How Wilderness Visitors Choose Entry Points and Campsites

The location choices made by visitors have important implications for wilderness management. The cumulative effect of visitors’ choices produces recreational use distributions, and many studies show that these are typically very uneven. A small proportion of access points accounts for most use, and use of trails or water routes is very uneven. Some campsites are heavily used while others are rarely camped on (Hendee and others 1978, chapter 13; Lucas 1980; Roggenbuck and Lucas 1987; Stankey and others 1976). This is important because use distributions strongly affect the two most critical wilderness qualitiesnatural ecosystems and special visitor experiences. Recreational use distributions often do not match variation in the ability of areas to support use (Cole 1987). Mismatches between places chosen for camping in wilderness and site durability are thought by many managers to be particularly serious, with fragile sites sometimes receiving use they are poorly suited for. In addition, campsite location choices can affect the sense of isolation and solitude of wilderness visitors, and seclusion at campsites is the most important aspect of solitude for most visitors (Stankey 1973). Highly uneven use of trailheads contributes to campsite solitude or congestion, and more directly, to numbers and types of encounters between parties and the resulting feelings of solitude. In a broader sense, location choices by visitors, both good and bad choices, strongly influence the quality of their experiences (McCool and others 1985). As a result of the impacts of visitor distributions on resources and visitor experiences, wilderness managers often want to modify the location of recreational use. This is a common objective of both education programs and recreation regulations. Education and information have been used to try to shift visitors’ entry point selections with varying success (Canon and others 1979; Krumpe and Brown 1982; Lime and Lucas 1977; Lucas 1981). Education and information have also been used in one wilderness in North Carolina to influence visitors’ choices of camping areas, with some success (Roggenbuck and Berrier 1981). Other attempts have been made to provide general guidelines to help visitors choose campsites that will reduce their impacts (Cole and Benedict 1983; and various “minimum-impact” education materials), but it is not known how much this has been tried or with what success. Regulations are also commonly used both to control the amount of use at trailheads and areas they serve through use rationing and to prohibit camping in certain types of places, most often within an established distance of lakes and sometimes streams and trails as well (Washburne and Cole 1983). Specific areas also are closed to all camping in some areas-Glacier and Cold Lakes in the Mission Mountains Wilderness in Montana and all lake basins in the Pecos Wilderness in New Mexico, for example. Some areas, particularly a number of National Parks, require visitors to choose each campsite they will use each night before they begin their trip and then stick to this fixed itinerary-a policy that is unpopular with National Forest wilderness visitors (Lucas 1985a), but how National Park visitors view fixed itineraries is not known. Most of these attempts to alter wilderness recreational use patterns suffer from a lack of knowledge of the behavior they seek to influence or control. This is reflected in the poor success of many management efforts to redistribute visitor use. Results of education information programs have varied from success-tripling the number of visitors choosing lightly used trails in Yellowstone National Park (Krumpe and Brown 1982) to little or no effect (Canon and others 1979; Schomaker 1975). Regulations also vary widely in effectiveness and often fall short of expectations. For example, about half of the campers in the Eagle Cap Wilderness in Oregon were reported to be violating prohibitions on camping close to lakes (Lucas 1983). Most campers in Glacier National Park, which requires fmed itineraries, are said by managers to be in the wrong campsite after 5 or 6 days. Managers probably could more effectively influence or modify use distributions if they had better answers to questions such as: How do visitors make location choices? who makes decisions? when do they decide? what factors do they consider? and which are most important to them? Managers could better decide between education and regulation if they understood what sort of locationdecision process they were dealing with. Managers using educational techniques could better tailor messages and their delivery to visitors with an improved understanding of how different types of visitors go about choosing places to visit and camp.