(from HCN blogs) ‘Wilderness limited’ —Heather Hansen

AN EXCERPT:   The study I was reading, done by the Rocky Mountain Research Station, was not, however, examining crowd control of manic organic food caches, but of wilderness areas. It looked at the questions: What will happen as population grows and management of wilderness becomes increasingly critical? Will we accept a loss of solitude in once soothing places, or will we apply limits to wilderness use? The results were not what I expected…

While most people surveyed perceived adverse change and had a “widespread sense that these places seem less like wilderness than they did in the past,” “Most visitors do not consider changing conditions to be very problematic, probably because their coping mechanisms are successful.” Therefore, support for management actions that restrict access, for the explicit purpose of improving the visitor experience (versus mitigating biophysical impacts), was minimal.

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Wilderness limited