked the idea. Westcliffe had come to terms with a new economic engine. The rabid rural denunciations of wilderness designation, so familiar during my years editing the Kremmling newspaper 20 years earlier that I could recite them as easily as the alphabet, had vanished from public discourse, at least in Custer County.
But with that said, what do we really mean when we
designate an area wilderness,
and does that indeed
protect
it?
Consider the Sangres again. If the number of visitor-days indeed tripled as a result of wilderness designation, then it means more people on the trails and necessarily relieving themselves in the woods.
At some point, all those trail footsteps will cause erosion and consequent resource damage, and prudent management might involve a strip of asphalt or the like -- except you can't do that in a wilderness area.
The same applies to human waste. After it reaches a certain level beyond the assimilation capacities of natural processes, then the protection of water quality means vaulted privies or treatment facilities -- and you can't put those in a wilderness area.
So the official wilderness declaration makes an area more popular, which causes degradation of the resources that the designation was supposed to protect. In other words, the Law of Unintended Consequences is still very much in effect.
Is there any way out of this?
Honesty would be a good start. Designation does not really preserve some pristine zone so much as it sets the area aside for some user groups and not others -- foot and hoof recreation as opposed to wheel and motor recreation.
For evidence in support of this thesis, note the furor over a proposed Forest Service ban on climbing bolts in wilderness areas.
If people truly supported the concept of places where there's no evidence of human handiwork, then they wouldn't want rock bolts -- or signs, or deadfall bridges over creeks, or even designated trails. And it would be best protected if nobody, especially the people who publish full-color chamber-of-commerce brochures extolling the area's attractions, even knew it was a wilderness.
Perhaps there's a way to handle this than the current one-size-fits-all wilderness law. Let's have zones. We could borrow terminology from the river guides, so that wild areas might range from Class I to Class V.
A Class I Wilderness would be protected from logging, mining and motorized vehicles, but would allow mountain bikes and wheelchairs along its paved trails which passed comfort stations and safe water supplies in an area kept free of mountain lions and bears.
Class II Wilderness would be somewhat rougher -- unpaved trails, perhaps, and privies of a more primitive nature.
We could work up the scale to Class V Wilderness. People should stay out, but since we already have too many rules in this country, it would be legal to enter one.
However, there would be no trails or rock bolts. You'd take your chances with giardia from the water. There would be free-roaming grizzlies, pumas and wolves, and there would be no rescue of any kind, even helicopter or packhorse, under any circumstances.
Visitors could bring guns, but armed hikers would be required to shoot any cellular-telephone user on sight. That may sound severe, but protecting our resources from abuse is an important duty for all citizens.
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