United States 

 Department of 

 Agriculture 



Forest Service 



Intermountain 

 Forest and Range 

 Experiment Station 



Research Paper 

 INT-277 



June 1981 



Redistributing 

 Wilderness Use 

 Til rough 

 Information 

 Supplied to 

 Visitors 



Robert C. Lucas 



INTRODUCTION 



Wilderness managers often want to redistribute 

 some recreational use to achieve management objec- 

 tives. Among ways managers can do this, one of the 

 most attractive is to provide visitors with information to 

 influence them to redistribute themselves. Little is 

 l^nown, however, about how to make information an 

 effective management tool for redistributing visitor use. 



The Use Distribution Problem 



Wilderness recreational use is typically distributed 

 unevenly. A few access points usually receive a majority 

 of use, and a small proportion of the trail system 

 commonly accounts for most visitor use (Hendee, 

 Stankey, and Lucas 1978). 



Concentrated recreational use can create adverse 

 impacts on wilderness values. Growing use accentu- 

 ates the problem. Resource impacts proliferate and 

 affect too much land in key areas. The areas receiving 

 highly concentrated use are often not the areas most 

 capable of supporting it. Relatively fragile ecosystems 

 may be heavily used while more durable places receive 

 little or no use. 



Crowding in popular areas also reduces opportuni- 

 ties for visitors to experience solitude. Visitors vary in 

 the value they place on solitude (or low density use) and 

 in their definitions of acceptable levels of contact with 

 other wilderness visitors. But often, many visitors go to 

 areas where concentrated use results in more contact 

 with other parties than desired. At the same time, some 

 visitors to lightly used portions of a wilderness may 

 meet fewer people than they would like, or at least far 

 fewer than they would accept. There is a mismatch, as 

 there is between use and ecosystem durability. 



Management to Redistribute Use 



Wilderness managers may have any of at least three 

 objectives for seeking to shift some use: 



1. They may wish to reduce the extremity of the 

 contrasts between lightly and heavily used areas. This 

 would require shifting some use away from the heavily 

 used areas to the less-used places. An even use distri- 

 bution is not a logical goal for a wilderness because, as 

 mentioned before, both the ecosystem's capability and 

 visitors' desired levels of contact with others vary. 

 However, managers and probably most other people 

 familiarwith useconditionsin many wildernesses would 

 agree that use is excessively concentrated. 



2. fvlanagers may want to increase or decrease use 

 of specific locations within a wilderness to better match 

 use to environmental capability. This would be particu- 

 larly appropriate where information is available on the 

 relative durability or fragility of different sections. It 

 could also be related to visitor experiences, based on 

 the availability of screened campsites, for example, orto 

 provision of a range of likely encounter levels. 



3. Managers may wish to redistribute different types 

 of visitors so that those who prefer lower levels of 

 encounters generally visit lightly used areas offering 

 such opportunities, and those who prefer higher levels 

 of contact go to areas where such experiences are 

 commonly available. 



Whatever the objectives, managers have a range of 

 possible management actions for redistributing use. 

 Management actions are of two main types, direct and 

 indirect (Hendee, Stankey, and Lucas 1978). Direct 

 regulation includes rationing use, eitherforan area as a 

 whole, for each access point, or by campsites. These are 

 powerful tools that could shift use patterns substan- 

 tially. However, they also are heavy-handed, authori- 



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