There are curious and interesting nuggets in the posts here and in the references/links given above. One is in the idea that numbers of people must be kept to some very low number in order to maintain wilderness.
I think most of this idea is rooted in the phrase of the Wilderness Act of 1964, "
has outstanding opportunities for solitude". I would like to point out that "
outstanding opportunities" by no means requires wilderness managers to ensure most people will experience solitude most of the time while hiking on a man-made trail.
What I read in that phrase is this: The wilderness should have ample space where people can go to find solitude. There is a big difference between hiking on a trail
IN solitude, and hiking into a wilderness area and, if one so chooses, being able to wander off and be completely alone.
I'd like to point out that, even on the trail to Half Dome, I could take anyone able to walk off trail, and show them complete and utter solitude, in about ten minutes. And those "outstanding opportunities for solitude" existed before any quotas were applied to Half Dome. I really hate to use the Half Dome trail as the example, though, because it is such an exception to nearly all the other trails in the Sierra, where visitation and use are a miniscule fraction of the Half Dome numbers.
In the Yosemite N.P. paper linked by dbd, "
Role of Science in Sustainable Management
of Yosemite Wilderness", their scientific research "
found that visitors to Vernal Falls had an absolute tolerance for four times as many people in the viewscape as their stated preference"
There are a few like
Bee's "
seasoned back-country curmudgeon, encountering one person in seven days may deem the whole experience ruined by a 'population explosion' in north quad of Yosemite".
But there are far more of the other type, found in Yosemite's Vernal Falls study, and those found by the Inyo Rangers noted
by Bob R, where campers at Iceberg Lake in the Whitney Zone, preferred camp sites close to each other, and abandoned dispersed sites provided by the rangers.
In the LAC paper (
Limits of Acceptable Change) cited
by Ken, Stephen McCool makes the point that wilderness managers jumped at using "
carrying capacity as a paradigm or model of visitor management". Continuing, McCool wrote: "
Such managers had a strong, biologically based educational background, and generally went into these professions to avoid working with people, rather than being attracted to the idea of managing recreational opportunities for the benefits to people they produce. Therefore, it was a relatively easy conceptual leap to visualizing the management problems induced by the hordes of visitors coming to such areas as a function of the landscape's carrying capacity being exceeded."
The point I would like to make is that very small trail quotas have been applied due to a misinterpretation of that often quoted phrase in the Wilderness Act of 1964, and that rather than providing "
outstanding opportunities for solitude" to a reasonable number of people, the wilderness gatekeepers are actually preventing any opportunities
for any wilderness experience at all to far too many people.
