I don’t know about you but my patience has worn thin.
I like the outdoors, but I am not an outdoorsman. As I say on my social media bios, I am an avid indoorsman known for intractable inertia disguised as leisure. In other words, a couch potato.
Okay. I work out some.
So I am a couch zucchini.
Last Saturday, I dropped a group of hikers off at the trailhead for one of Washington’s most pristine wilderness hikes - Enchantment Lakes. The severely potholed gravel road leading up to the trailhead was snarled with traffic.
Okay. It was slow going - and - there was traffic.
When we arrived at the parking lot, it was predictably overflowing. Vehicles were parked beside the road which made parts of the Forest Service road one lane. A masked sweating ranger directed traffic, answered inane queries and suggested where people could park.
It reminded me of going to Dave Matthews at the Gorge back before the venue owners had their shit together and when going to the Gorge was the music event of the summer. The morass of cars and people at the trailhead was painful to witness firsthand.
When I received my Recreation degree - okay, Leisure Studies, but when I started the process it was titled Recreation and Parks - it was the late ‘70s and we were desirous of people to catch the outdoor bug. The outdoors was being underutilized. Many of us saw the outdoors as the great palliative to the ills of urban density.
You could ‘find yourself’ outdoors. Reinvent yourself. Become a new you.
As I looked over the hundreds of hikers milling about at the trailhead this past weekend, I see our goal has been achieved. The great outdoors is no longer underutilized.
Social media has seen to that. And to think so many of us worried about the advent and impact of Outside magazine and the subsequent articles accompanied with glossy photos of some of the most remote and wondrous places on earth.
I read the local ranger station that administers permits for overnight hiking in the Enchantment Lakes Wilderness corridor had something like 1,000 applications submitted in 2010. By 2016, they were deluged with 21,000 requests for permits. Of course, that perfectly mirrors the rise of social media. I know the population has grown but it has not grown that much in 6 years.
I can only imagine the number of permit requests for 2020.
Everyone wants a picture of themselves in the foreground of the mystically beautiful chain of lakes you encounter on this strenuous hike. I don’t know how many overnight permits are issued daily or yearly. The besieged ranger on the road to the trailhead parking told me that he figured 5% of the groups and cars were those camping multiple nights in the Enchantments.
Which means. . . there was a ‘shit-ton’ of hikers going for a walk in the woods with no hope of reaching any of the lakes. Clearly, there were going to be some disappointed social media feeds. Because both trails leading to the lakes present barriers to entry.
The Snow Lakes trail is a long, dull, gradual uphill slog that provides no views. I’ve hiked it several times for no apparent reason except it has easy access.
The Colchuck/Asgard Pass trail - which I have not hiked - gains a significant amount of elevation in a shorter distance.
Neither trail is conducive to your casual social media day hiker.
Now, I have written before about the benefits of being outdoors and I am a firm advocate of getting out and recreating, but some places need protecting through limited access. I know the local ranger station is contemplating the implementation of permits for day hikers in this particular wilderness area. On days like the past weekend it is desperately warranted.
Because, you see, what happens when you have hordes of users is trash. Whether it is incidental, neglectful or purposeful.
Tiny example of trash picked up along the trail to Enchantment Lakes this past Labor Day Weekend.
I don’t even want to contemplate the first few miles on either of these two trails and what is going on twenty yards off the trail as it applies to human sanitation.
I picture it like the streets of London circa 1560.
Shitting in the woods can be a blissful experience. But my guess is social media day hikers will not be well versed in the etiquette. My guess is they will leave behind more than their fecal matter. It’s disheartening.
My hard and fast rule is that if you are going to poop in the great outdoors you need to learn not to use toilet paper, or so-called disposable wipes. You need to learn what natural items are safe to use. You most definitely need to be able to distinguish poison oak from every other leaved plant in the forest.
Okay. I’ve gone scatological. I’ve lost the thread.
I started by saying my patience has worn thin. The soccer stadium worth of yuppie hikers were just the last straw.
Other things in no particular order:
The knucklehead in the Oval Office’s continued abuse of power and abuse of the rule of law without consequence. . . so far.
Third party knuckleheads who still cling to some kind of ‘purity test’ for candidates while a nascent dictatorship grows.
Knuckleheads who can’t protest injustice without inciting violence and those who can’t contest them without inciting violence and the goddamn police who are incapable of being non-partisan.
Those who can’t engage online civilly. This morning I was tempted to congratulate a group of posters on our local FaceCrack page for managing to post a dozen comments without things getting ugly. Seriously. I wanted to post, “I want to commend all of you for keeping all of your comments civil. Good work.”
Knuckleheads who instigate fires because they are too knuckleheaded to realize that heat, dryness, wind and loads of tinder are a bad combination for pyrotechnics and fireworks. I am still of the belief that in an era of the hottest years in living memory and scientific evidence that the climate is changing we need to ban “things that cause or contribute to fire.”
Kind of a no brainer.