Mount Hood has proposed a new permit system for people wanting to scale its summit. Deschutes and Willamette National Forest launched a similar system last year. How do these systems work? Are they successful at reducing crowds? What happens if you’re caught without a permit? To answer these questions and more, we’re joined by Lisa Machnik, Recreation, Heritage, Partnerships and Land Staff Officer with the Deschutes National Forest.
Note: The following transcript was computer generated and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Mount Hood National Forest is proposing a new fee and permitting system for people who want to hike in the forest or scale the summit. This is just the latest effort in the Northwest to raise funds from recreation, to track the number of visitors, or in some cases to limit those visitors. Deschutes and Willamette National Forests launched similar systems about a year and a half ago, so we thought this would be a great time to check in to see how these systems are working. Lisa Machnik is the Recreation, Heritage, Partnerships and Lands Staff Officer with the Deschutes National Forest, and she joins me now. It’s good to have you on Think Out Loud.
Lisa Machnik: Thanks for having me.
Miller: As I noted, it’s been about a year and a half since officials from both the Deschutes and Willamette National Forests implemented permit systems. Although I should note that the planning for that preceded the pandemic. Can you explain what prompted this in the first place?
Machnik: Absolutely. That’s a great question. It did take us a number of years to work through the planning before we implemented the permit system. The whole goal of the permit system was for us to sustain the recreational use that we have in Central Cascades Wilderness areas, while ensuring the wilderness character of these areas is protected for future generations and so people can continue to have these wonderful experiences. We started talking about the levels of use in the wilderness areas in [inaudible] we had seen just a huge increase in visitation. For some context, we started collecting visitor data for numbers back in 1991. For about 20 years they were pretty stable – 40,000 to 60,000 people a year in the Three Sisters Wilderness, for example. Then we started to see that line just take off like a rocket. Within five years we had tripled the number of visitors, so looking at 140,000 people a year, just in the one Three Sisters Wilderness. One of the challenges was that that was really concentrated on peak weekends and really popular trailheads. So we recognized that, if we didn’t do something to better manage the use, that these areas were essentially gonna change entirely. The whole experience people were having – and were looking for – when they went into the wilderness was going to be something that we weren’t going to be able to recover. So we started a planning effort, back in 2017. Where we are now is with the permit system that you mentioned. It was implemented in 2021, and we’re in our second year of implementation.
Miller: What exactly were the problems with the increase in people?
Machnik: It wasn’t so much a problem that more people wanted to have a wilderness experience, which is great. We want to get people outside on public lands. Part of the problem was that we were seeing this steady growth, and we didn’t see an end in sight. With population growth occurring, with more and more people discovering opportunities to get outside…
Miller: And many, many more people living in Central Oregon, the fastest growing part of the state.
Machnik: Yes. And we don’t see that stopping anytime soon, too. I mean it’s a great place to live. We totally understand why people want to be here. And then they want to recreate outside. So that expected population growth, increasing visitor use, increasing local population use was really leading to increased resource damage. We were also starting to see some user conflicts. We recognized that this couldn’t just keep growing without having significant resource impacts and significant long-term resource impacts that we weren’t going to be able to recover from – from a land management perspective.
Miller: So the overarching goal was to reduce crowds. Has that worked?
Machnik: Yeah, I {?} probably {?} expand on that a little bit. It wasn’t just to reduce crowds, but it was to manage use in a way that allowed people to still access the wilderness but {?} was in a less concentrated fashion. Really helping people discover other areas to go and managing those peak weekends and those really popular destinations so we weren’t seeing a lot of use concentrated in a very small area in a short window of time. Because really what causes quite a bit of the natural resource problems is that really intense burst of use in our short summer and at very popular places. We wanted to recognize that we have a pretty wonderful wilderness resource. There are a lot of places for people to go, and we wanted to manage them more effectively.
Miller: We asked listeners about their experiences with permit systems, broadly in the Northwest in the last couple of years, because it’s not just Deschutes National Forest. We got a couple voicemails. Let’s listen to one now. This came in from Sarah in Portland.
Voicemail: I had to use the system to get a parking ticket to go up to the Ape Caves in Washington this summer. It worked well for me because I went online and did it about four months in advance. I liked that it was easier to park and get into the parking lot and actually find a spot to park. I was fortunate to be able to get the tickets because I was able to get online and had the forethought to be able to do it four months in advance. I just think it’s gonna help make it harder for folks who don’t have the ability to use the internet or have the ability to manage and figure out a schedule four months in advance.
Miller: We can talk about the internet later, but I want to focus for a second here on the question of timing. What options are there for people who don’t have the ability or don’t want to plan ahead?
Machnik: That is such a great question. We really wrestled with that as we were developing the system. So there’s a couple of parts here. One is availability for long term planning. If people have that flexibility and that option, we do have a release of some of the day use and the overnight use permits in advance. We also have a significant batch of permits for both day use and overnight use that are released much closer in. So overnight use, for example, there’s a subset of permits released in early April and then we go to a seven-day rolling system. So, a week out, a whole new batch of permit availability opens up for overnight trips. People can reserve those either online or over the phone. For day use, we have a much closer-in opportunity because we really heard from people after the first year that planning really far in advance for a day trip… It was popular for some people, but for a lot of people, they really wanted to have more of that short-term flexibility. So our day use permit… Again, this is just a subset of the trails here in Central Oregon. It’s 19 trailheads out of 79 wilderness trailheads and that doesn’t even account for all of the other trails and recreational opportunities. But for those 19 trailheads, you can get permits either 10 days before, when the first batch opens, or two days before your proposed trip, when the second batch opens. We’ve really tried to balance out, knowing that some people have a chance to make plans well in advance, especially if they’re traveling from a long distance to get here, but then there’s a lot of other people who want to be flexible and more spontaneous in getting outside.
Miller: What happened with no-shows last summer, the first summer when, in Willamette and Deschutes National Forests, this particular system was in place?
Machnik: That’s a great question. We did have an overall no-show number, for people who’d reserved permits, that was a little higher than we would like. I think there were a few different reasons for that. One is, it’s fairly easy to get a permit, and then it’s also easy for other things to come up. We asked people all along – and we continue to ask people – if you get a permit and you’re not going to use it, please return it. Please cancel it so that someone else can have that opportunity. Last year we also had some pretty heavy smoke for several weeks and some hot temperatures that really pushed people to make decisions other than maybe go hiking or climb up the side of a mountain or go backpacking for a couple of days. So the smoke had an impact. The fact that it is a process for people to cancel the permit – they have to log back in online or they have to make a phone call and it may not have felt worth it at the time when they had an opportunity to do something else. So one of the things we’ve done this year is we continue to message with people when they do get a permit: Please do cancel if you don’t want to use it, so someone else has the opportunity. We also increased our quotas across the board because we recognized that that was a piece we didn’t really think enough about, the number of people who might no-show. We should account for that in setting a number of permits available.
Miller: Oh, it’s like inviting more people to a wedding than you have room for because you know some are going to say no.
Machnik: Exactly. [laughs]
Miller: Although, ideally, they don’t all say yes.
Machnik: [laughs] It’s always a balancing act.
Miller: Yeah. I should remind folks, we’re talking right now with Lisa Machnik. We’re talking largely because the Mount Hood National Forest is in the process of putting forward new rules in terms of fees and permits there, and we thought this was a good time to talk about how permitting systems have been working for the last year and a half in the Deschutes National Forest. Let’s listen to another voicemail now. This is Denise from Woodburn.
Voicemail: I haven’t even tried to get a permit to go anywhere because I don’t have a cell phone, and until recently I didn’t even have an email address. So this program, of going to all these registrations and all of it being online and stuff, is really affecting those who can’t really afford very much or even have a chance to participate in the out-of-doors.
Miller: What options are there for people who don’t have internet access or easy access to the internet?
Machnik: The primary option, if you don’t have easy access to the internet, is to go through the phone number for recreation.gov, which is the platform that we’re required to use for federal reservations in these types of systems. That’s the simplest answer, is to make that phone call. If there’s access to internet through a library service or… We can’t offer permits through our Forest Service front desks, but we can certainly help people find places where they can go and get more information about where to get permits. In the Deschutes National Forest and the Willamette National Forest we’ve worked with a lot of our partners to talk about access to these opportunities, and we can work with local groups to make sure it’s clear and as simple as possible for people to get permits, where we’ve put permit systems in place. We also want to emphasize that not everything is under a permit system. They might be seasonal, which gives people opportunities in the shoulder season if that’s available for them, or many of the opportunities that don’t have a permit system in place. We do, as I mentioned, have the 19 day use trailheads {?} in the permit system as well as the overnight permit system. And there are 60 trailheads in these wilderness systems on the Deschutes and Willamette National Forest that are free, self-issue permits at trailhead. We’ve really tried to acknowledge that there is an impact for people for this subset of trails and in the system we’re talking about here. But there’s also a lot of opportunity to access wilderness, in particular, that’s outside the permit system and that gives people that flexibility and doesn’t require that they go online or make a phone call.
Miller: In the last couple of years when we had conversations about – especially early on in the pandemic – about getting out to the woods when that was one of the few options that was available to people, we heard a lot about reports of way more trash and way more human waste along or even on trails than folks had ever seen. Has the permitting system changed that? Has it improved the trash and human waste situation?
Machnik: I think it has, but it’s not just the permit system. When you get a permit, whether it’s self issued or through recreation.gov online or by phone… When you get a permit, you have easy access to all the rules and regulations as well as the leave no trace messaging and some good tips on how to manage your trash and how to manage human waste. One of the things we’ve seen the last couple of years is a huge effort from a lot of our amazing volunteers and partner groups and interns as well as staff to help people see what their impacts are when they go into these natural areas and how to make choices that limit that impact. We’ve seen a lot of educational efforts and a lot of cleanup efforts really make a dent in that initial bit of chaos that we were all handling as public land managers early in the pandemic.
Miller: What happens when somebody doesn’t have a permit and they are found in the woods. I mean, first of all, are rangers going around on trails in the middle of the wilderness asking people to see their permits?
Machnik: Good question. The most common way that you’ll have someone ask you for your permit is at one of our trailheads. We have an amazing cadre of volunteers as well as some interns and a handful of permanent staff and seasonal staff, who are at the trailheads greeting visitors, offering people just an opportunity to chat with a ranger or a volunteer about what they can expect in their experience, but they also do check permits. The majority of our wilderness rangers out in the field, if you run into them, they will probably ask you if you have a permit, and they’ll ask to see it. But most of their role is visitor contact as opposed to permit enforcement. Our field-going wilderness rangers do a lot of campsite cleanup. They break down illegal fire rings. They talk to visitors about the incredible experience that they’re having. They’re really a resource as opposed to an enforcement agent. But we do have those volunteers, interns, partners at trailheads, and when they’re asking people for permits, they also have a ton of information about different opportunities. So if people show up at a trailhead and they don’t have a permit because they didn’t know about it or they thought they’d see maybe if something was available on site that day, it’s a pretty great resource to have because we can redirect people to trailheads that have either the self-issue free permits that they can go to without any issues or another local trailhead that might be a similar experience to what they’re looking for. Whether it’s access to a lake or getting up to a ridge or a peak to get a view, there’s a lot of opportunity. It’s not just the trailheads that are part of the permit system. So our employees and our volunteers do a fantastic job of helping people see where the suite of opportunities is if they show up without a permit.
Miller: Lisa Machnik, thanks very much.
Machnik: Thanks for having me.
Miller: Lisa Machnik is a Recreation, Heritage, Partnerships and Lands Staff Officer with the Deschutes National Forest.
Contact “Think Out Loud®”
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show, or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook or Twitter, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.
