Dear HCN,
Last summer my partner
Lynn and I did some backpacking in Kootenay National Park in the
Canadian Rockies, a couple of months after Canada instituted their
backcountry usage fee of $5 per person per
day.
After we got over the initial shock, and
headed back into Radium Hot Springs to pull more cash out of a bank
machine, we (grousing a little) realized the fee was needed for
backcountry maintenance, and we were glad to pay it to help out the
park; and besides it might be the wave of the future here in the
USA, so we might as well get used to it. I used to think user fees
for wilderness and other backcountry areas were a good idea. Now,
after taking our trip, I’m not so sure.
Lynn and
I are the sort of backpackers who strive for positive impact, if
that’s possible. We regularly haul out trash left by others, do
spot repairs of trails, throw obstacles into switchback shortcuts
and destroy extra fire rings at campsites, picking out the nasties
to haul out with us. We’re admittedly not fully evolved: I
encourage Lynn to lead because I don’t like bending down to pick up
trash while I’m hiking and I know she will; she derives an
atavistically perverse pleasure from the smell of wood smoke and
sometimes I can’t talk her out of building a fire below timberline,
and neither one of us can hover above the ground quite yet. Still,
we pride ourselves on our backcountry
ethics.
Payment of the backcountry usage fee in
Canada changed those ethics. We noticed a difference in our
attitudes almost right away. We still picked up trash, but that was
about it.
We walked right by all kinds of trail
washouts, unauthorized fire rings and shortcuts needing repair.
We’d paid for the upkeep of these trails. Let the rangers take care
of it. After all, Mickey picks up the litter in Disneyland,
right?
We realized that our willingness to spend
a fair amount of our precious backpacking time cleaning up and
repairing comes out of our sense of collective stewardship of, and
responsibility for, the lands we travel through. Turning it into a
commercial transaction by paying an access fee damaged that sense
of stewardship. We felt our sense of responsibility had been
purchased by the park, and taking care of the land thus became the
duty of its paid attendants.
At least for us,
bartering our labor to take care of the land instead of spending
our cash gives us a stronger sense of ownership and responsibility.
So now I don’t know about this user-fee business. It seems to me
that it might just serve to further spread the same kind of
poisonous thinking that has screwed up the planet. People will pay
the fee and come back whining about bad weather and trees across
the trail, sounding like tourists whining that they were bored by
Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride.
Instead of user fees, I
propose that backcountry maintenance be the joint responsibility of
rangers and volunteer trail crews, with their expenses paid by a
“public lands recovery tax” levied on the mining, timber and
railroad companies. After ripping the public off for billions, it’s
the least they can do.
Since outfitters also make
a profit from the use of public lands, they ought to pay something
for the privilege, too. That way, the commodity-based relationship
would be maintained by the people who get off on that kind of
thing, and the rest of us can work on being good
stewards.
David B.
Marshall
Shelton, Washington
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline A close-up look at user fees.
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