When Boulder ultra-running legend Scott Jurek clambered to the top of Maine’s Mount Katahdin — a spectacular, record-setting 46 days, 8 hours, 7 minutes after starting the 2,180-mile traverse of the Appalachian Trail — rangers from Baxter State Park were prepared.
But they were not celebrating. They were writing citations.
The champagne that spilled: littering. Sipping that champagne: alcohol violation. More than 12 people hiking together: another rule violation. Also, his film crew was cited for violating the rules of their permit by recording video on the summit.
At first blush, the tickets issued June 12 seem a mean-spirited response to Jurek’s impressive feat of endurance.
But the issue goes much deeper, reflecting a growing unease with how new-school recreation — like ultra-running, BASE jumping, peak-bagging, group clinics and stand-up paddling — fits inside traditional perspectives on how Americans use their protected wildlands.
Modern-day adventurers are not always the lonely, Thoreau-inspired hiker ambling through the woods — a reflective approach that for decades has been promoted as the only way to truly appreciate unspoiled lands. Yes, the new adventurers, like their predecessors, briefly are escaping their hectic, industrial lives.
But they are using new tools, pursuing adrenaline surges and often trumpeting their play in online photos and videos.
Jensen Bissell is the director of the private-trust- funded Baxter State Park, which has a reputation for fiercely protecting the quiet wilderness experience. He turned to Facebook to explain his reasoning for citing Jurek,
arguing the ultra-runner’s sponsors — displayed on his headband and amply logoed support van — should not be angling for commercial gain inside Maine’s largest parcel of wilderness.
Detractors come out
“Corporate events,” he wrote, “have no place in the park and are incongruous with the park’s mission of resource protection, the appreciation of nature and the respect of the experience of others in the park.”
The post spurred more than 800 comments from detractors.
Bissell’s response was in stark contrast to that of Yosemite National Park managers, who saw opportunity when Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson finished their record-setting climb of the Dawn Wall on El Capitan in January
.
When the rock-climbing legends returned to the valley below El Capitan, a park-service-provided lectern stood ready before a phalanx of news cameras eager to catch the pair’s thoughts after their 19-day ascent.
“Forging a connection”
“So much of what we are doing is forging a connection between the parks and visitors so people understand why parks are here and people appreciate the environment we try to create,” Yosemite assistant superintendent Scott Gediman said.
The two parks’ reactions to internationally acknowledged athletic feats reveal divergent approaches to stewardship of public lands and highlight the increasing struggle for cash-strapped land managers dealing with inspiring, yet unpredictable, athleticism inside the country’s preserved wildlands.
“Most people are not going to do those things, but the value is that they are inspiring,” said Christian Beckwith, whose annual SHIFT Festival in Jackson, Wyo., gathers outdoor leaders to consider conservation alongside adventure and culture. “You might not be able to run the Appalachian Trail in 46 days. But you still might be able to go out for a run this evening and dig a little deeper because you are so fired up. The challenge is balancing that inspiration with the impact and long-term sustainability of our natural resources.”
When regulations for public lands were first etched into law decades ago, the rule-writers never suspected GoPro-strapped athletes would be leaping from quiet peaks with wingsuits or exploring remote backcountry on lightweight personal rafts.
Today’s pervasive Zeitgeist of adventure is, in many ways, baffling to bureaucrats in charge of protecting public lands and struggling with dwindling budgets eviscerated by wildfire costs.
Land managers now are joining with recreation industry players to map a future that includes younger, largely urban consumers who don’t seem particularly interested in quiet time in the woods.
Outdoor industry leaders
“They are not going to take their Osprey backpack and throw themselves in the wilderness for three months, like my dad did. They want to go in groups,” said Jessica Wahl, a former Interior Department administrator who now works as a recreation policy manager at the Outdoor Industry Association in Boulder.
Last year, Wahl helped gather a group of about 40 outdoor industry leaders — from the Boy Scouts and the YMCA to metro outdoor nonprofits and advocacy groups and companies such as REI and Outdoor Research — to push a unified agenda into federal land management offices.
The Outdoor Access Working Group is teaming with the
Federal Interagency Council on Outdoor Recreation to make public lands and outdoor recreation more relevant for future generations. Its first goal is to ease the complicated group-permitting process perceived as a barrier to getting urban kids onto Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service lands.
Rife with controversy
The government’s partnership with business is rife with controversy. Park supporters cried foul this past spring when the Park Service rescinded some of its alcohol rules to accommodate a $2.5 million marketing deal with Budweiser.
These changing attitudes toward nature were foreseen by the sage Roderick Nash, who in his influential 1967 book, ” Wilderness and the American Mind,” predicted that soon we would be “loving wilderness to death.”
“That’s been happening for years. We’ve worked so hard to keep big business and big industry out and only now are we realizing, in this digital age, that we all are big business and big industry, but writing ourselves out of the equation is counterintuitive,” said Boulder’s philosophical raconteur and pro climber Timmy O’Neill, who helped pace Jurek on the Appalachian Trail.
Effort is losing ground
Wild Wilderness director Scott Silver realizes that his group’s decades-long fight to promote unfettered recreation filled with nature and solitude is losing ground.
“The arrogance of today’s ‘wrecreationalists’ is the issue here,” Silver said, a reference to the wreckage that some leave behind.
This whole push to make the outdoors relevant to more people comes from industries eager to sell more recreation products and services, Silver said, noting that Interior Secretary Sally Jewell was REI’s CEO not long ago.
“This is all an industry strategy to increase profitability,” Silver said. “A person like Bissell makes a good decision, and he is lambasted.
“That proves to me that the recreation industry has become so much more powerful than anyone ever predicted and the threat to wildness posed by the recreation industry has never been greater.”
Jason Blevins: 303-954-1374, jblevins@denverpost.com or twitter.com/jasonblevins
