Sea kayakers and boaters who presumably seek pristine wilderness in Prince William Sound have left garbage and trampled vegetation, threatening its wilderness status.
"It's always amazing to me to be walking a beach out in the Sound and have these trashed out camps around and think, 'Why are they out there if they want to act like that?'" said David Janka, who has operated a research vessel from Cordova for decades.
Patagonia types called attention to the problem themselves at a forum in Anchorage last week, which was organized by the Sierra Club to provide public comment on an update of the Chugach National Forest management plan. I'm wearing a Patagonia pullover right now and I've loved the Sound since my childhood, so I fit the stereotype, but snowmachiners, heli-skiers, hunters and fishermen were there, too, mostly saying the same things about the need to protect the wilderness.
The forest plan update involves many important issues besides thoughtless campers. The public comment period ends Friday. The plan and link to submit comments are online.
Congress established an official Wilderness Study Area for western Prince William Sound in 1980. The U.S. Forest Service manages that 1.9-million-acre area as wilderness while studying whether it remains truly wilderness, deserving of an official designation it could recommend to Congress.
Since 2000, when the state punched a highway through the railroad tunnel to Whittier, boat traffic and recreation in the Sound have increased dramatically. Janka said he once could enter favorite coves to anchor with the knowledge that he would be alone. Now, he must time visits to certain areas to reduce the chance of encountering loud tour boats and groups of kayakers.
Speakers at the meeting and in interviews afterward talked about abandoned fire rings, half-burned garbage, toilet paper, muddy trails tramped in the muskeg, and even places where campers cut wood with chain saws and built furniture and ramshackle shelters.
No one brings a chain saw on a sea kayak, but a new kind of sea kayaker does contribute to the problem.
"Younger people traveling, but without much experience, and they have the money to get out there," said Kelly Bender, co-owner of Lazy Otter Charters and president of the Greater Whittier Chamber of Commerce. "And it used to be just a much smaller pool of people traveling."
Bender and other chamber members are worried about the Sound losing its wilderness feel, because the wilderness experience is their business. Some kayaking areas close to Whittier, like Blackstone Bay, have become crowded, especially on summer holidays, she said. There are quieter places to put clients farther out, but increased garbage and other impacts are widespread.
Perry Solmonson, owner of a kayaking business in Whittier since 1981, said at the meeting that some of his clients don't know how to behave.
"I changed my name to Sound Paddler, because our new customers can't remember five words, Prince William Sound Kayak Center," he said, to laughter. "It's sort of funny, but it's true. And they have a hard time understanding how to take care of the beach, or how to make sure to get their kayak high enough in the high tide. So we do need an educational aspect to this, and we need to hit it hard, so that the users are going to protect the area."
But Janka said it isn't only tourists or people who have bad manners who have changed the Sound. New technologies — including efficient outboard motors, cellphones and GPS — have allowed many more people to navigate waters once considered too remote for weekend outings from Anchorage.
Hunters have overharvested black bears around the Sound, diminishing bear viewing and prompting the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to issue an emergency order shortening the season last year. Forest Service researchers have documented areas heavily used for recreation that overlap with sensitive wildlife hot spots and need protection.
The new Forest Service plan update mostly follows a plan written in 2002, but with less detail and with relaxation of some rules. Personal-use timber cutting would be allowed in the study area.
Nature writer Marybeth Holleman said that's not appropriate.
"How can you maintain (a) wilderness characteristic if you're allowing these kinds of activities?" she said. "There are already some points of degradation that are going on right now, because the Forest Service is not enforcing their current regulations. So, to many of us, the plan looks like the Forest Service is just going to back down, rather than remedying the lack of enforcement that is going on now"
But Mary Rasmussen, who is leading the planning project for the Forest Service, said the timber cutting change was just to make the plan consistent with existing law.
Rasmussen said the agency is working on an update of its recommendation to Congress for how much of the study area to make permanent. In 2002, it recommended leaving out 500,000 acres of the area, including Knight Island, Wells Passage and the area around Columbia Glacier.
A recent Forest Service document evaluating those areas notes vessel traffic strips many islands in the Sound of their wilderness isolation, even if the land itself is undisturbed.
Paul Twardock, an Alaska Pacific University outdoor studies professor, has studied these issues for decades, making his own research inventory of campsites and other human impacts. He said it is important to keep them in perspective, because the disturbed area amounts to only 9,000 square meters.
"What we see at those sites is lots of impacts, and, as people have said, it seems to be getting worse," he said. "But that amount of land is miniscule when you look at the whole forest."
He said if the Forest Service relaxes its management because of that small area — or because of a few bad campers — it risks the whole wilderness.
"Someday, it might be 10 years, it might be 20 years, it might be 50 years from now, when Congress does make a (wilderness determination), maybe the wilderness study area won't be quite so wilderness," Twardock said. "So that's my main point. We need to watch out for the slippery slope of degradation."
Charles Wohlforth's column appears three times weekly. He also hosts radio programs on Alaska Public Media. On Thursday at 2 p.m., "Outdoor Explorer" will cover this topic, with audio recorded at the meeting last week. Email Charles at cwohlforth@alaskadispatch.com.
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