Leave-A-Trace

Purcell Trench manufacturing company

Leave-A-Trace page (editorial)

I picked up the United States Forest Service map. The admonition to Leave-No-Trace (LNT) was on the first fold. The Service encourages all visitors to camp 200 feet from lakes or streams. “For cooking and warmth, camp stoves are preferable...” I was surprised they did not ask me to take only pictures, leave only footprints and kill only time. Most LNT preachers manage to weave the revisionist motto into the sermon somewhere.

Based on the amount of verbiage dedicated to the Leave-No-Trace campaign, one would assume campers and hikers were the number one problem threatening our national forests and other public lands. Anyone who has spent time tramping federal forest or rangeland over the past few decades might argue that wholesale clearcutting and other abusive logging; cattle using lakes, streams and rivers as toilets; or spider webs of degrading roads flushing silt into coldwater fisheries might be better candidates for a vigorous environmental campaign.

Even motorized recreationists are asked to Tread Lightly, rather than Leave-No-Trace.

I had a booth at an outdoor show. A small army of BLM and Forest Service employees spent a day and a half establishing an extensive information display nearby. The primary topic: campfire. The agencies had display after display encouraging the use of stoves, fire pans, fire blankets, requests to carry out ash, replant sod, disperse fire rings and so on. Later, I was visiting the adjacent National Forest. A group of campers with trucks and trailers were camping less than twenty feet from a beautiful river. Adults were sitting around a large fire while their children ran around on motorcycles in a marshy area. A couple of forest service trucks passed with the occupants waving cheerfully to the campers.

After the long weekend, I visited another informal camp area on the same river and found dirty diapers, old tires, clothing, a double bed and mattress, sofa, carpet, broken toys. I filled the back of a pickup truck twice and made trips to the nearest landfill. Where was the army of forest service employees?

I took a canoe trip from the Canadian Rocky Mountains to Hudson Bay and camped at several traditional Indian campsites. None of them were 200 feet from a lake or river. Indians have been camping directly on the shores of lakes and rivers for thousands of years. Somehow, the continent survived until white folks got here.

I was hiking in the beautiful granite high country of California, stopped near an exquisite lake and noticed that the large flat stone in front of me had been a camping spot for hikers the night before. They had done a consummate job of Leaving-No-Trace. I found cut fir boughs back in the brush. The boughs were used to sweep the entire area. On close inspection, it was clear significant damage had been inflicted on the lichens living on the large flat stone employed to minimize the appearance of use.

Published over a half century ago, A Sand County Almanac asked Americans to adopt a national conservation ethic. Sadly, we are further away from that goal today than ever before.

Has the Leave-No-Trace campaign reduced both the environmental and aesthetic impacts of backcountry campers? Yes, but the campaign has been a mixed bag. Leave-No-Trace is a fundamentally flawed concept in three ways: First, it is impossible. The campaign should be renamed the Leave-A-Trace campaign. The only way to Leave-No-Trace is to stay home. Second, it is largely a pseudo environmental campaign, which detracts from the real need to protect the environment on all fronts. And third, LNT extremism erodes the real camping and wilderness experience.

Research makes it clear all recreation changes the environment. Leaving-No-Trace isn’t a realistic goal. In many instances, campers are asked to degrade their experience to pursue the impossible goal of Leaving-No-Trace.

Several years ago, I read an article by a hiker encouraging backpackers to take refuge in a tent in the evening and read a book rather than sit around an environmentally destructive campfire. Let’s face it, that kind of advice is an invitation to stay home. Your choice, relax in the comfort of your EZlounger with an incandescent bulb illuminating your page or huddle up in a tent reading by flashlight or miniature lantern.

My favorite anti-campfire article was by a river runner who insisted campfires are always evil and out of place. He related how he “had to” get down on his hands and knees with tweezers and pick up bits of charcoal from his camping beach. The poor city slicker apparently didn’t realize fire is a natural part of the environment he was in and every beach along the river does have and has had charcoal in it centuries before a white person ever set foot in the watershed.

In their 1979 text, Backwoods Ethics, Laura and Guy Waterman wrote, “In making the transition to the compact, portable gas stove, we’ve found we don’t really miss that old campfire - in fact, we wouldn’t want one now. We prefer to get along with no smoke in our eyes, no soot on our pots, no scouring the forest for dead wood, no set-up and break-down time, no nighttime beacon of blazing light that makes the stars hard to see and scares off animal life.”

It is true that modern gadgets can minimize camping chores. Of course, one can minimize camping chores completely by staying home or “camping” at a resort or in an RV - exactly what outdoor recreation data tells us more and more Americans are doing.

Throughout most of North America, periodic wildfire is natural. In fact, vigorous fire suppression has substantially altered the environment. There is more dead and down material in forest environments today than ever before. The buildup of fuels constitutes a major threat to watersheds, fish and wildlife.

Wilderness

The Wilderness Act identifies three essential criteria for formal Wilderness classification: size, substantial naturalness (substantial, not pristine naturalness) and the ability of the land to provide solitude and, or, primitive and unconfined recreation. When land management agencies, special interest groups, outdoor gear promoters, writers and armchair pundits tell you to never go into the wilderness alone and take modern gear (such as stoves) to facilitate Leaving-No-Trace, they are encouraging you to violate the spirit of the Wilderness Act.

Primitive recreation isn’t about leaving only footprints, taking only pictures and killing only time. Primitive recreation is precisely about catching a wild trout and frying it over an open campfire, cooking a grouse on a spit, spending your evening around a magical and spiritual campfire like thousands of generations of wilderness users before you. Primitive recreation is not about heating a little water over a mechanical stove and pouring it into a foil bag of instant processed goop, then heading off to your plastic tent to huddle up with a book illuminated by your lantern.

The ability to build a campfire and cook real food over it is the definition of real camping and the essence of woodcraft.

For thousands of generations, humans were hunters and gathers, and campfire builders. Hostility toward these elemental human characteristics makes no more sense than hostility toward language and our tool using opposable thumbs.

Throughout much of the west, camping opportunities are limited. It is a good idea to get away from water and hunt up your own isolated spot off the beaten track, then Leave-A-Trace rather than a mess. However, in many canyons and steep mountainous country, the only option is a flat near a river, stream or lake. You are not going to destroy the environment by putting your sleeping bag on the ground. Don’t feel guilty. Did you feel guilty driving to the trailhead? Virtually every facet of your life involves greater environmental impact than camping near a river or lake.

There is a great deal of good camping advice from the Leave-No-Trace organization. Familiarize yourself with it and use as appropriate. The popularity of Leave-No-Trace, though, is largely related to the emphasis placed on aesthetics rather than real environmental impacts. You don’t have to have qualifications to chime in on aesthetics, so people with no environmental education or training have perpetrated and promoted mythology. At the extreme, Leave-No-Trace posits a world where man and nature never meet. It is anti hunting and fishing and discourages even walking or sleeping on the natural earth. To LNT devotes, picking a few huckleberries for pancakes cooked over a campfire is a sin. Because Leave-No-Trace has largely been an educational campaign, the normative order of camping has changed. Land users are conflicted. Follow the Leave-No-Trace motto or fry that trout, pick that berry, build a campfire? Of course, the campaign creates conflicts between users. Shooting an elk is sinful to many LNT aficionados, so people who should be working together to conserve natural resources fight.

One of the great failures of the Leave-No-Trace campaign is the lack of uniform application. While some backcountry advocates practically treat LNT as a religion, many recreationists totally ignore responsible land use behavior. Except in Wilderness, I see more recreation related land abuse than ever before. Land management agencies do not seem willing to halt the abuse.

Frankly, I sympathize with users. You visit a half dozen campgrounds on a national forest and they are all immediately adjacent to a lake, stream or river and then the agency tells you not to camp within 200 feet of water. Who would take that kind of educational advice seriously? You note the forest road you are driving along was constructed by bulldozing thousands of tons of fill into the adjacent river or stream. If government doesn’t respect watershed conservation, how can they expect it of the public.

The gulf between the LNT philosophy the land management agencies espouse and the real behavior they tolerate or actively promote is so great there is no credibility. Government, especially natural resource management agencies, must lead by example.

We live in a world full of real environmental problems. I wish even a few of them had as much time, money and interest spent on them as the Leave-No-Trace program.

Americans burn more petrol per capita today than our parents and grandparents, not less. We consume more energy per capita than our parents and grandparents, not less. We consume more minerals and other raw materials than our parents and grandparents, not less. We produce more waste than previous generations. There is more sprawl today than thirty years ago. The politicians we vote for have worse environmental voting records than the politicians our parents and grandparents supported. Americans want bigger and more cars, straighter highways for faster speeds, bigger homes; we promote growth and development in every nook and cranny of the nation. The American lifestyle is the antithesis of the Leave-No-Trace concept. With the exception of a few backpackers, the LNT program is a failure. LNT is a pseudo environmental campaign that sucks up money and time. It allows some to feel self righteous while doing little to solve real environmental problems.

What we need today is the same thing we needed in 1949. It makes no sense to have a mostly ignored LNT program for campers, a largely ignored Tread Lightly campaign for motorized recreationists and a tread heavily national ethos most people have taken to heart.

Don Tryon, September 2007

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