ALPINE LAKES WILDERNESS - When Congress decided to preserve some of the nation's most spectacular forests 33 years ago, it wrote a law that described them as wild, primitive places where "the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man."
A 45-minute drive east of Seattle, on a narrow, dirt-and-rock trail snaking up to a blue-green mountain lake, a whole lot of trammeling is going on.
Groups of hikers, some with day packs and some loaded for overnight trips, jostle past one another along the well-worn path to Snow Lake. At tight points, people wait patiently for others to pass. Three miles up, at the top, the heather hugging the lake shore is trampled and most of the perimeter is roped off, with government signs reading "Closed For Restoration."
Last weekend, a hiker going up the most popular trail in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness encountered people coming down at a rate of one group per minute. By the government's own standards, a hiker seeking a true "wilderness" experience is not supposed to encounter another human more than seven times a day. On this hike, that standard was exceeded every 10 minutes.
What's happening in the Northwest's most beloved wilderness areas - what one Forest Service official dubbed "the people problem" - has the government trying to recapture an intangible but much-sought state of being in the woods: solitude.
At Alpine Lakes, in the Indian Heaven, Mount Adams and Goat Rocks Wildernesses in southwestern Washington, and at Mount Hood in Oregon, the Forest Service is expected to begin limiting the number of day hikers and overnight backpackers as early as next spring.
The restrictions are novel because they are not aimed solely at protecting the natural environment from overuse, government officials say. The proposed rules seek to preserve between humankind and what Congress called the last "primeval" places a certain psychic relationship, namely, people's desire to forge into the deepest, uncharted woods and leave everything and everyone behind, to "cast off the chains of organized society to freely seek the One that remains," as hiking-guide author Harvey Manning put it.
"Solitude is a crucial wilderness value, and it's clearly in our mandate to try to protect and preserve it," said Susan Sater, the Forest Service's wilderness manager for Washington and Oregon.
"It's like trying to define what you've lost when you're backpacking and you can see another tent from your campsite, or when you're walking up a mountain and there's somebody in front and somebody behind and all you can do is follow along.
"It's a feeling that people have. How to make rules to apply that in real life is extremely difficult and controversial."
A movement is growing among some hikers to oppose the government's plan. In the Seattle area, it's being led by Ira Spring, president of the Washington Trails Association and co-author with Manning of the popular "100 Hikes" series of guidebooks.
Last month, Spring helped persuade Sen. Slade Gorton to write a measure into the Senate Interior Appropriations bill opposing the Forest Service's "attempt to control the concept of solitude in wilderness."
The amendment chastised the agency for "developing regulations that attempt to bring wilderness into compliance with social standards, which are subjective, and which artificially set numbers of allowable encounters per day between human beings."
At stake is not just whether hikers can continue to have unlimited use of their favorite trails, Spring said. Isolating wilderness from the people will, over time, weaken support for preserving it, he says.
"People need to use wilderness to appreciate it," he said. "How do you regulate solitude any other way than by locking people out? It's a strange interpretation of the Wilderness Act."
Wilderness, sturdy or fragile?
The debate about the future of the region's wilderness areas comes at a time when more people than ever are entering the woods and the Forest Service is increasingly under fire for trying to enforce what the Wilderness Act refers to somewhat nebulously as "wilderness values."
Last winter, anti-regulatory sentiment boiled over in Congress when auto-racing legend Bobby Unser survived two nights in a blizzard in the South San Juan Wilderness in New Mexico, but was cited and fined because he had been driving a snowmobile (motors are not permitted in wilderness areas).
Lawmakers rallied to his cause, and Unser and hunting activist Ted Nugent made news when they told a congressional committee that Forest Service officials had become "Nazis" standing between man and his right to live off the land.
While rarely expressed so dramatically, such strong sentiments about the woods are widely held in the Northwest.
When wilderness was first designated, it was intended to be primitive with few or no trails. Hikers and campers were expected to travel cross-country like mavericks. Neither the hikers nor the areas were viewed as delicate; it was common then to cut pine boughs for the night's bed and build fires or camp wherever one pleased, practices now frowned upon for damaging the landscape.
Today, wilderness areas have many more regulations, including a ban on dogs in some sections and campfires in others. But the areas still are viewed as places where people can free themselves, however briefly, from some of the confining rules of government. Hikers are not required to stay on trails, for instance, meaning the hardy sort can find all the solitude they want simply by bushwhacking away from the popular routes with a topographic map and a compass, some local hikers contend.
"If you want it enough, it's out there," Spring said. "You can't go to Snow Lake, but that's only a tiny, tiny part of the total wilderness area. It would be a shame to shut down the wilderness just because Snow Lake and the other easy-access places are crowded."
"Elitist and selfish"
Barring people from hiking as a way for the government to protect natural resources from damage may be OK, but doing it to impose a social standard is "elitist and selfish," according to David Knibb of the Alpine Lakes Protection Society, the group that fought to include the area in the wilderness system.
The proposed restrictions would curtail use of parts of the Alpine Lakes by an average of 60 percent and some other wilderness areas by as much as 50 percent. At the most heavily used trail, the one to Snow Lake, day hikers would be limited to 42 and overnighters to 27. Today, as many as 500 hikers use the trail on a weekend day in August.
Despite the backlash against regulation among some local hikers, there is evidence that the broader public is feeling increasingly puritanical about how the woods should be used. Other hikers may even support limits on use as a way of enforcing a concept like solitude, some social research shows.
1965 survey vs. today
Forest Service officials recently unearthed a 1965 survey of wilderness visitors, and decided to ask present-day visitors the same questions to see what has changed. The study, conducted at the Eagle Cap Wilderness Area in northeastern Oregon, suggests a dramatic shift in public attitudes about wild areas.
In 1965, only 23 percent agreed that music radios should be barred from the wilderness. Today, 67 percent say radios are taboo. In 1965, 53 percent felt it was OK to cut brush or limbs to make a bed or a campfire. Today, only 17 percent agree that cutting wood is OK.
And in 1965, 29 percent agreed that use of wilderness should be restricted. Double that number - 56 percent - say limits on people are needed today.
The rigid attitudes today likely are linked to a sense that wilderness is becoming clogged and often is used inappropriately, not because people feel the physical resources are being destroyed, researchers say.
Black tie and tablecloths
In the River of No Return Wilderness in central Idaho, for instance, raft outfitters frequently are praised for their "no-impact" camping. But when one company began serving meals to wilderness customers on a moored dinner raft featuring tiki torches, linen table cloths and waiters in black tie, some visitors began questioning whether the wilderness experience had been compromised.
More than ever, hikers complain about intrusions on the wilderness experience, such as the growing use of cellular phones, noise from planes or helicopters and even fellow hikers who bring toys such as Frisbees, Forest Service officials say.
"People have become extraordinarily protective of the notion of wilderness, and by that I mean the social values of isolation and solitude and simplicity that come with being in the back country," said Alan Watson, a psychologist who studies human attitudes about nature for the Aldo Leopold Wilderness Research Institute, an arm of the federal Department of the Interior.
"There is a great deal of worry that the modern world is taking a bit of the wildness out of the woods," he said.
"Magic in a rainbow"
Should Gorton's amendment be approved by Congress this fall, it would signal that the Forest Service should stop considering these subjective, social values when managing the woods and instead focus on the "on-the-ground impacts" of human use, such as erosion, trampled vegetation and human waste.
It's not clear yet which approach could restrict overall use more, Forest Service officials say.
Judging by a vigorous debate that has been taking place in the pages of Signpost for Northwest Trails magazine, there is little consensus among hikers about the Forest Service's proposed rules. In the last year, various letter writers have compared solitude to "the magic in a rainbow," implied that trail-bound hikers are wimps and accused Spring and Manning of opposing the restrictions solely because they want to sell more hiking guides.
The controversy is nothing compared with what may happen if the government begins stopping people at the trail head, Forest Service officials admit.
"People express a support for solitude, but nobody really knows how much the public is willing to sacrifice to get it," said Sater of the Forest Service. "When we do this, it won't be elegant. But we feel it wouldn't be responsible stewardship to just keep saying that everything's OK in the wilderness."
Danny Westneat's phone-message number is 202-662-7455. His e-mail address is: dwes-new@seatimes.com
by Danny Westneat
Seattle Times Washington bureau