The Crested Butte News Serving the Gunnison Valley since 1999
Permits may be required for Conundrum Hot Springs visitors
By Olivia Lueckemeyer
Overcrowding in certain areas of the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness has prompted the Forest Service to initiate special action to regulate issues resulting from increased use.
At a Gunnison Board of County Commissioners meeting on March 8, Forest Service Aspen-Sopris District ranger Karen Schroyer and lead wilderness ranger Andrew Larson explained to commissioners the adverse affect of increased overnight visitation, specifically at the Conundrum Hot Springs and Four Pass loop areas of the forest.
Findings from the required registration system show that, at Conundrum alone, overnight visitation has increased by 285 percent in the past decade. As a result, wilderness and resource degradation has skyrocketed.
“We have a capacity of 20 designated dispersed group camp sites, but we are seeing upwards of 75 groups of people per night over the summer weekends spread out all over the basin,” Schroyer said. “Degradation is incredible; live trees are being cut down for firewood, huge amounts of human waste, and barren ground that is not going to come back for quite some time.”
To control the issue, the Forest Service conducted a capacity study, which indicated the need to move forward with an adaptive management system. Proposed strategies include employing more rangers to patrol problem areas, increasing public education and enforcing length of stay limits and limited entry permits.
“This allows us to respond to increased use and change our management based on certain triggers we reach once use reaches a certain point in an area,” Schroyer explained. “Then we can adapt and change our management.”
Last summer, 515 pounds of garbage were removed from the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness, 231 pounds of which came exclusively from Conundrum. Additional violations documented over the past year include 351 piles of human waste left out in the open that had to be buried by wilderness rangers, and 582 incidents of visitors not using bear canisters to store their food and garbage. The latter has prompted the Forest Service to issue a five-year emergency special order for the entire wilderness, requiring campers to store their food and trash appropriately or be subject to a hefty fine or jail time.
“Over the past two years we have had to close camping around Crater Lake because bears have become habituated,” Schroyer said. “Food is left out, people are hanging it poorly in trees, burying it or keeping it in their tents. It’s incredibly unsafe and very dangerous.”
Schroyer explained that at this point, the Forest Service has exhausted all options to deal with overuse, and that a permitting system is the next reasonable step. A National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) analysis is underway to solidify this action.
“We are hoping to put out a proposed action and go out for public scoping this summer,” Schroyer said. “Best case scenario, a decision is signed on this by next spring.”
At the same time as conducting the NEPA analysis, Schroyer and Larson will also be looking at how to implement their plan through the National Recreation System. They intend to eventually charge a fee for the permits in order to cover the cost of implementing the program.
“Charging a fee would allow us to hire rangers to be out there to monitor use, to do a better job of reacting to it and to see how use is being affected by this permitting system,” Schroyer said. “We have no idea what the fee would be yet, we will go through a process with a business plan to take a look at how much it will cost to keep up with this and how much money we need to maintain this in the long run.”
As of now, the current staff for the Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness includes four volunteer interns, one permanent seasonal ranger and one temporary seasonal ranger. For more than 320 acres of wilderness, Larson stressed, this is simply not sufficient to handle such an immense system.
As part of the adaptive management strategy, Schroyer and Larson also plan to zone different areas in the wilderness to determine how many permits will be issued for campsites. Zones will be based on whether an area is considered semi-primitive, primitive or pristine, and color-coded in green, yellow or red.
“We took a number of campsites and whether they are red, yellow or green, we allocated a number of those campsites to be available for the permit system,” Larson explained. “At its baseline, the Forest Service will issue 374 permits for campsites, but will only permit a fraction based on management goals for each zone.”
Schroyer said that while the Forest Service feels it is necessary to initiate this action, it does not wish to impede too heavily on wilderness use. Her intention is to start small before enforcing heavy-handed restrictions.
“We are hoping to be able to allow folks to camp in zones, with the freedom to pick their own site to spend the night as long as it’s forest-compliant,” Schroyer said. “We don’t want to go in guns blazing with heavy regulation and management. We want to have the minimum management possible to achieve our goals.”
